Christmas in California

Hello! We took a break from blogging for Christmas (sorry Auntie!) but it's Mitchell here to fill you in on what you missed.

To start off our winter events, the Grad student association invited us to their pizza and ugly Christmas sweater party. We insisted that 'Christmas jumper' definitely sounds better, but the only thing that achieved was us getting mocked mercilessly and the word 'jumper' being repeated in an assortment of awful English accents. The party also included a white elephant gift exchange, something neither of us had done before. It's similar to a secret Santa, but you pick a gift from a pile and once you open it your gift can still be stolen from you! You do then get to pick another gift though so don't worry no one ends up giftless. I got a fancy pack of playing cards and Emily had a board game, before it got stolen! So she stole a bunny shaped waffle maker which she was much happier with.

Emily's bunny waffle

As we'd mentioned in the last post, we'd also fully cancelled our Christmas plans to head home. Omicron, from what we were hearing, was getting really bad in the UK. A friend of ours and my brother had both got it and on top of obviously not wanted to get ill, we really didn't want to be stuck and unable to get back to the US for a while. Especially because there was a possibility the borders would close again, although that didn't actually end up happening at least. This was obviously pretty sad for us but Emily had immediately set out planning our Christmas.

Over the weekend before Christmas I headed to an improv audition with the group I've been going to. They have an 'improv league' that every half a year they rotate all the casts for. Compared to the UK auditions I've been to there was a lot of people! And I was only there on one of the two audition days! Fortunately for me, as the standard was really high, there was a lot of slots to be cast, almost half of the number of people who'd auditioned and that evening I got a call! Meaning I'm in an improv group for the next few months. I've had one rehearsal at the time of writing and am really looking forward to our first show (although hopefully there won't be too many American pop culture references as I somewhat embarrassed myself in the rehearsal! Fortunately it was very funny and I now know who Toucan Sam is.)

My improv Achilles' heel

For my birthday we were planning to go and see the new Spiderman movie together, or at least I thought we were! On the actual evening Emily was a little late to pick me up from work and completely failed to match my level of concern about catching the movie in time, apparently even forgetting the movie time, we then took what took me far too long to realise what was definitely not the route to the cinema. It was a surprise party! One of my lab group after hearing that we weren't going to be heading home for Christmas had contacted Emily and organised it! It was really lovely, I've never had a surprise party before so I was really blown away. We hung out, had pizza and tamales, even had some candles to blow out! and then me and Emily thrashed everyone at Mario party. (don't worry we still saw Spiderman the next day)

That brings us all the way up to Christmas. We'd considered going to a beach but the whole week of Christmas was pretty rainy, so we stayed inside, nice and warm. Over the days either side of the holiday, we managed to call each of our families a couple times. It wasn't the same as being there but to be fair it's still pretty amazing we can be stuck 8 time zones apart and still able to hang out and play some games on Christmas. On the actual 25th Emily woke me up way too early, as is her Christmas tradition, it being the only non-working day when she'll get up before me. We made a seitan roast dinner (by we I mean mostly Emily but I definitely helped) and made all the traditional trimmings so we didn't miss out on a proper Christmas dinner. We spent the day chilling and watching Christmas movies, it was a nice time.

Almost too much for our oven!

Almost too much for an Emily!

In between Christmas and New years I actually ended up doing a little work because my paper came back for final review and was accepted for publication! If that means nothing to you then: I did a good science!

For New Years Eve we pre-opened our alcohol cans so they'd have gone flat by the time we got to drinking them and came up with a new drinking game to a Disney movie. Last year we watched Frozen and drank whenever they said anything like cold/ice/snow, it was a bit much. This year we did Hercules and drank on hero/god/mortal. This was actually basically an ideal amount and the song 'Zero to Hero' actually doesn't say Hero as much as you think. We're hoping for a new year with less impacted travel so we can see our families, either here or back home.

I headed back to work this week and had to wait a while to get my Covid test before I could go in. We've literally just had our Covid booster vaccinations as well so we'll let you know how that affects us! We're thinking we might head to a San Diego museum this weekend but we're only making plans we can cancel easily in case of the vaccine knocking us out. We'll let you know next week!

Get vaccinated! And be good!

Love you lots, 

Mitchell and Emily