Christmas Vacation Part 2

January 12, 2010 9:47 pm

Alright, let’s see how much I can remember from Christmas…

First, a roll call of who was present: Kyle’s parents, Evan, and Mollie were all there. Evan’s friend Laurel was also there, with her son Paul (who is approximately 3 and adorable). Oh, also Kyle and me. So we were missing Mike, Erin & Bryce with their sons Will and Sawyer, and Megan & Chad.

On Christmas Eve, Kyle’s family always does a short “program” in which everybody either reads a short story or plays a song. I like this tradition. Kyle and I read How the Grinch Stole Christmas (I read the narrator’s part, and Kyle did the voices), Mollie played carols on her flute, several other stories were read, and we sang a bunch of carols as a group. I don’t know how they kept this going through the years, but I thought it was a lot of fun. After that, it was time to open the gifts from siblings. (There was some talk of opening all the gifts on Christmas Day, but it was decided that Tradition must be upheld! (Even if it’s slightly weird.)) We actually only did the gifts of siblings who were present, though, saving others for tomorrow when we could do it over Skype.

Kyle and I had the interesting opportunity to do stockings for the first time this year. We really enjoyed being Santa for each other, but we were kinda tapped out for stocking ideas. We ended up going to Walmart a couple days before Christmas and basically picking out our own candystuffs. Kyle realized that what would really make his Christmas perfect was an assortment of pastries only available on the east coast: Devil Dogs, Funny Bones, and imitation Pick ‘Em Ups, so I filled his stocking with those and he was good. Oh, and a meat tenderizer. My stocking was mostly candy, but also a box of crayons (for my Sunbeams class) and some tasty white cheddar shells and cheese I never buy b/c it also happens to be organic (and therefore crazy expensive). So our stockings were a little weird.

But I get ahead of myself. So Christmas Eve we put out stockings (pretending that we didn’t know what was going into each other’s) and went to bed. Paul came and woke us up early Christmas morning, and I think he got our names right. (Usually, if you asked him what Kyle’s name was, he’d say that he was a duck. Then if you asked him what my name was, he’d say it was Kyle.) Then it was time to open presents! This was a great deal of fun, but I’m not sure what the highlights were. I really enjoyed watching Kyle open the gifts I’d picked out for him and seeing if he actually enjoyed them as much as I’d hoped he would.

A lot of the rest of the day was spent, of course, playing around with what we’d received. Kyle got me a GPS, so that had to be charged and set up. And the books from my childhood that he’d found on eBay all had to be looked at. That sort of thing. There were Skypes with Kyle’s absent siblings. I called my parents and got the lowdown on my family’s Christmas. If you can believe it, they actually had a white Christmas in Dallas. Without me. Jerks.

We didn’t have much longer in Cromwell: we left on the 27th. This was a very long day. Kyle’s parents drove us to New Haven, where we took a train to Grand Central in NYC. From there, we took a bus to JFK. Our plane was a very long but uneventful ride back to San Francisco, where we took a couple of trains to Sunnyvale. (We’d left our car with Mike, but he was on call and couldn’t come pick us up.) Finally, we we got into our car for the final drive. And with that, we were home!

An Apologation

January 10, 2010 9:51 pm

Clearly, there’s more yet to come from our Christmas blog. Also clearly, it’s no longer anywhere near Christmas time. But I was sick for like a week after we got back, and there have been major migraines since then as well. Throw in a more-than-healthy dose of laziness when I have been feeling okay (yes, I admit it), and you get where we are: Jan. 10 and unfinished Christmas blogging. I really will get there, though. And once I do, Kyle can do New Year’s and such, and we can return to our regularly scheduled blogging. Maybe even later on tonight. Possibly not, though–my head is starting to hurt again. 🙁

Christmas Vacation Part 1

December 23, 2009 8:40 pm

Jess says it’s my turn to blog, so we’ll see what we can do here.

We got to the airport about 2 hours before our flight. Which was good, because we were apparently going to need most of that time. We went to the American Airlines self-check-in, walked up to a computer, punched in our information, got our boarding passes, and then waited for someone to come down, put the luggage tag on our bag, and place it on the conveyor belt. And we waited. And we waited. We watched while the guy who hates his job wandered up and down the line throwing people’s bags onto the conveyor belt. We watched while other employees walked into the back room and disappeared for several minutes at a time. We watched while people piled up at the kiosks and the line. After something like 30 minutes of standing there someone finally came around to take our bag.

Then we got into the security line. Something like 7-10 TSA employees to run a single line. By the time we got halfway through from where we started, the line was twice as long as when we got in it. They eventually opened a second line which sped things up considerably. I won the security-theater lottery and got patted down. Nothing like having your 4th amendment rights violated to make the holiday season cheery. However, TSA seems to be making some intelligent improvements. Further in front of us a mom and a dad were both holding small children when they got to the front of the line. The TSA employees allowed them to go through the metal detectors while holding the kids. Previously I’ve seen the employees demand that the children walk through by themselves, so the screaming, crying kids who have no idea what’s going on get pushed and prodded through the detector. So I’m glad someone with intelligence decided it wasn’t any less safe to let parents carry kids.

When the plane started boarding, the airline was offering $500 travel vouchers for people willing to bump to another flight. Which seems pretty decent, but that wouldn’t have covered the cost of the flight for our tickets; we might have considered it except for our hotel reservation and the plans for the next day.

The flight itself was uneventful, though American Airlines didn’t give us anything but a couple cups of soda during the 5-hour flight (you could, however, purchase a small sandwich for $10, or crackers and cheese for $5).

We arrived in JFK and went down to get our bags. For unknown reasons, the baggage claim signs weren’t providing any information at all, but the captain had announced which carousel our luggage would be at. That took forever. We did finally get the luggage and meet up with our pre-arranged car which took us smoothly to our hotel.

After checking in around 1:00 AM we asked if there was somewhere to find food. We were directed to a 24-hour deli on the corner which was acceptable.

The next day we checked out and left our bags at the hotel while we wandered around the city. When the rest of the family arrived (after a delayed train) we further wandered around the city ending up at Macy’s. We walked through their “Santaland” and then had dinner at one of the several restaurants in the store (there are something like 3 or 4 Starbucks inside Macy’s!).

N08_secondary-banner_colorOnce we finished up at Macy’s we booked it back uptown to see The Nutcracker performed by the New York City Ballet. It was fun. Jess didn’t cry and was able to enjoy the show. After the show we went back to the hotel and got our bags and then headed towards Grand Central. Jess had a battle with the subway again. She was being too nice to the ticket reader and it kept telling her to re-swipe. Once she flicked it through nice and quickly, it let her in.

The train ride back was fine, although we had to switch trains because there was some concern about whether our train was in proper working condition or not. I also spent most of the train ride fixing the Board. There were a few minutes when Mom and Dad called me over to solve a logic puzzle for them (which was part of an ad on the wall).

The next day we did nothing: our muscles and joints were a bit sore (did I mention that we walked around NYC for 6 hours?). Today we also did mostly nothing. We went over to the high school for a few minutes to say hi to some of my old teachers. Due to vehicle scheduling conflicts we then had no ride back home. So we walked home, pausing at Subway for lunch and to warm up again. This evening we went up to the Trinity College campus and watched It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen, which Jess had never seen.

That’s been our vacation thus far.

Mini-Christmas: Your Pictures, Our Frame

December 19, 2009 4:43 pm

Jess’ parents sent us a Christmas present (of the afore-mentioned eyes-closed-wrapping fame). We were told we could open it before we left for Connecticut. So today we had Mini-Christmas. We got up, turned on the Christmas tree, put on the Christmas music, and opened our present while wearing our pajamas.

We received an Internet-enabled digital picture frame! We’ve been having fun playing with it and getting it all set up and such. One of the nifty features is that you can email pictures to a service which the frame will then grab and display for you. It actually provides two different services you can pick from which offer this feature. The first one we tried “MemoryFrame.com” is having some technical issues, but then we discovered the other one, “FrameChannel.com”, and it’s tons better. It allows you to monitor RSS feeds and all sorts of things.

So now we have some information gathering to do.

Do you have an account with a photo-sharing website? If so, we can probably connect our frame to your shared pictures so we can see your pictures right in our own picture frame! So let us know.

If you don’t have a photo-sharing setup, you can still share your pictures with us easily by emailing them to KBD_JHD ( at ) framesend dot com. But, you know, make that look like a real email address. Hey, you can even send us messages by writing something in Microsoft Paint and emailing that to us!

We’re hoping to get enough feeds from our friends and family set up that the frame will act kind of like a digital window to all of you.

I will admit, I’m quite impressed with the simplicity and quality of integrating the FrameChannel website with the frame itself. The combination of the two basically fulfills all the awesomeness that digital picture frames promised.

So far Christmas is off to a great start. Hopefully the gimongous snow storm on the East Coast won’t cause us any trouble.