Week 52

Can you believe this is the last Project 365 post of the year???!!! I have a few more photos than usual to share, since I'm late posting this week AND we had some special get-togethers that deserve more than one photo a piece.
So on to the photos...

December 19th Ivan and his brother shared the pulpit at the hispanic church. After all English, all the time, it was fun to hear (and speak a little) Spanish.

(You have probably already seen this photo over on Rita's blog.)

Then we spent the afternoon with family...

me and Sharon

Rita and Mike

Ivan spent several days digitizing old family slides, including this one from when we were first engaged. I must have been looking down at my ring :)

Had a wonderful time with our kids and their spouses last Wednesday. Newlyweds Kyle and Tina hosted the get-together and everything was so pretty! This was a table by the door:

Jon had spent several days working on my computer and gave it back to me that night. Here he is explaining the new set-up:

I love how Tina has arranged her jewelry. She found this poster-on-wood and thought the bridge wires would be a great base for her earrings. I agree!

Here's the cute couple (in front of their tiny Christmas tree which you can't see).

 See their stockings off to the left? I liked her use of the old windows to "frame" them.

No photos from Thursday. Packing, packing and more packing.

Or Friday. Jon and Natalie took us to the airport in Chicago. We left mother's house about noon Friday and arrived home in Carlos Paz just after 8 p.m. Saturday. Long trip but no real snags; it's never fun to have to take the shuttle from the international airport to the domestic one in Buenos Aires for that last flight. We did end up taking a detour between airports, taking two of our four suitcases to the main bus terminal in Buenos Aires and shipping them to avoid excessive luggage fees by the airline. Since it was Christmas day the airline might have shown mercy and not charged us but we were afraid to count on that so decided to send the extra pieces by bus. It was about 1/3 what the airline could have charged.

Anyway...

Once we did get to the domestic airport, we had a few hours to wait (they bumped our flight to a later time) so we kicked back and relaxed:

Friends picked us up at the airport in Cordoba and brought us the rest of the way home. Joe and Gail are hanging out with us this week, as well as Ben (who visited us in October). [Ben was actually home for a few weeks and we saw him at Rob's wedding, but he came back to Argentina a week before us.] Gail had made delicious empanadas for supper -- what a great welcome back!

Fireworks are prevalent at Christmas and New Year's here and this year we had a show in our back yard -- the folks renting the house right behind us put on quite a fireworks show, which we enjoyed (from the safety of our covered patio so the ash and debris didn't fall on us).

Remember back in early November I shared this photo:

Well, after six weeks of sun and rain, here's what it looked like this morning!

The squash plant is spilling out over the fence and sidewalk! The geraniums have gone nuts too. In fact, everything in the yard is growing like crazy. However, Ben spent the late afternoon/evening de-junglefying our yard so it looks a LOT better now. But it's dark so I can't take an "after" photo.

THE END.

Well, for this year anyway :)