Family Photo Shoot

bikers, originally uploaded by emgillz.

Well, I admit I'm nervous to dish out my family to the raw openness and mystery of the internet.......but it appears to be the thing to do for whatever old friends who look at this to remember what I look like. It's been gratifying to see pictures of old missionaries and friends' new babies, etc. So I thought I'd show off (for you Jen, since you asked) myself, Amanda, and Will just before our Lake Tahoe bike ride with Mom, while Dad tried to gamble back the money it cost us to go in the first place.

Will's pretty darned tall now, and Amanda's a hottie, but I pretty much could still pass for a sister on a special P-Day what with the bike helmet and ratty hair.

Now that school is back underway and I have freshman/sophomore research papers to read, new Japanese characters to learn and then forget, and my Margaret-Atwood/Ian-McEwan seminar to mull over, our three days in Tahoe seem like a really really good and rare dream I wish I could revisit instead of the semi-boring semi-horrifying regular dreams I float around in at night (depending on the moon and the tides? a friend once suggested).

Well, for those who haven't been for a while, Tahoe is still the strange blend of trail mix, martini, and old fashioned soda fountains. There were restaurants with dishes like Tofu Palace and Vegan Peanutbutter-and-Chocolate Pie for my sister (and tempura for me), and all the old favorites for chicken nuggets and fries for my brother.

We did all the things people should do in a place like Tahoe: I bought a book called Women Who Charmed the West filled with pictures of various popular prostitutes and Annie Oakley, we took a tour of Vikingsholm by an old woman who had played there as a child before the eccentric old rich lady who used to plant wildflowers on the mansion's sod roofs passed away and the park rangers took it over, we shivered on the beach and barely got our feet wet, and I taught my family to press your face very, very close to Ponderosa trees, like going in for a kiss, and putting your nose in between the thick slabs of bark where the sap smells like strawberry ice cream and butterscotch. And if you do that once, that's all you can smell when you ride a bike through a forest of them.