A Very Foltice Christmas

We are back to the grind this week after having a great holiday season. For Christmas, we packed up the rental car for Washington D.C. to be with Dana’s family (our cars can barely putter around town, so a rental was necessary). It was nice to see snow for Christmas, though for the past 9 years in Ft. Lauderdale we had started to get used to sitting by the pool after opening Christmas presents.
We left on the 23rd at 5pm and travelled straight through until 4:30am. On New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t stay up past 10pm, but when travelling, I become Superman. Actually, the two cups of truck stop coffee made me Superman. Despite taking directions from a “lady” for the last 90 minutes of the trip, we arrived with no issues (I am still not sold on Garmin). I think women must have invented Garmin so that men have to listen to a female voice give directions. All week I was looking for the Pierce Brosnan voice setting on the Garmin device. (Editor’s Note: Thank you Garmin for making the voice female. We would not have made it to my parent’s house without it and I found it gratifying that Bryan was at the mercy of a “female” direction giver. He had no choice but to listen.)
We had a great Christmas with family. Robyn and Dan made it in at 2 pm Christmas Day, which delayed our gift opening. It was a great week in the life of Dylan. He started to crawl the day Dana was trying to pack everything for our trip, making packing take twice as long and more complicated. He gets around quite fast, has his two bottom teeth coming in, and is piecing sounds together. We are telling him to slow down, but he is not listening (a sign of things to come).
I dominated in ping-pong the entire weekend and made sure everyone knew it. The only blemish came on the first night to Dana’s Dad. I made him pay after that. Ping-pong trash talking runs in my family and it usually ends with someone crying. This all adds to the family traditions. I can still hear my Dad saying (predicting) over and over “into the net” as he hit another shot with an obscene amount of backspin.
We hung around through Sunday night to celebrate Grandma Z’s 80th birthday. We went out for brunch at an Irish restaurant and I decided that I am in love with all you can eat brunch buffets. For my first plate, I went with a breakfast theme. The second plate was lunch food, and the third was a ‘best of’ plate (consisting mainly of bacon). The fourth and final was a dessert plate. I blacked out shortly after that and came to 4 hours later.
We woke up at 3am Monday morning and drove until 3pm. It was good to get home and Dylan was a champ. He just slept the whole way. I have never seen so many motor homes with Quebec license plates heading south. On a two lane highway, these are traffic cloggers. My blood pressure rises now whenever I see one on the road.
(Just to recap this post so far: I’ve insulted women and Canadian retirees. Who’s next?)
We had a great New Year’s. We purged the house and watched a ton of football. We are doing two fasts this month: one is a spending fast for the month of January posted on our financial blog, justaskmoney.com, and the other 21 day Daniel fast through our church starts on Sunday. We are looking forward to a great 2010.
“It’s gonna be a great year, Gilbert. HAAAHAAAHAAA” - Lewis Skolnick, Revenge of the Nerds