This was the 3rd time I took my dad there, although it was in over 10 years,
so we hadn't been there in quite a while. The dishes were quite pretty and
yummy, prices were less unreasonable than last time, although a bit more than a
similarly very fancy restaurant in San Francisco.
The only big minus was how we ended up waiting 1h at the end for our
last dish, dessert. No idea what happened, but service or kitchen
capacity was a problem.
This year we went to stay with my mom first, and we were there for our yearly Xmas dinner, which happened thanks to a lot of help from Patric and Diane (and Jennifer :).
For Xmas eve, my brother and I had Xmas eve dinner with my dad who cooked for us:
For New Year's Eve, Tata did her famous sweetbread and my dad's usual friends came over for dinner. Unfortunately my dad had to duck out early to get a shot for swelling up that happened at the wrong time, but we still had a great evening, even if he was missing for the end of it:
Jennifer and I went out one day when the weather wasn't too cold, and walked around some sights around central Paris:
Colonnes de Buren
We then went to the Musée d'Orsay, inside an old train station, a fantastic building:
We then walked outside a bit more, now that the main bridges are filled with locks, their are selling locks on the remaining bridges, and headed to Musée de l'Orangerie by the louvre park:
We then took the remaining time to walk the Champs Elysées and maisons de noël:
Another day, we went to the Musée des Arts Forains with my dad:
Another day, I drove to the Cathedral of St Denis where over thousand years of French Kings and famous people are burried:
the last french king and his wife, who both got beheaded for their troubles :)
Some other Paris pictures left over:
map of all the churches in Paris ;)
And after all this good fun was time to fly home. We found a nice passenger in the Air France lounge ;)
The Air France business seats we got (with miles, thankfully I didn't pay for them) were the worst business seats I had had in an overnight flight so far (true in both directions). Note to self to avoid them in the future.
Since I was not going to see any snow for a while after Xmas, I was eager to go snowboarding, so when we heard about a storm coming, Arturo and I went to South Lake Tahoe to be on the correct side while the storm of doom arrived. Turns out that it weakened a bit by the time it hit tahoe, so many resorts didn't get that mucch but kirkwood still got 17 inches, which while short of 3ft was still good :)
This was just enough to make terrain usable in most places without too much fear of rocks poking out. Friday, cornice got open by 13:00 which was welcome since they only had one chair running 'till then, so we sure enjoyed the snow before crowds showed up. Saturday, Heavenly was still closed due to damage from the very windy storm, so many people came to kirkwood. Still, we were able to find enough snow to have fun for most of thd day :)
Friday was still a bit stormy and we got just a bit of extra snow:
Crowns used to be a mess, take an imprint, sned it somwhere, wait a week or so, get it back, and it's not quite perfect, so the dentists adjusts it the best way possible but if it's not a great seal, oh well, it can't be fixed and it's expensive to do it again, so they don't.
I had too many crowns already, and multiple leaked, so they allowed bacteria in and cavities under the crown, where they can't be seen due to the metal, until you have a full blown infection.
I got tired of this and finally changed dentists in 2014 to Dr Todd S Adams got this new 3D printing setup for crowns. He scans your tooh, makes a model, has the software verify it, presses print, and a few minutes later, you get a near perfect tooth