Happy New Year!

Hope everyone had a good holiday. You would think that since I had 10 days off of work, I would have more time to update the blog. It's been so nice to have the time off. We had a great time in LA with the families. We got to see Grandma and she was looking great. It seems that they will be taking her off of chemo now, so it shouldn't be much longer. It would be easy to be sad about her leaving us, but we've known about her cancer for a year now and I'm thankful that she has not been in any pain. She's been with us longer than we had expected and we have had some time to mentally prepare ourselves for the inevitable. Still, we will probably be going back to LA next month to see her when we go to pick up some furniture from Edwin's mom's house.

While we were in LA we got to spend time with both sides of the family. Unfortunately, Laura, Alex, and Hannah all got sick with some kind of virus. We stayed in a house in Culver City and had some great fried chicken at a local restaurant called Honey's Kettle. It had great fried chicken, but the service was horrible. It was supposed to open at 10:30 AM and I was at the door at 11 which was locked. There were 3 people working inside and they all looked up and then kept working. After about 5 minutes, one of them decided to let me in. If the chicken weren't so tasty, I would probably not recommend it. We took out from there twice and I would go back and recommend it as long as you have the time to wait for it.

We did a lot of stuff around the house this week. We put a deposit for our cabinets which we will receive in mid-February. It's the first step in the kitchen renovations. We also bought a Viking stove off of craigslist. It's now sitting in our garage. We had to unpack some more to make room in the garage to store it and the cabinets that will be coming. We also painted the dining room, hallway, and bathroom closets with some help from my aunt, uncle, and cousins. It was nice to have the time to devote to it. Our bedroom is going to be the last room that gets painted and we still need to paint the trim, but then we should be done with painting. We also took down the Christmas decorations. It took a lot less time to take them down than it did to put them up.

We also hosted a New Years Eve Game Night & Potluck. Show & Derek made a seafood stew (yum!) and the Benerjees made apps, Alfio & Michelle brought pizza, the Tachikis brought a salad, and Michelle brought hummus & veggies, we provided the dessert, lemonade, and cheese. It was a good time. With the new year, it made me think about resolutions. I didn't make any this year. I don't like committing to exercising more or losing weight because I just know I'll break them.