Post Holidays

I'm home again after a lovely holiday, so I thought I'd review just for my wonderful readers. This is relatively random rambling, so be prepared if you're going to read this whole, long post.

After all the frustration and drama with the cable company fiasco, which worked out, ultimately, I was looking forward to a nice break and visit with my family, and that is just what I had! My younger sisters and I all made it to the parents' again for Christmas, and PJ and I stuck around for New Year.

The first thing I did to begin recovering from the cable situation was bake cookies. If you didn't know, I'm now officially the Christmas cookie baker for my family. I always make sugar cookies and "Christmas Crinkles" (aka Chocolate Crinkles if you look up the recipe, but PJ always called them Christmas Crinkles) for the family as soon as I get to the parents'. Usually I do them in stages, one per day, but I decided to do them all at once this time. It actually went better than I expected and wasn't too overwhelming. I did save the decorating of the sugar cookies for the next day though; I didn't feel like doing them all by myself (decorating is much more fun with someone helping), and no one else was home yet. Mom helped me finish them up the next day. The cookies turned out better than ever, I think, and everyone enjoyed them, as they always do. As I told my older sister, I like people to like me for the cookies I bake!

Having the whole family together for the holidays is always interesting. We fall into old habits, old ways of interacting, yet they're different. We're adults, but my sisters and I still act like kids sometimes; it's strange how that happens. We have more patience with one another, and less patience at the same time. Overall, we keep it together pretty well, I think, and enjoy the family time regardless. We watched a lot of movies, visited our grandparents in their nursing home, and prepared for Christmas.

The Christmas morning went pretty well. We always have a battle about what time we will do the gifts, but we always work it out somehow. Dad and PJ always want to open gifts early so we have time to relax before heading out to my Dad's family's Christmas gathering. BB would like to sleep in--she does love her sleep!--and open gifts a little later in the morning. Mom and I don't particularly care, but we don't sleep late, so earlier kind of makes sense to us; we try to stay out of this discussion if possible. Everyone was extremely thoughtful with gifts, as always. They seemed to like what I gave them, and I loved what I received! My parents gave me a waffle iron (I love waffles!) and a Blu Ray Player (since I had a cruddy old DVD player), among other things. BB and PJ gave me some great DVDs, some of which I've wanted for a long time and one or two I didn't even know I wanted until I had them.

The larger family Christmas gathering was nice. My sisters and I used to dread them because we weren't comfortable chatting with our own family members and always stayed together in a corner somewhere, not really talking to anyone. Eventually, we all figured out how to be more social, and we embrace these opportunities to catch up with and chat with family members we don't see often.

New Year was a non-event, as usual for my family. Most of us feel it's just another day, not one requiring special celebration. We eat traditional foods and stay up until midnight; we switch to one of the network stations just before 12:00, but it was one that didn't show the ball dropping, so we missed that anyway. No big deal to us. I had no huge problems in 2013, but I plan to make some changes this year, so we'll see.

I came home yesterday, and it's nice to be back. I like spending the holidays with everyone, but it's nice to get back to my routine. Also, I guess I kind of missed Squeaky....

Last night, the tech from the cable company came to install the phone. The appointment I had made was for this afternoon, and it was only by checking my account via the website that I learned that the appointment had been mysteriously changed to yesterday evening (I'm glad I checked!). The tech was here for about an hour, he was extremely chatty, and he flirted rather awkwardly with me the whole time. Squeaks hid in the kitchen, but at least she didn't completely abandon me! Despite the somewhat uncomfortable situation, I'm glad the install hurdle has been jumped. I called the parents last night to give them the new number, and the line buzzed the whole time. I don't know if it's the old phone I was using or the phone line itself, but it's extremely irritating, and I hope it doesn't continue. If it does, I guess I'll be entering a new battle with the cable company. Yay. Fortunately, I'm only planning to use the home phone if my cell phone is having problems, but I don't want an annoying sound in the foreground of my conversations when I do use it. That almost defeats the purpose.

So, there it is, the extremely long coverage of my holidays. Sorry about the length, but I did warn you! Now we'll start getting back to normal. For now, Merry Christmas!