Christmas week was full of good family time. For Christmas night, we had a family dinner with the relatives on my mom's side of the family. It was a classic type of Chinese dinner, with maybe too many courses and lots of seafood. (Here's what I remember: a shrimp/egg drop style soup, lobster noodles, crispy duck dish, chicken dish, whole fish dish, scallop dish, salt and pepper pork chops... there are probably a couple others that I'm missing.)
Afterward, I went with three of my cousins to do an escape room (Blind Tiger Bar at EscapeSF). This was my first real-life escape room experience. We escaped with no hints, but we weren't breaking records or anything like that. It was more or less what I expected it to be in the mechanics of it, and it was an enjoyable experience. The theme was that we were looking for the records of a prohibition-era mob group. It started in a hallway with multiple doors and we had to figure out which one was the location of the speakeasy, then we had a room where we had to find the names of the mobsters, then break into the safe, and then get out. I think we were out in 50-something minutes.
The next day, we went back into SF. My parents have been helping to taking care of my 98-year-old grandma who is recovering from surgery, and have been making that trip a lot since late November. I used the time to spend more time with my cousins. We went to a dim sum restaurant that we had used to go to maybe 25-30 years ago. It's called New Asia Restaurant and the only way I recognized it was the circular golden archway around the door. I didn't have a lot of specific memories after going inside, but the arches around the door struck some deep memories somewhere. I wish I could say that the food was as delicious as I remembered, but I can't honestly say I remembered much about the food from back then. However, it was definitely delicious.
After eating and dropping off leftovers and other food with everyone else staying back at the nursing facility, we then took my dad to do an escape room (The Incredible Machine at ClockWise Escape Room). This one was a larger one, and the four of us got paired up with another four random kids (high schoolers, I think). I don't want to be too judgement of them, but the consensus was that they slowed us down. Fortunately, the room was set up in a way that let people kind of split up and go all over, and so it really wasn't until the last steps when the paths converged that we really felt the drag. One of them gave up about 40 minutes in and was mostly just sitting around. But we escaped from that one with no hints (with only a couple minutes to spare).
The next few days after that were much more about time with immediate family. J&J drove up from Southern California and we did a lot of general hanging out. When C&M were with us, there were 7 children around, which is a bit crazy. But I appreciate that unstructured time together. I have fond memories of hanging out with my cousins around the holidays, and so I'm glad to see that they're getting a similar type of experience.
Then Sunday came and it was time for Christmas with my dad's side of the family. This is the usual multi-generational affair with more people than I care to try to count right now. This is the extended family that I spent the most time with growing up. We played some basketball with the older kids (solid fundamentals still dominate over kids launching long shots), and played family bingo (which is our replacement for some of the gift exchange stuff, though some gifts are still exchanged anyways). Bingo is getting more interested as the kids are getting older. At one point, I had four "helpers" trying to read off the bingo balls to everyone, and not always correctly. But that's part of the charm of it all.
I came back to Las Vegas on New Year's Eve, and had a couple days before leaving for Mexico on January 3. The mornings of January 1-3, I woke up with a slightly sore throat, which I had hoped would be all that I had to deal with, but I was wrong. I ended up being sick for the entire time I was in Mexico. Not sick enough to be stuck in bed all day, but sick enough that it was clear to everyone else I was sick. By the time we had made it up the mountain, I really didn't have much of a voice to talk with, and I was having random coughing fits.
Brief sidebar on my travel. I flew InterJet for the first time. The first leg ran two hours late and the second leg ran on time, which had me practically running through the airport looking for Gate T and finding the line in the last few minutes of boarding. What's interesting about this is that I'm looking around at maps of the Mexico City Airport, and I *still* don't really know where I was or where I went. I just went from one official looking person to the next asking, "Donde esta Puerta T?" I would get a long set of instructions that I could barely follow, but they fortunately pointed me in the correct general direction, and each time the instructions got a little shorter. The only thing I remember was being told that to get to Gate T, I had to look for signs for Gate B. At least, that's what I think I was told and what I ended up doing. But I don't really know. It was just a crazy 20 minutes. I'm not sure I'll travel InterJet again, though I'm not 100% sure that I can actually blame the experience on them. I'm not sure that AeroMexico would have done anything different to help me make my connection.
Things went well at the clinic. We served almost 500 people over three days, running a dental clinic, general medicine, vision checks, a pharmacy, and doing cosmetology. The students were hard-working and self-organizing, which was good because I wasn't around the clinic as much as last year. In fact, Dave said that Chable felt this group was the best group of students that he's seen. They weren't looking at their phones all the time, and they were always working when they were around the clinic. I think the youngest of the students in this group was in their late 20s, and that added age/maturity showed through.
For me, it was time to focus on the Science Center. Since the last time were there, they've plastered the walls and installed window frames (but not the windows). So the next step was to paint the walls. Unfortunately, painting doesn't actually give the best pictures but I have those pictures anyway.
Here are the "before" pictures with gray walls:
And here are the "during" and "after" pictures with the painted walls:
At this point, it's nothing amazing to look at. But getting 1800-2000 square feet of wall painted is still an accomplishment. Special thanks to Dan and Samantha, who both did more painting than I did (I was moving around at only about 80% speed). There's still a lot of work to be done on the physical structures. This summer, Dave is going to try to get his electrician up there to set us up with both solar power and power to through the municipal source. We will also need to have the floor tiled, concrete counters poured, windows installed into the frames, and the bathroom needs to be hooked up. But we're getting there. There's probably more I can say about this time, but I'm going to have to type it all out again when I update the science center webpage, so going to save that for later.
For the last clinic day, I spent my time playing with the kids and doing science activities. We did the water rockets because that's always a winner. But we also made clouds in a bottle, brought out the microscopes, and made little animation wheels. I thought the animation wheels would be the least interesting thing because it's slow and a little bit complicated to explain. But I guess I keep underestimating the draw of these types of artistic endeavors. Unfortunately, I don't know how many of them understood the animation wheel itself, but they had fun drawing them and so that's kind of what matters. When you do these demos, it's less about teaching than it is about engagement. And if they were engaged for an hour drawing dots on a circular disk and spinning it around, that's still a win.
The next day was the drive back down the mountain and heading to the ranch. And the day after was spent in town. We ended up with a bit of an extra adventure that night. After doing some mezcal tasting with Dave, a bunch of us went with Brigham to do more tastings. (Unfortunately, I didn't taste anything, and I mean that in a quite literal sense. I couldn't smell or taste much at this point.) Then there was a bonus adventure when Dave forgot to pick up some of the group from the Zocalo (we got spread out into multiple groups) and I had to hustle from the restaurant we were at to get them. But everything worked out in the end, including catching the last bus that was back to the ranch literally at the last moment (the bus started moving before we had all sat down).
Then there was an early flight home the next day. I'm in the "mostly recovered" state at this point with regards to the illness. I've still got some congestion in my throat/lungs and only having an occasional cough or two instead of heavier coughing fits. Maybe after another night or two of sleep in my own bed, I'll be back to 100%, which will be just in time for me to spend a week scrambling to finish my course prep for the upcoming semester.
