Decemberween 2011

Last year for the gift-day of December 25th, Corrie and I came out to Santa Monica. My brothers, cousin, and mom all also came out to visit. It was great fun...Norm and I went swimming in the dangerous runoff beach conditions on Christmas Eve, an event memorialized in January's post Dolphins and Venice.

This year, the tradition continued. Norm and I went swimming in a cleaner ocean, this time with much larger waves than either of us had swam in in years. We got pummeled.

The family was good, the gifts were precious, and the ocean was cold and rough.

There was one gift that Corrie and I got from my godparents, my Auntie and Uncle that live in Santa Monica, that was different and unique. It was a large dirigible. A dirigible toy.



It's one of the Air Swimmers. It has attached fins made of tissue paper, a gondola that runs along a track, and a tiny motor in the tail construction that whips the tail from one side to another, causing the blimp to move forward. The motorized gondola moves forward and back as a means of ascending or descending. It all works relatively well, if quite slowly.



The cool thing I've noticed from it hanging around our apartment is how the air is effected by simply walking around. If you walk by even the meekest air current can cause the Air Swimmer to get shoved around.