Holiday recap

Wow, 6 days off in a row, I don’t think I have taken 6 days off from work in a row for a looong time, maybe 10 years. My Xmas break ran the gammut. The days up to and including Christmas were rather busy. On Friday I wanted to knock out whatever I could to free up the remainder of time off. We had to clean up for my mom coming over Christmas eve as well. I enjoyed the feeling of having many days off in front of me. The first day of vaca is always the best for me, as the end of the time off approaches I spend a lot of that time mourning the end of the fun. I thought that perhaps as Christmas neared, my holiday excitement level would possibly increase. It never happened.

On both Saturday and Monday, Ali and I went for 2.5 mile + runs. For her birthday I bought her this sweet little wrist worn GPS. It is used to accurately track your runs. It is amazing. It tracks every aspect of your run you can imagine, including a graphical representation of the course you followed. You can have it act like a virtual partner that runs at a set pace to help keep you up to speed. It actually motivates you to run more and faster. I think of all the gifts Ali and I got for our birthdays/xmas, this was the coolest one.

On Christmas eve afternoon I went and picked up my mom. Ali made a lasagna that was fantastic. We finished off the night watching the Polar Express. It was a cute, different kind of holiday flick. On Friday I watched the original, uncut version of Christmas Vacation. I forgot how much better it is when the swearing and non PC content is put back in. I love that movie.

Christmas morning came and I got Ali up around 7’ish, a far cry from the 5am ish start times I used to push for. There was a lot of stuff. It took probably an hour and a half until we opened all the gifts for me, Ali, my mom and the pets. It took forever. It was mostly anti-climactic because so much stuff arrived for us unwrapped or in boxes that identified its contents. After everything was opened, a sense of dread / anxiety overtook me. Seeing all the shit everywhere and thinking about how I was going to get it put away/installed/used was digging at me. This feeling was compounded by the normal melancholy following the completion of the xmas ritual.

After eating a french toast breakfast my mom prepared I tore into the pile. Ali could sense my anxiety and helped organize and put stuff away. I threw the wireless controller onto the xbox, I installed and configured the USB Bluetooth adapter on Alison’s computer to work with her Treo, I set up the cat water fountain, I replaced our Cable/DSL router with a new one and played with the wireless weather center I got.

Mom and Ali took some time to sit out in the sun while I continued with my madness, frantically trying to restore order to what I saw as chaos. Ali and I took my mom back to her place in the early afternoon. The three of us walked down to the beach for a few minutes just to say we did. The weather was cool and overcast, not good beach weather. We found someone had taken the time to spell out Merry X-mas in shells on the beach. We took Mom’s pic in front of it to use at a later date. It was the first time we had been to the beach since the hurricane came through. All in all it looked ok. We walked back and thanked mom for coming over and went home.

Even though the end of daylight was soon approaching, I headed out to construct the mounts for my outdoor weather center. I had to do some trial and error to locate the stuff where it could communicate with the base unit inside. I wound up mounting the stuff in the orchard. I then attached the base unit to Ali’s pc and installed and configured the software. The software allows me to upload the current weather to my web server. Very geeky but I like being able to monitor the weather conditions in my yard realtime. I finished up just as the sun was going down.

Christmas night I was still itching to get out of my skin. I tried to describe to Ali how I felt. It was a big snowball of negativity that I knew was uncalled for but I could do little to make it subside. I felt empty, discouraged, anxious, sad and angry all at the same time. I went to bed that night knowing that future Christmas holidays will probably follow the same path unless we decide to have a kid.

On Monday I noticed that my outdoor temperature reading was 10 to 12 degrees higher than it should be. My initial design did not shade the remote unit from sunlight so the suns rays were artificially raising the temperature. I went out and built some additions to my mount to block it on 2 sides from the sun. It seemed to keep the temps more inline with reality. I worked more on getting things put away throughout the day and by the end of Monday, most things were back in order. I felt less anxiety than the day before.

We watched a lot of movies over the break. We saw Cinderella Man, Dodgeball and Anchor Man. I though the first 2 movies were great, Anchor Man was garbage. The funny moments were very slim in that flick. I have a ton more movies to play on my xbox media center.

Tuesday and Wednesday, Ali was back at work so I had the days to myself. Tuesday I wanted to crank out any and all remaining housework so I had Wednesday to WoW till I dropped. I finally dug into the ebay pile of stuff and listed 8 or 9 things online for sale. I did some minor outside work and then played WoW the rest of the day. Wednesday was even more hardcore Wow. With nothing else on my schedule, and no dog at home to demand my attention, I had a marathon session. I basically played from 6:30 am to 9:30 pm with maybe an hour and a half break thrown in there. I played almost exclusively with my rogue and traveled all over the Eastern continent. It was over the top ridiculous playing that long, but I had fun and it was nice to totally ignore everything else. With my rogue I find myself looking for trouble, killing horde whenever possible and just basically being a thorn in other player’s side. It relaxes me.

I’m back at work for a 2 day work week and then it’s another 3 day weekend, yahoo. We are running yet another 5k this weekend on New Year’s Day which will dictate a mild New Year’s celebration.