The family and I had a great time in sunny Florida seeing all the Miller relatives. Saturday was beach day. I swam with 5 or 6 dolphins off the coast of Sanibel Island’s Lighthouse beach – that alone was worth the trip! Lily, our youngest pup, decided to take a swim or two as well – she was great fun to have along.
That night, we set off to Macaroni Grill to celebrate Pappa’s birthday.
The girls have been (re-)bonding every day with their cousin Bailey, and loving every minute of all the attention from not one but two grandmas. We took them to the tennis court at Grammie’s condo, and Andrea and I ended up playing a rowdy set or two – she can really hit the ball! – while the girls chased lizards with Gram. We played until we nearly had heat-stroke.
My brother and I got some much-needed hang-out time late Saturday night, getting a Redhat 8 box up and running from scraps in his garage. Corey was along for the ride as well, VNC’ing to the box as soon as we had it up and running. We have moved his HighTechGeek site over from Windows and it is humming now instead of crashing every day (his Windows machine has an overclocked AMD chip, which does not do well in the Florida heat in his garage :> ). We also hooked up with John Carpenter, who served us up some amazing home brews, which we drank while discussing the status of our never-ending side projects. It was good to catch up with him.
The rest of the family is doing great, and we were long overdue for hanging out with them. Sunday was great, with Mum doing her thing serving a spontaneous 15-course lunch. I don’t think we stopped eating all day, going from there to Dan and Val’s for Val’s famous tofu pot pie. Tammy and Diane joined in to make it a fairly complete family reunion.
We finished up on Monday with another great session with Poppa reading excerpts from “Riding the Rails”, the novel he has been working on throughout 2002. It’s been great fun for all of us to share in his obsession. He hopes to have it published this year. Dan and Corey worked on a great birthday present – a mockup of the first release of the book.
How did I fit that all in a weekend!? Can’t wait for the next get-together!
