Like a castle built upon the sand

2003-12-26 - 9:10 p.m.

I was just filling in the "One Year Ago Today" bit of this entry and I decided to go visit that entry. I was happy to find a little rhyme I wrote last year which I quite liked. Anyway, if you missed it last year and you're in the mood for a post-Christmas rhyme about life in the family practice clinic, feel free to check it out.

So yesterday was Christmas. I hope you all had a great holiday. Since we had already celebrated it a few days ago, Christmas morning at my house was nothing special. We got up and ate breakfast and at about 9:30 we piled into the car and drove to my grandfather's house where he and my aunt were waiting. I haven't seen this grandfather since October for his one-month open heart surgery follow-up appointment. He's doing really well. Still nutty, but that's to be expected.

My aunt usually gives me something cute and useless for Christmas. That's what she got me this year. But she also got me a book. She got me The Science of Harry Potter: How Magic Really Works. I wanted to tell that next year she could just get me a book and forget the cute whatever, but that's not really something you should do on Christmas, is it.

My grandfather always gets me chocolate and/or perfume and/or money. Reading last year's entry I see that last year he just gave me perfume. Well, this year he forwent the perfume and just gave me chocolate and money. I wanted to applaud that choice too.

Today we spent most of the morning sitting around the fireplace reading books. Well, my aunt, mom and I did, anyway. My dad fell asleep and my grandfather wandered around the house. But anyway. I'm reading The Da Vinci Code right now. Usually I don't care much for mysteries and usually I don't care much for books that are on the bestseller list, but this book rocks. I'm only 300 pages in so I don't know how it's going to end, but it has a ton of interesting ideas in it. Now I just need to do a little research to see how much of this stuff is really true. It's interesting, though, this is the second book I've read recently that suggests that history has been completely rewritten and what we think happened isn't what really happened at all.

At around noon my grandfather suggested that we go out to lunch at a little restaurant called "The Sandpiper" in Bodega Bay. It's about a 45 minute drive from his house, so the five of us squeezed into our car and drove there. We went out to Bodega Head to see the ocean and then had lunch at the restaurant. The weather was great there. It was cold and windy, but the sky was clear. And the waves were as big as I've ever seen them there. Still not very big, but bigger than usual. I tried to get a picture of a wave crashing over a big rock, but it always seemed they crashed biggest when I didn't have my camera pointed at them.

The rocks in the foreground of the picture below mark the opening of Bodega Bay while the rocks way off in the distance are the other side of the bay. If you look closely you can see the unusually large (for here) waves crashing against the rocks in the foreground.

Just ouside the restaurant where we ate lunch, on the bay itself, there was a whole flock of sandpipers frollicking in the water. Most of them don't show up very well in the darkness of the shoreline, but these in the sun's reflection show up just fine.