Return to the Living

by Matt | Jan 7, 2013 | Personal

I’m alive, and vertical, which is nice for a change! It was a heck of a holiday season, that’s for sure.

We started with a visit to my family home in New England over Christmas. We managed to find long but direct plane routes from Houston to Boston. I knew that flying with a toddler was probably best done all at once. We normally fly South West but couldn’t find anything with less than 2 stops leading up to Christmas, and I just envisioned a battle getting her back on the plane after stopping in Atlanta or Chicago. That just wasn’t going to work. So, we paid a little extra for direct flights on United. I was actually pleasantly surprised and that flights all worked out perfectly. She slept for a good bit on the way up there, and I surprised her with a portable DVD player for the rest. She wanted IceAge and munched on Goldfish and was happy as could be.

My parents loved seeing her and we got to visit with nearly everyone. Christmas day was a blast and she was dizzy with excitement opening gifts. I got the new Roku box, she got a Lego princess castle and my aunts and uncles came for dinner. After that it started snowing and we were stuck inside for 2 days. I had wanted to go into Boston a bit, and get out and visit with my buddies in the area, but the northern part of NH got 15″ and we were good and stuck. It wasn’t until the morning of our departure that it actually stopped.

The snow let up around midnight and we had to get on the road by 3:30am to get back to Boston in time to make our 7:30am flight. We thought flying early would be good for the kiddo to get some sleep, which never happened, but catching the red-eye after a snow storm was just grueling. It was a white-knuckled drive for yours truly. We thankfully made it to the gate with about 20 minutes to spare.

Back here in Houston we were preparing for New Years when we all collective came down with some version of the flu. Our daughter was the luckiest with just a passing cough and some sniffles, she had the flu shot a couple months ago. My wife still has a cough but it never really developed into anything. I was laid up in bed for the better part of a week. Fever, chills, body-aches, the whole thing. We canceled New Years plans and I just laid on the couch drinking tea. Happy 2013!

So, after that it was just recovery for the past week. I haven’t even had a chance to play any of my newly acquired video games, or go through my retail-therapy baseball cards. I had gone to Target to find some Robitusin and game home with a half-dozen discounted rack-packs of Chrome and Platinum.

I’m back in the office today, and have a nice stack of yellow padded envelopes from ebay to open as well. The 2nd half of my December purchases have been waiting patiently for me. I’ve got some catching up posting to do.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a good holiday season. I’m looking forward to going back through everyone’s posts from the past 3 weeks.

Matt out.