day 30

I hope that you are feeling better today. Gita relieved me at work and I spoke with her at length about India. She has never been to many of the places that you have gone and she is from there! She has wanted to go do the houseboat on the backwaters, but she never gotten around to it. After I said that you had done that, she swears the next time she goes to India she is doing the houseboat thing.
Did you get to speak to anyone at the Consulate? If then had any suggestions, be sure and tell me. I'm interested in what they had to say.
Our big thing here is our Wii. It was suppose to be a family Christmas present, but it never even made it to my scraproom to be wrapped. We have all been playing since we got it yesterday. Even gma joins in and plays bowling. She is very good and almost beat dad at it until the last frame when he bowled some strikes.The cutest thing is that we made are Mii avatars and we pop up during the games. Like if Jason and dad are bowling, me, gma and steph will be in the crowd watching. Or if dad is playing baseball, we all are on the opposing team. In tennis, the ones not playing are spectators. It's so funny. The weirdest thing is that dad and Jason's avatar really look like them. Especially when they are diving for a ball!
I am getting ready to do Christmas. I don't know why but even broke as I am, I can't wait to decorate. I want to do it early so that I can just sit back and enjoy the season. On my way home from work I saw several people with Christmas trees on the roofs of their cars and it made me feel so nostalgic. I remember going to get the tree was such a big deal. We would wait until the 15th so that the tree wouldn't dry out. The whole family would go to the tree lot. It seemed when I was younger that we always managed to go on the coldest night. We would go from lot to lot looking for the perfect tree. Every one that was a possible pick would be scrutinized by the entire clan. My grandma would make the initial pick, my grandpa would drag the tree out where everyone could get a good look at it. My dad would tell grandpa to give it a thump or two and grandpa would tap that tree against the pavement to see if it dropped too many needles. Mom would bend a few needles to make sure they were not dry and I would inhale deep just to catch that crisp smell of pine, which surely had to be the ultimate test for the perfect fresh tree.
Later, I decided that the perfect tree had to be one that we found and cut so we'd get a permit to go up to the mountains and cut our own tree. The one problem with that is the little tiny charlie brown looking tree in the wild, is a HUGE, gigantic monster of a tree in a living room with 7 1/2 foot ceilings.
We went from that, to tree lots looking for the cheapest tree [this is while dad and I were both in school and funds were pretty low], then back to big gigantic cut trees that looked great, but didn't last long. I don't even want to relate how our one gorgeous tree ended up being replaced on Christmas Eve because it was dead and needles were dropping by the handfuls if anyone even thought about breathing on the dang thing. Now I haul out the fake one, which doesn't smell good unless I find a great pine candle. Which reminds me of the year dad hung up a bunch of pine tree car fresheners inside the tree...but that's another story. Anyway, back to my fake tree which I can take out and decorate December first and even if it does smell a bit like dust if you get too close, it looks beautiful , doesn't dry out and I don't have to worry about falling needles.
On a whole different note, did you decide to go to the hugging mother's ashram? This is one mother sending hugs your way. Write me!