back from tampa with a camera full of photos so it’s going to take a bit for them to all surface.
apparently it’s possible to take 500 pictures on a trip lasting only 57 hours.
…but that’s only about 9 pictures an hour…
soooo that doesn’t sound so bad, right…?
i got in friday morning, before dawn, off a red eye flight that involved sitting next to a man that decided that a giorgio armani magazine perfume sample smelled sooo good that he needed to rub it all over his hands, wrists, and arms right then, right there, in the confined fuselage of an airplane, sitting in a chair physically connected to my chair and separated by only a 3” wide arm rest which does not constrain aromas from crossing from one seat to the next. and no, he did not ask me if i shared his love of that giorgio perfume sample beforehand.
also, my seat’s reading light was broken, which is the stuff of my nightmares.
i had a couple hours to sleep before the day my mom had scheduled for us well in advance was to begin. after a quick catnap the first stop was my tia’s house (my great aunt, the only sister of my abuela). tia is just a few months shy of 89 years old and lives alone in the house her husband built for them many, many years ago. i figure, being 90 years-old entitles tia to a lot of things and one of them is never having to cook. who would invite a 89 year-old to a party and tell them they need to bring a covered dish? but regardless, many of our family gatherings still include tia’s rice pudding. we all readily eat it, but none of us really know how to make it, so the first goal of the day on friday was for my mom and me to learn how to make tia’s rice pudding!
easier said then done since the basic procedure seems to be adding random amounts of the various ingredients at random times… but one hour of stirring and watching and the rice pudding materialized before our eyes. then, we were announced to be rice pudding experts… which i’m pretty certain is completely inaccurate.
my favorite thing was that ½ way through our rice pudding lesson, tia had to pause to take a phone call from cousin selina (tia’s granddaughter) to give her her weekly picks for their fantasy football league.
if they ever win the football pool, they are going to take their prize money and then go buy all dollar scratch-off lottery tickets, and then all the money they win (or don’t win) from the scratch-offs is their ultimate prize…
