Happy New Year!

The end of the decade found me in Mexico, sleeping in a shelter with strangers.  No worries, I didn't let that dampen the festivities!

On New Year's Eve Eve, the local branch of the church had a family party.  5 people stood on the dance floor and a few more watched from the walls until 40 loud Americans arrived.  Throw in the Macarena and an ipod, and it became a very lively place.  Try to take a group picture with each of 15 cameras, and it became complete chaos.

On New Year's Eve (the real one), we had a fiesta at the Roadhouse.  After a full day's work, we had a celebration dinner of enchiladas prepared by the Roadhouse staff.  One of Carol's friends from a previous build made a delicious tres leches cake.  We had a masive pinata, with some pretty weird candy inside.  My favorite was the pop bottles (a nod to the Utahns, who don't get soda) with candy inside.  I heard the mini tamales were nasty, but the ginormous pixie sticks were cool because they turned your mouth florescent colors.  One thing I just don't get is the plastic bugs rubber banded to suckers.  Naaa-sty.

We topped it all off with the kind of firworks that are illegal in CA for a reason.  Against background noise of firecrackers and gunshots, one church broadcast some kind of singing.  We whooped it up and sent bottle rockets in all kinds of bad directions, including under a tanker truck, towards a nearby gas station, directly over the wall into the police station, over our own cars, right at Stuart's leg, and (accidentally, we think) careening around the compound.  The security guard just smiled and said "No problem."  He even offered up a homemade gunpowder packet.

New Year's day, we packed up and headed home, which for me involved a four hour car ride to Phoenix, lunch with some dear AZ friends, and a flight back to Sac.

What a way to end a decade!