My beautiful sister, Annelore, was here.  A quick whirlwind tour, way too short, completely without my adorable niece & nephew, but here.  So, so here.

Annelore had a work conference in Stuttgart, not even Stuttgart, in Böblingen, halfway between us & Stuttgart!  She came bursting in on Thanksgiving (I knew she was coming of course) and left the table speechless.  We had three families, two German and our new Italian friends,  crowded around our uber-large Ikea table, and then there was Annelore.  Annelore greeted everyone exuberantly, friendly, and loudly.  She immediately loves everyone, and makes sure they know that.  I am a very out-going, social, extroverted kind of person.  Annelore puts me to shame.  By the time my guests recovered, I grinned and said “there’s another one. There’s three of us.” and silenced them all again immediately.  I didn’t explain that Manon is the quiet one.  I was having too much fun enjoying their realization that I’m the quiet one.

When we were little, 11, 5 and 2, we took a cruise on the QEII.  Manon, the baby, was left with a babysister and Annelore & I joined our parents for our first class dinner.  That evening a family photo was taken of all of us… except Manon.  My mother, in those pre-photoshop days, carefully cut out a photo of Manon.  To this day, that photo is framed in her house.  I will get a hold of the photo, I will scan it in, and I will paste Manon into our sisters photo.  I almost photoshopped her in here.  I can’t believe we didn’t take a sister photo when the three of us were together this summer in Belgium.

This morning we had sister-time, alone-time, bonding-time.  We drove up to the new house and I showed her where we are moving in December.  She ooh’d & aah’d and made me feel all warm & fuzzy.  Then we had a lovely, leisurely, breakfast at the airport thanks to some flight delays through Amsterdam. I completely and totally fan-girl’ed over Colm Meaney (Star Trek’s Chief O’Brien), sitting at the table right next to us.  I fan-girl’ed so hard I altogether forgot to whip out my handy-dandy smart phone & take a picture. I’m now telling it as I-respected-his-privacy, but really, I was starstruck & totally forgot.