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!