The week with Meg and Amy was awesome. I didn't get to write about it until a while later, because I immediately left for the Cedar Point trip, so details are kind of sketchy in my memory now, but I wanted to get something down about it.
On Wednesday (5/11/2005), I headed straight to Baldwin after work, to see the opera put together by Natalia's class. It was pretty impressive. They wrote the music and lyrics (with the help of their music teacher), designed and built the sets and costumes, etc. Natalia was chosen to play one of the five main characters, and had a solo. She seemed a bit nervous before going on stage, but once up there, she showed no trace of that nervousness. As you can see in the pictures, she has great stage presence. Her singing was surprisingly good as well. She's got a good sense of rhythm, and would often pull things back on time when her stagemates started to drift off of the beat.
On Saturday Andrés and I headed to the airport to pick up Amy and Meg, whose planes arrived within half an hour of each other. Once we had them both, we headed to Carolina to see Natalia's gymnastics competition. At first I left my camera in the car, so I didn't get any pictures of her routine on the balance bar, but finally I decided I should go get it, and so I managed to get some shots of her floor routine.
When it came time to award medals, it seemed they were giving them away to everyone; some classes would have all the way to sixth place, others as far as eighth. And yet in spite of that, Natalia didn't win any medals. As they walked off the podium, it seemed that she was the only one in her group of nine or so that hadn't gotten one. I don't really understand the logic behind their medal awarding strategy. She was pretty upset about not winning anything, but she got over it quickly.
In a grievous lapse of judgement, it seems I didn't take nearly any pictures during the week that Meg and Amy were here. I did take some one night when we grilled vegetables and made margaritas, but for the most part the week went undocumented. The tragedy. Now I will have to rely on only my rickety memory to serve as record of the week's events.
Since I couldn't take any more time off of work, Sunday was the only remaining day when I was free all day. Michelle hadn't done the hiking thing at El Yunque before, so we planned to do that. When we awakened on Sunday, however, it looked rainy and unpleasant. We didn't want to waste the day, though, so we picked up Michelle and headed out to El Yunque anyway. It mostly cleared up by the time we got there, but rain still loomed. We decided that instead of hiking down the stream to the waterfalls as we usually do, we'd explore the section of the creek upriver from the bridge, which we'd never done before. That section was much more hikeable than the downstream section, which is more like wading than hiking. There was much more solid, dry ground available on the upstream section, and there were only a few parts where you had to step through shallow water. At no point did we find ourselves immersed in water, so I think I might return sometime with my camera and hike back up there and take some pictures.
On the drive down the mountain, we stopped and got empanadillas and sorullos and revelled in its deliciousness as usual, then returned home. Since we were already wearing our bathing suits, we went to Michelle's house and got into her pool for a while.
As night fell, we got the urge to watch Empire Records, so we bid her good night and returned home. As we turned on the TV, we heard the voice of Lois uttering unfamiliar words, and realized in shock that we had forgotten that with Sunday comes a new episode of Family Guy. Postponing our plans for Empire Recordage, we enjoyed the Sunday night lineup of shows and then watched the movie and fell asleep.
The rest of the week seemed to speed by on fast forward, since I spent most of each day stuck at work. It was frustrating knowing they were all there at home, but they came by work to visit for my lunch hour some days, so it wasn't too bad.
On Wednesday we grilled vegetables and made margaritas as mentioned above. Mushrooms are gross as hell to handle, but taste pretty good. And tofu with barbecue sauce is awesome. But then, anything with barbecue sauce is awesome.
All too quickly, Friday was here, and it was time for us all to depart. My plane left early in the morning, so I couldn't go to the airport to see them off. I left late, as usual, and was low on gas to boot. I didn't have time to stop for gas, so I figured I'd gamble that it would last, and just drove straight there. Fortunately it did, and though I arrived five minutes too late to do the self-checkin (minimum of 40 mins before departure), I wasn't checking any bags so an attendant was able to check me in and I made it on the plane with no trouble. And thus ended one week-long adventure and began the next weekend of fun.