A Christmas Story (kind of)

Greetings and Happy Holidays!! The staff and guests of Ottertail Lodge wish you the best Christmas ever. Here we see the official tree of the season, prominently displayed in the greatroom of the lodge. Kind of makes you wish you were here, doesn't it??
What with Lucy in Milwaukee, Mag in Oh, Clare!, the Ottertail is a little quieter than usual. We have no guests in the Lodge proper, but the big bunkhouse has a few rooms occupied. I'll try to give a little recap of the season.....


We all went to Donna's house for Christmas Eve. Donna is Peg's mom, so we also got to visit with Jim and Gary, Peg's brothers, and their families. Quite a houseful, but Santa managed to elbow 'his' way in. And what a bag of goodies he brought us!!


Apparently Santa figured Peg had behaved herself well enough to get a stocking filled with goodies. Of course, he was completely correct, as usual.


How THIS one scored a stocking of goodies is beyond me..... just kidding. Now that I think about it, Santa looked a lot like this one a few years ago..... funny how that works.


Of course, this was the first time for Hailee and Ashley to get scared by that gruff old Santa. But it worked out O.K. and no one cried. O.K., Chris sniffed a few times, but other than that, we were good to go.


We convinced 'Santa' to stay around a little while so we could all get our picture taken with him. He's usually a little more secretive than that, but I guess all things change over time. Especially Santa's looks!!!


When the festivities and feasting slowed down, some of us headed down cellar to check out the games. Carlo brought his "Crusher" serve out of retirement and soundly thrashed all takers. He hadn't had this much fun since college....


Of course ID tried valiantly to overcome the intense pressure of the "Crusher", and I wish him better luck next year.


But Carlo was humbled when 'Side Pocket' took him to school on the pool table.... some kids get teddy bears as a first toy, --this guy got a pool stick for his second birthday.


Back at table tennis, we had this. I'm not sure what this is all about and I'm not even going to venture a guess.


After Donna's, we headed back to the Ottertail. Not much energy left at this point, but we managed to stay up till 1:00 A.M., talking, playing piano, watching TV, etc. As I write this, most guests are still asleep. O.K., they're all asleep but it's only 10 minutes to noon.

I learned a new trick in the airplane last Thursday. It's called a 'forward slip' and is a maneuver designed to loose some altitude quickly if necessary. It consists of throttle to idle, stick forward and a simultaneous stick to left,rudder to right. This causes the plane to maintain it's path of travel, but at quite an angle. Kind of like going down the highway in a skid, going straight with the nose pointed toward the ditch. Returning the controls to neutral causes the plane to return to previous attitude and you can continue what you were doing. The plane looses altitude really fast during this and at first seems like something you WOULD NOT want to do. I enjoyed it, though.

Well, enough of this rambling, have a good day and see you all down the road sometime. I gotta go, Carlo