Rachel's Visit

This weekend my sister Rachel came to visit!  Both of my sisters actually came up to Fresno.  Joy was just starting her trek back to Oregon for another year in her discipleship program.

So Joy stayed one night and drove out the next morning, but Rachel was staying the whole weekend to spend time with us and then would be taking a bus back on Sunday afternoon.

The girls arrive Thursday night and helped Heidi make a cauliflower salad for dinner.  They recently read the book “Forks Over Knives” at our suggestion and are moving in the vegan direction like we are, so it was nice that we all had the same healthy goals in our eating, as well as being able to learn from each other.

We helped Joy get a hotel booked for the next night and played a round of Dominion Intrigue before going to bed.

The next day, my sisters went to visit Heidi and tour her workplace.  From there, Rachel borrowed Heidi’s car and Joy got on the road heading north.  Rachel then came down to visit and tour my workplace.  I was able to hook her up with a bag of dried fruit as well as some chocolate-covered raisins, which she was very excited about.  After hanging out with me, she went to go spend the rest of the afternoon with Amy, picking her brain about nursing, getting ready for her second-round interview for a school nurse position with the City of Orange.

I got off work around 7:15 and met her at the house.  We loaded up the kayak I had borrowed from Heidi’s brother’s mother-in-law and returned it to them since they wanted to use it the next morning.  Then another work emergency happened and I got on the phone for a half hour as I drove to the grocery store to get us some supplies for dinner before heading home.

Dinner was rather makeshift since I wasn’t paying attention to check the ripeness of the “ripe-now” stickered avocados.  So we opened a bottle of wine, boiled some ears of corn and pulled out a salad Heidi had made the day prior.  Rachel and I got to talk about our respective relationships (me & Heidi, her & Adam) and some other family dynamics before Heidi arrived home from getting together with her accountability partners.

The next morning, we nixed our plans for me to run and Heidi & Rachel to cycle alongside me and slept in.  It was pretty wonderful.  We all got up around 8:30 and Heidi made some vegan waffles with almond flour for breakfast.  Afterward, I unloaded the dishwasher and then began re-washing all the dishes the automatic dishwasher did wrong.  Ugh!  But we ran into a time-crunch because Heidi and I needed to leave for a neighborhood watch info meeting downtown, and so Rachel graciously finished the dishes for us.

When we got home, we relaxed for awhile before teaching Rachel how to play Spades.  Our monthly card game night was that night, and Rachel would be subbing for Amy, who was housebound with a work kid (Amy does home care for medically fragile children).  I had to play two hands since there were only three of us.  It was a fun challenge.

We had an hour before we had to leave, so we sat down to watch some T.V.  We picked White Collar so that it would be easy for Rachel to join in the middle.  She opted to go watch Project Runway in her room instead.

Then we headed over to Tiffany’s house.  Dan & Olga had brought taco fixings.  Delicious food.  We had arranged for Ron & Sarah, the youth pastors at CBC Palm to come and sub in the group.  We have really enjoyed getting to know them and wanted to give them a chance to get to know people over at CBC Maple.

Spades was a lot of fun.  I had one hand where Tiffany was my partner and she went nill with the King of Spades.  It was really cool because I was able to focus in and really able to pick up on the strategy to draw out her high cards where I would be able to cover them.  The first two rounds I scored pretty well, but then I tanked on the last round.  Ended with 700 for the night, so I was happy.

We went home and I decided to go for a run then since I hadn’t run that morning.  Heidi was tired and went to bed, but Rachel decided to cycle with me.  We went five miles.  She was a little nervous riding in the dark, especially on county streets with no lighting or on more crowded streets, so we steered into city neighborhoods.  It gave us some great opportunities to talk and really share with each other.

After I finished running, we kept walking, but eventually came home and kept talking there as I stretched.  We finally called it quits at 2 a.m. because daylight would be coming soon.

The next morning we were running a little behind getting ready for church, but we made it just in time.  It was nice having Rachel there and getting to introduce her to so many of our friends.  Heidi’s sister Heather showed up for the second hour of the service with her kids, and we had them all over for lunch afterward.

We played a couple more hands of spades since Rachel was now addicted, and then took her to the Greyhound station.  It was a great weekend!