2006 was an intense and sad year. Mom passed away in June after suffering for many years with cancer. I do have some pictures of Mom before she passed away with various relatives from Easter, Mom's Birthday, Mother's Day, and Marc's Birthday, but I do not feel comfortable posting them at this time. Maybe sometime in the future...
In February I flew out to San Francisco to visit with Mom and Jackie and Steve after Jackie gave birth to Sophia. I then accompanied Mom back to Louisiana and spent a few days visiting with her and getting her to her Oncologist. I then returned back to Arizona, thinking that Mom was a little emotionally depressed but basically all right. A couple of days later, Mom called to tell me that her diagnosis was 3-6 months left to live. I felt shocked and visited Mom a couple of weeks later immediately after my trip to Central America to visit various Mayan cities (nope, no photos of that either). Marc, Jackie, and I started taking turns spending at least a week with Mom, so we were traveling to Louisiana every 2-3 weeks until she passed.
In August I went to San Francisco for Jackie's Birthday. I did not feel like photographing her Birthday, so I have no pictures of the event. Afterwards, Adele and I flew up to Eureka and drove around northern California visiting the Redwood trees from Eureka north up to Crescent City.
While all of these events were happening, Adele and I had our contractor building an addition to our house. The addition started in February just before I flew up to San Francisco to visit Mom, Jackie and Steve and did not (mainly the painting had to wait until July 2007) stop until January 2007. Along the way, our contractor discovered many more things wrong with our house and fortunately fixed all of them. This addition finally made our house feel like a home. All of the problems were fixed, and the house's energy felt great.
So for now I am posting only 2 events from 2006: Thanksgiving and Christmas.
This Thanksgiving was the first that we celebrated without Mom. I felt a silence without Mom. Jackie and Steve and the kids and Inga arrived late Tuesday night. Wednesday we met up and went to the wildlife park OUT OF AFRICA® so the kids could see the lions and tigers and other fierce creatures. We saw all kinds of cool animals, including giraffes (which we got to feed carrots; the boys were thrilled with that), wildebeasts (I think that is what they are called), and zebras. We also saw plenty of fierce cats,including tigers (who are totally cool), a black panther, a lonely jaguar, and a vigilant lion. I forget if we watched the park attendants feeding these fierce cats. We also got to see a black bear and some dogs, namely a yappy hyena and a cool-looking wolf. The kids sure got their fill of wildlife. Just before closing time we departed for home. And that was our adventurous Thanksgiving Wednesday for 2006.
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