Roadtrip from Hell (Christmas 2008)

subtitle: there's no place like home.

CHRISTMAS: I had to work the 24th and 26th, so we spent our first christmas holiday together here in Iowa. I got off work at noon on the 24th and promptly flew over to the local mall to finish shopping for gifts. First I had to go to the Gap and get myself a little present, obviously. We went to church together and ate clam chowder for dinner (my family tradition) but I got it...out of a can. Don't tell Grandma. I think the cans of soup were cheaper than buying just the clams to make it the traditional way anyway. Also, who has time to keep up with christmas traditions when you have to work all the time? After dinner we tried to finish wrapping our presents. I told Aaron we should read the Christmas story from Luke 2, so he read it to me in a sing-songy high pitched voice. I had this brilliant idea that it would be really cute if we had a sleepover out by the tree to stay up watching christmas movies. Our laptop with a DVD drive broke so we ended up not doing the movie thing, but we pulled out the sleeping bags and pillows for a night under the tree. Which was great until Aaron started rolling over and pushing me into the evergreen. I kept waking up with ornaments on my face. We bought each other one big present each. I got Aaron a huge amazing fish tank for Brutus and he got me a bread maker. After we had opened the 2 presents we thought about opening the other gifts for our families and re-wrapping them before the trip to Michigan. We both assumed the other person would be making Christmas breakfast so after a "discussion" about it, we fried a pound of bacon and ate it out of the pan. We were invited over for dinner at the home of some new friends' parents, so we spent the day eating delicious food, playing games and staying up late watching Get Smart. ("forty yards... just at the edge of my range!" "if captured, this pill will cause death in nine seconds."/"yes, but how do I get them to take it?") Overall it was a great Christmas.

ROADTRIP: I went to work the next day and we planned to leave after grabbing a quick dinner. However, as I drove home from work at 5:15, the high temperatures were causing extreme fog as the snow melted and I could barely see a car length ahead of me. As I furiously finished (read: started) packing while Aaron loaded up the car, we decided to wait until the extreme fog advisory lifted at 1 am to leave, hoping to strike out when it was cold enough that the fog was gone but not so cold that the condensation turned to ice. We are smart college graduates, after all. So we had our neighbor over for a drink and went to bed, with alarms set for midnight. Then we got several well-meaning phone calls warning us about the bad weather that disrupted our few hours of sleep. We set out at 12:45am and found ourselves in massive fog just on the outside edge of Des Moines, which was the predetermined turning point if the weather was too bad to justify leaving that early. We had to get to Michigan in time to see Aaron's florida-bound grandparents before they left that afternoon, so we kept pressing on. According to the laws of the state of Illinois, I pressed a little too hard. This was fine because I obviously had $75 laying around that I couldn't figure out how to waste for any more enjoyable purposes. I stopped to get gas, coffee (worst cup EVER!) and a little breakfast sandwich to discover that I had, in fact, left my credit card on the dining room table in our apartment and traded all the cash in my wallet for toll quarters. Aaron made fun of me unmercifully. More than just the hellish fog we had experienced throughout Iowa and Illinois, Indiana decided to grace us with thunderstorms on our way into Michigan. Right as we crossed the border into Michigan, I realized that with the time change, Aaron's family was expecting us right about then and we were hours away from their home. I called, and they graciously put their present-opening on hold for a few more hours. We stopped at my parent's house for showers and orange juice. I really just wanted to go to bed, but we got back in the car for another 3 hours to visit the H fam, who began opening presents as soon as we got there. I was in my pajamas with horrible hair after eleven hours of white-knuckled driving. My face decided to revisit 7th grade and a family member with a new camera took a lot of pictures. We spent three and a half days with each side of the family. Most of the week we spent in Michigan fades in my memory behind the fevers, congestion and lung-hacking we did while spending about 20 hours a day sick in bed. A week later I am still coughing.

KNITTING: I have been knitting a lot this fall. My hobbies are very cyclical - I just really get going on something and after a while I get sick of it and do something else for a while. I need to get on a scrapbooking kick soon, but for now I'm still hard-core about my knitting. Here's a picture of the pretty scarf I made for my sister Beth.