Back at the compound

Update and bumped  Pro tip: be careful around hotel recliners. We had one in our room that was comfortable enough, but the foot rest didn't want to stay down when I got up. This morning, I had to give it a mighty shove with my right foot, and as soon as my foot touched the floor, the foot rest sprang up and kicked me in the shin. I didn't notice until I got home, many hours later, that the thing had actually broken the skin, and that I had bled. The damned recliner is probably siting there in that hotel right now, just chuckling to itself.

We went to Virginia Beach for a couple of days to visit No. 1 Son and the grandkids. We didn't want to drive on, or the day before, Thanksgiving, so we went up Sunday afternoon and came back this evening. Maggie was in school yesterday, so we took Cal to the zoo, then Five Guys and then the ice cream shop (my low carb diet, as you can imagine, ran off the bridge and crashed in the gorge).

Here's a first for Mrs. Paco and me: the hotel where we stayed had a power outage from about 7 pm yesterday until 3:30 this morning. When we were driving back there after visiting with the family, it looked like somebody in a car had plowed up a couple of power poles and maybe fifty to a hundred yards of line. The desk clerk at the hotel presented us with two glow sticks and her best wishes for getting to our room. At about midnight, a horrendous alarm went off: the desk clerk said there was no fire emergency, but that, apparently, water pressure in the hotel had dropped. She manually shut it off, and, fortunately, it didn't come on any more. When the power returned, I was alerted to the fact by a noise that sounded like a triceratops being attacked by a T-Rex; turned out to be a ventilation fan that was trying, against great odds, it seemed, to drag itself back into operation. We were, as you can imagine, glad to get back home.

Here's Cal stomping a giant snake at the zoo (not a real one, obviously; I don't think they grow that big, even in Brazil).