Christmas with the ladies

Morning began with an hour run. I decided to run the 15 minutes out to the country and run amongst the farm life. While it's typically very peaceful out there, I failed to remember that where it is flat and farmland, there is no shelter from the wind. And the gusts were about 35 miles an hour. And the cold was rolling in. It had rained the previous 48 hours. After a half hour in that lustering cold, I was definitely looking forward to getting back to town for some reprieve from the wind. About five minutes from home, I was pelted with freezing rain. I had to stop and turn my back to it at one point because the little balls of ice felt like razors hitting my face. Hot coffee never tasted so good as when I got back to mom's.

My aunt and cousin arrived and we had lunch. This was fairly uneventful. Then the Scrabble gaming began. Granny sat out the first game. My cousin won the first game and then she and my aunt headed home.

That's when the real fun started. My granny, old and senial as she is, dominated. At one point, she was up by 40 points. She couldn't add her points up for shit, but she sure as hell can play up the triple word scores. And let's not mention the fact that she'd start the game with a word and then later ask who wrote that word and whether it was actually a word!

We had four generations of women sitting around the table. My granny, who will be 91 in three weeks, my mom, me and my ten year old niece. My mom was asking about my favorite Christmas song, which turned into her singing "I want a hippopotomus for Christmas..." horribly off tune. Kaylee and I were laughing about farts, I'm playing words like "boner" as granny snickers in the background and tells her daughter to "shut up" and questions whether "freer", which was played about four rounds earlier, is a word. To be a fly on the wall in the room...

It was a glorious day and a fabulous evening.

Tomorrow, I head to dad's family...