The Holidays

I didn't get a chance to post over the holidays because I was busy, busy, busy. I went home on the evening of the 21st so I could go with Julia for her surgery on the morning of the 22nd. She had some work done on her foot and the surgery went perfectly. She had a bit of difficult time bouncing back from the anesthetics, but she was home and in bed by the end of the day.

We'd both sort of expected her to be sleeping and pretty drugged up over the holidays, but she felt pretty good and not particularly sore or drugged. We had a couple of rough spots due to some harsh medicines, but we managed to get that under control in the first couple of days and after that it was smooth sailing.

While she was in surgery, I ran out to get some crutches and a scooter for her to get around on, so she was pretty mobile even though she can't put any weight on her foot for a while.

All of this added up to mean we had a pretty nice Christmas. We went to her mom and dad's for a big holiday party and spent the night there to avoid getting her home again just to come back the next day.

As for the holidays themselves, they were good. I missed my family, but that's just how things are right now. I talked to them a couple of times during the break and everyone seemed to have a good time -- although Grandma ate too much food while she was cooking for the parties and made herself sick. I thought that was kind of cute, but I felt bad for her because she didn't get to celebrate with everyone.

My younger sister's sons have and Xbox and one of the gifts they received from their parents was an Xbox Live subscription and they were very excited to get online and trade information with me. I don't actually have any of the (many) games they have, but maybe that'll inspire me to get some of the "hot" titles. I just hate to spend the money, though. Anyway, we're all hooked up now and we chatted online just the other day.

New Year's Eve we spent with Jen and Hays and their daughter Lily. We had a nice dinner and celebrated New Year's on the East Coast at 9:00 so Lily could enjoy it and then she was shuffled off to bed. She's too cute. After she went up we played a game of Settler of Catan, which lasted much longer than any game of that I've ever played. When Julia finally won we were all happy to pack up and head for home. It was a good night of relaxing.

The next day we slept in, then went to Julia's parents again to sit around and do whatever we wanted; which meant read, play another game of Settlers of Catan, and eat leftovers. Then we decided to go for Chinese dinner and see The Young Victoria. We all enjoyed it and honestly, for my purposes, it could have gone on for another hour at least. I love period pieces and this one was gorgeous and very interesting. I love watching the social interactions and how things are said or not said. It was also nice to learn a little more about Victoria and Prince Albert.

With the holidays over, Julia and I spent most of our time around the house. She wasn't really able to cook or clean (kind of hard to get around very easily on that scooter in the kitchen and up stairs), so I took care of most of the running around, fetching, cooking, cleaning, and whatever else needed to get done. I even cooked a few times and baked three batches of cookies!

Seth had a get-together somewhere in there, I think between Christmas and New Year's and I was excited to go because Jason and Liz were going to be there. I hadn't seen them since they moved to London two years ago and now they're back! Mike and Sharon and the girls were there, too. Which reminds me, we had the four of them over for lunch during the break, too. We were crazy with the parties.

I flew back to California on Sunday the 3rd and had just enough time to unpack and unwind for a couple of hours before it was time for bed and work the next day. I don't really feel like I had much of a vacation, but I knew that going into the holidays and really, it was just nice to spend a couple of weeks with Julia. That made it really hard to come back here. I like that girl.

I'm back at work. Things are good -- and I even received some nice comments on the forums about some of the missions I made a couple months ago. That was a rare treat; nice things being said on the Internet.

Enough typing for now. I'll update soon. I swear.