Chirstmas Day With the Harty Family

Christmas Day was a Harty Family Celebration. Mom and Dad Harty were already staying with us then Stew(Gordon's brother) came with his wife Linda and their two boys Erik and Andrew. They live in Texas. It took them two and a half days to drive here. We wish Richard (Gordon's older brother) and his family had come also. We miss them.We cooked, ate, open gifts, listen to music, and played a Christmas vertion of Family Feud that was a lot of fun. We culminated the night by watching the movie CARS. The movie was one of Dad Harty's Christmas gifts.We love it that Christmas Day was celebrated at our place.

Christmas Eve

Our Christmas Eve was a lot of fun! Our group was; Mom and Dad Harty, also our friends David, Matt and Hiedi came and Amor and I.We cooked, had dinner, talked and laughed a lot (Matt is very funny), listen to music and had a great time until about 1:30 a.m. We enjoyed having this gathering at our place. We think we should do gatherings more often

Mom and Dad Harty's Rental Car

Mom and Dad Harty come from Tracy to celebrate Christmas with us here in Temecula. They rented a car for their trip here. The rental car was exactly like our new car we purchase a month ago. The difference was that the rental Matrix did not have a sun roof. See the two cars side by side in our garage.

LADY Is No Longer in the Family

I am sad to announce that LADY in no longer in the family. LADY is Amor's green Acura (it looks black in this picture but LADY is really dark green). It got the name of LADY by Amor's brothers because LADY are the first 4 letters in it's licence plate. It has been in the family for 11 an a half years. It used to belong to Amor's brother Stew. Stew's first son Erik came home from the hospital when he was born in the LADY. Them Amor became the next owner of the LADY for the last 8 years. It was the car he had when we were dating. So many romantic memories of places in the San Francisco Bay Area we went with the car :-) It is also the car we had have now that we are married. It was a very special car.

LADY never gave us any problems since my hubby took good care of it. But lately it was coming to need lot's of mayor maintenance that were worth more than the car. It was also loosing its paint and needed to be repainted. So after thinking about replacing it for a year, it has finally happened. We have replaced LADY with a 2003 Toyota XR corolla Matrix. This one has a CD player so we are enjoying playing music and listening to audio CD books as we drive places.

Following is a quick picture I took of our new Toyota as Amor is backing out of our garage ready to drive it to work for the first time. He loves his new car. It has all the extras with the exception of navigation.

Thanksgiving!

We had our Thanksgiving get together with my family this year. We drove up to Sacramento Wednesday to my parent's house. It was so nice to be there that even after the long drive north(almost 10 hours) we had energies to stay up until midnight just visiting talking and catching up.

The next day, the morning was full of the fun busy activities in preparing the food. My mother cooked some delicious garbanzos and also rice. Amor and I worked in our contribution to the meal which was a zucchini, black bean, cilantro and salad greens salad. We also prepared a home made salad dressing to go with it.

At two we drove to my sister's place to where both the Funes and the Sousa( the sousas are my sisters husband Carlos family) gather. We had a great meal and great fun eating, visiting and playing games until midnight.


We had a lot of food! The meal was; Garbanzos, rice, sliced creamey bake potatoes , vegetables, vegetarian meat, freshly brake home made wheat bread, salad and turkey(Carlos' family is not vegetarian). We also had apple/cherry pie with icecream. We were so full that the next day no one ate until lunch.

Family gatherings are therapeutic and a great blessing. I thank God for giving us a family. It is a great gift from God to have a family that is there to support each other in the good and hard times.