A River Runs Through It: Day Seven of Our Christmas Vacation

To continue the Christmas recaps...

I woke up feeling awesome on December 29. Despite developing a cold the day before, I felt pretty good. I was pleased to note that the pain/pressure in my uterus area had subsided a great deal. We went to El Mirador for lunch with my mom and Uncle Charles. I had enchiladas, of course. I didn't take any pictures, but here are a couple pics of the bathroom doors that I took when I ate there back in June:




Who takes pictures of bathroom doors, anyway? Apparently I do.

We went back to my uncle's house to rest. Roy and my mom took naps, my uncle went back to work, and I hopped on the laptop and spent a good amount of time organizing my photos. Would you believe that I've probably taken 5,000 photos in the last year but haven't bothered to organize them? (Actually, I am normally an organizing fool, but this has been one hell of a busy year.) It was cool going through old photos, because I got to find some like this:



I love it! It was taken in November 2007, and I had completely forgotten about it. I love how happy we look.

Once everyone was up and rested, we went out for a bit. My uncle is a big collector of art objects from different countries, so we went to a shop that he frequents. Again, no recent pics, but the shop sold stuff similar to this:



Then we decided to brave the Rivercenter, a mall that is built on the Riverwalk. The only reason I wanted to go was to get a present for Mandy and Paul. It was a dumb decision. The traffic to get there was awful because of some event going on at the Alamodome. Some of the streets were closed down, and we ended up having to get on the freeway due to lack of options.

It's a freeway, right? No big deal, right? But if you remember, nothing is simple with my mom at the wheel. You might as well tell her the world is ending. You'd get a similar reaction.

It was so frustrating trying to get my mom to understand that being on the freeway and going the wrong way for a short while wasn't really such a terrible thing. I told her many times (calmly, to my credit) to get off the freeway and to turn around, and she finally did - but not after much nail-biting, fretting, and swerving (yes, swerving!).

We pulled into the Rivercenter parking garage and parked. Hooray. Success.

The mall was a mess of people. I hate crowds, truly. After picking the perfect gift for Mandy and Paul, the three of us sat outside for a brief moment until it got too cold. The Riverwalk is especially gorgeous at Christmastime.





We inched home (through tons and tons of traffic). It was nuts. My mom was a bit on the stressed side, but she handled herself much better (probably because we weren't on the freeway). Once back at my uncle's house, we hung out. And I took photos - really distorted and sometimes overexposed photos.





Yes, those are my crazy eyes (in the first picture).

And that was our day. Not terribly exciting, but after all the "excitement" that came before, it was a nice day - very wonderful to be feeling like myself again. I'll take my mom's anxiety over a hospital visit any day.

Final recap coming soon!