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.

That Time of Year

by Matt | Dec 10, 2012 | Personal

Well, it’s December. I have a real love-hate relationship with December. I love cold weather, I’m still a New Englander at heart and there’s just something about the chill, seeing your breath outside, the wind, the quiet, the gray skies. It’s peaceful. Winter also means skiing, which was a huge part of my life for a long time, even though I don’t get to go very often, it’s still something I think of fondly.

December also brings my birthday, and Christmas, and depression. I don’t think I have what we’re now calling “Seasonal Affective Disorder”, at least I’ve never been diagnosed with it officially. I just don’t really get into the season, and I don’t really like my birthday in general.

I’ve never really had a “good” birthday. When I was younger it was tough to have birthday parties because my birthday is so close to Christmas (just a couple days). My parents also usually took my younger brother to hockey camps in Decemeber. So, I was alone for a good number of birthdays. I’m not blaming them, we always celebrated when they got back, but on the actual day of, I was usually by myself.

There were a couple times I managed to cobble together some sort of event. I can remember once or twice having Chip, Chris and Josh over for some videos games, those were good times, but I think that was about it. The biggie was my 18th birthday. I had to work that night and when I got home everyone was gone, there was a note on the counter and a $20 bill. The note read “Happy Birthday, get yourself some pizza, we’ll be back on Saturday”, or something similar. That was pretty much the final straw. From that point on, I just didn’t really enjoy my birthday.

My wife has been really good about making sure we always do something for my birthday now, even if it’s just going out to eat. She’s knows I’m kinda down this time of year and always tries to cheer me up.

This year we tried getting people together for a “End of the World” party, since my birthday and the end of the world seem to be lined up nice and fittingly. No dice. Everyone is out of town or traveling. I had really wanted to go big this year. Big party, food, booze, the whole 9 yards. Oh well.

Christmas is a whole other “thing” that I won’t get into, but let’s just say that I’m not really looking forward to it. This almost perfectly sums it up. Sigh. At least there’s eggnog.

At least I have my family, my friends, my health. There’s a lot to be thankful for. I usually remember that in the end, but don’t mind me if I get a little “bah humbug” between now and then.