2024 Life Logs, Day 329: Settling In
Date: Monday, November 25, 2024
Weather: Mostly Sunny; 88 High Temp, Low 77 degrees F
Location: At Home with Justin, Jo, Ziggy, and Coco in Aguada, Puerto Rico
We called today our settling in day. Ziggy and Coco have this week off school, Justin is taking this week off work, and it was my first day here, so we spent today just settling in. First off, we talked about our meal plan for the week and Jo made a shopping list. Justin and I then went shopping at three different grocery stores, came home with four big boxes of food, and got the food stored away. We then had lunch and mid-afternoon we headed down to Marina Beach in Rincon to get in the water and bask in the sun. That was fabulous! For dinner we had pasteles that I will write more about later in this blog, and tonight we watched the second in a series of movies Coco wanted to watch. The Maze Runner film series is an action-packed and very scary American science-fiction film series. They had already watched the first in the series, The Maze Runner, so they just told me about that so that we could move on to the second film in the series, The Scorch Trials. Scary or not, we will probably move on the final film in the series, The Death Cure, tomorrow night.
Christmas celebrations begin early in Puerto Rico. I read today that there are three things you must have on the table for a Puerto Rican Christmas—pernil which we had on Thanksgiving Day last year, arroz con gandules (rice and beans), and pasteles. We started our Christmas celebrations today with pasteles which are a delicious treat wrapped in a banana leaf and then wrapped in paper and tied up like a little package.
They are delicious but a little hard to describe, so I borrowed these photos from the internet. There are two types and tonight we had pasteles de yucca with chicken in the filling. “Some people compare them to tamales except that they are nothing like tamales except that they are labor-intensive and wrapped.”
Another Christmas tradition we started on today was the making of those lists for Santa. Heather has suggested that this Christmas we limit our giving to something you want, something you need, something to wear, and something to read. So, I asked everyone to make of list of three things in each category. Coco and Jo got their lists written, but Justin and Ziggy need a bit more time.
I love being able to visit here at this time of year. I not only get to celebrate Thanksgiving with Justin, Jo, Ziggy, and Coco, but I also get to share some of their joy in getting ready for Christmas. In the next couple of days, we will turn our focus to the cooking preparations for Thanksgiving. Then on Sunday, the first day of December, we can go get the Christmas tree and I can help decorate. There is new kitty in the family and Justin is more than a little worried that Christmas ornaments will be too great of temptation for kitty. We shall see.
