a surprise, a beautiful day at the beach and a christmas celebration

monday morning . . 

bellocq english breakfast tea and butter cookies, vanilla and gingerbread.

beginning a new knitting project . .

my sister arrives with a surprise!

a couch for the tv room! this is the couch her friend cora gave her several years ago for my parents to use in the senior citizen apartment complex they moved to in 2014.

we were going to get a new ikea sofa bed couch, but they never had the color we had agreed on in stock. we didn't think we could fit the above couch in our cars (or even lift it into the car), but my nephews were able to do both, and squeezed it with not an inch to spare (my sister and brother-in-law did not have much leg room in the front seat).

ta da!

adam hung the holiday icicle lights i like so much which my dad used to always put up . . 

a visit to the beach . . 

hors d'oeuvres of crackers and the cheese jason brought from vermont (delicious remnants from the cabot store) along with a cheddar ball morgana picked out from the iga market that was reminiscent of the hickory farms ball my mom used to always get.

holiday deck lights . .

and the icicle lights with my colorful railing lights.

exchanging gifts . .

we were so full after the cheese and crackers and pizza and salad, that we didn't have dessert!

zooming with korrina and chanda . . 

i think greg is tired and ready for bed, but is figaro?

second day

 the new painting from a cape cod artist that adam got for kathy and warren for christmas.

 admiring their new refrigerator!

 making cold roast beef sandwiches, which i actually enjoy almost more than a roast beast! (i never liked roast beef when i was growing up. i used to complain to my mom whenever she made it. she must have wanted to clobber me!).

 getting ready for a group photo without uncle warren who went off to work.

chanda wouldn't mind having more snow in nyc.

 we then took nana back to her apartment and got on the road for home . . 

where i enjoyed some of the lake champlain chocolate jason had given us for christmas.

 since we were driving korrina home to brooklyn, we took the whitestone bridge across long island sound . . 

 with the city rising up in the west . . 

 to the new kosciusko bridge . .

 beneath the brooklyn heights esplanade and out to brooklyn where korrina discovered (after we had gotten her bags into her apartment lobby) that she had left her keys on our shoe bin at home.

 so we headed into manhattan . .

where we dropped morgana off somewhere on the east side as she needed to take a train uptown to reina and stefan's new apartment . . 

picked up korrina's keys at home (leaving chanda there to clean up after the cats) and headed back to brooklyn. thankfully, we quickly found a place to park on coney island avenue, right around the corner from her building, so greg and i could help her upstairs with her bags. i think wash was happy to see her, as brian wasn't due home for a couple of hours.