(no subject)
This was one of the more amusing Christmases I've had in some time.
Because I was putting in a full day Thursday working on my Project of *DOOM*, I was still in the office (as was Andy; it was just the two of us) when the Fed Ex guy arrived. Apparently, he was carrying our work Christmas Presents. Last year, these were the smallest possible boxes of Legos from Andy (I got the Obi-Wan battling Assassin Droids one). This year, there was a bit of a step up; corporate sent us all two $100 American Express gift cards.
These things appear to rate only slightly below cash and way above gift certificates in my "generic Christmas gift" category. They may actually beat out cash for me specifically if it turns out that:
a) They can be used just like credit cards online; and
b) There are online vendors who take American Express.
At that point, I can suddenly buy other people Holiday presents much easier than I normally could. (Yes, I know I could, and probably should, own a credit card. The reasons I don't are mostly stubborn and/or moral ones.)
On Christmas day, vtkatt drove her, Truman, and me to my mothers house in Chesapeake. (She moved there from Portsmouth about 18 months ago, if I never told you that before. It's a nifty house, because it looks like it was built in three sections by committee, and used to have an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the back yard.) We left around 2pm, and vtkatt proceeded to keep her speedometer between 85 and 95 for the vast majority of the trip (I think the speedometer may be about 5 miles high at that point, though). Traffic on Christmas day is really quite lovely; there are enough people on the road that you get the pleasant feeling of passing them, but not nearly enough to ever slow you down, and there isn't a cop to be found anywhere. (I saw a total of one on the trip down, and that wasn't until we got off onto 164 right near the house; he was sitting with his lights flashing, though there wasn't anyone nearby, so I don't know what was going on.) The result of the lack of traffic and copious use of speed was that despite three stops, including a "let's have vtkat get lost trying to find her sister in an area she should remember well" trip to the Coleman bridge, we got to my house in right around 5 hours, I believe. (I think, if we'd cut it to a single stop, we could've had it done in 4 hours easy.)
Christmas night went relatively painlessly, thankfully; the only real negative was that my grandfather probably talked vtkatt's ear off, as he is wont to do when anyone gets within visual contact.
Truman woke me up several times over the course of the night, once to go to the bathroom, the rest just moving around. Apparently, he also went wandering without waking me up, as both my mother and my sister reported visits from him, though he was apparently nice enough to leave when they told him to. He didn't chew anything up while he was in the house, though, and the only mess he made was a little vomit that I suspect was due to giving him ham, and that cleaned up better than I expected it to (I don't think it left a stain). He was a bit nervous on the trip down, really refusing to lay down for more than a couple of minutes at a time, which was odd compared to vtkatt's description of how he acted when they and Tiffany went to Ohio.
Post-Christmas morning, I woke up to a rather surprising sight: snow. No, let me correct myself: more friggin' snow on the ground than I'd seen in Portsmouth in my last 4-6 years there. And more falling. Big-honkin' snowflakes, too. This was *Blacksburgian* snow, and it was falling in *Tidewater*. This was somewhat discongruent to me.
But Truman loved it. Part of it was hyperactivity, I suspect, but when he was let out that morning, he started running in circles and digging in the snow and would chase snowballs and everything. I had to let him out on several occassions not to relieve himself, but just to go play.
Then came the attempted trip back. vtkatt was going to go to Glouster to visit some of her family for the morning; she returned several minutes after she left, two fishtails later, learning a lesson us locals knew well: one of the downsides to never getting snow in an area is that you generally don't have snowplows and the few you do have you don't get onto the roads nearly fast enough.
The part that really amused me, though, was that the storm was coming up the coast... this was a Nor'easter winter storm, which I don't think I've ever heard of before. (I mean, really, how the hell do you get cold air coming up from Florida?) Due to its positioning, it was dropping on I-95 in North Carolina, and it was dropping on I64- east of Richmond, but west of that, the sky was clear as could be (according to dopplar radar, at least).
So, around 11am, the three of us get back in the car and attempt to make the trek to Glouster, then home. Town Pt Rd hadn't been cleared. 164 hadn't been cleared. I-664 hadn't been cleared. (But hey, at least it had a tunnel which was wet without being icy!) I-64 hadn't been cleared, and that's when traffic got thick enough to be problematic. It was basically moving at 30 or so as we got onto I-64, and slowed down to beltway rush hour speeds by the time we got to Jefferson Labs. A trip that would've normally taken 60 minutes ended up taking 150 minutes or so. Thus, it was around 2pm that we left Glouster through West Point (a spot I remember because it was usually the drop-off point for me when I'd get a ride from Mandy when she went to visit her mother in King & Queen Co.). My blood sugar was low, since I hadn't eaten breakfast, and I was tired from being woken up the night before, but the line of snow really did end right at Glouster (it was rather funny to go from 4"-6" snow to light dusting to nothing in the stretch of about a mile), so once we got back onto the interstate, it was clear sailing. Traffic back was thicker, which slowed us down a little. We stopped in Richmond for Quizno's, which has the distinction of being about the only "fast" food I'll touch these days. (I've never really thought of sub shops as fast food; they cheat on food prep in a different and healthier way than other fast food does in my mind.) I really wanted Zero's, but since we left Tidewater around 11, and since the phone books for Southside don't include Hampton/Newport News, I really didn't have a good mix of Zero's I knew the location of that would be open when I passed them.
Then we drove into the sun for a little while, but made good time once we got outside of Richmond (traffic let up a bit after the I-95 interchange; normally I'd take the 295-loop around Richmond, but, as noted, I needed food), and were home by 6-something.
I think, based on this weekend, that I like overnight weekend trips more when I have a three-day weekend. Instead of coming home from it and feeling that I didn't really have a weekend, I take a Friday off work, *then* go do a weekend elsewhere.
Because I was putting in a full day Thursday working on my Project of *DOOM*, I was still in the office (as was Andy; it was just the two of us) when the Fed Ex guy arrived. Apparently, he was carrying our work Christmas Presents. Last year, these were the smallest possible boxes of Legos from Andy (I got the Obi-Wan battling Assassin Droids one). This year, there was a bit of a step up; corporate sent us all two $100 American Express gift cards.
These things appear to rate only slightly below cash and way above gift certificates in my "generic Christmas gift" category. They may actually beat out cash for me specifically if it turns out that:
a) They can be used just like credit cards online; and
b) There are online vendors who take American Express.
At that point, I can suddenly buy other people Holiday presents much easier than I normally could. (Yes, I know I could, and probably should, own a credit card. The reasons I don't are mostly stubborn and/or moral ones.)
On Christmas day, vtkatt drove her, Truman, and me to my mothers house in Chesapeake. (She moved there from Portsmouth about 18 months ago, if I never told you that before. It's a nifty house, because it looks like it was built in three sections by committee, and used to have an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the back yard.) We left around 2pm, and vtkatt proceeded to keep her speedometer between 85 and 95 for the vast majority of the trip (I think the speedometer may be about 5 miles high at that point, though). Traffic on Christmas day is really quite lovely; there are enough people on the road that you get the pleasant feeling of passing them, but not nearly enough to ever slow you down, and there isn't a cop to be found anywhere. (I saw a total of one on the trip down, and that wasn't until we got off onto 164 right near the house; he was sitting with his lights flashing, though there wasn't anyone nearby, so I don't know what was going on.) The result of the lack of traffic and copious use of speed was that despite three stops, including a "let's have vtkat get lost trying to find her sister in an area she should remember well" trip to the Coleman bridge, we got to my house in right around 5 hours, I believe. (I think, if we'd cut it to a single stop, we could've had it done in 4 hours easy.)
Christmas night went relatively painlessly, thankfully; the only real negative was that my grandfather probably talked vtkatt's ear off, as he is wont to do when anyone gets within visual contact.
Truman woke me up several times over the course of the night, once to go to the bathroom, the rest just moving around. Apparently, he also went wandering without waking me up, as both my mother and my sister reported visits from him, though he was apparently nice enough to leave when they told him to. He didn't chew anything up while he was in the house, though, and the only mess he made was a little vomit that I suspect was due to giving him ham, and that cleaned up better than I expected it to (I don't think it left a stain). He was a bit nervous on the trip down, really refusing to lay down for more than a couple of minutes at a time, which was odd compared to vtkatt's description of how he acted when they and Tiffany went to Ohio.
Post-Christmas morning, I woke up to a rather surprising sight: snow. No, let me correct myself: more friggin' snow on the ground than I'd seen in Portsmouth in my last 4-6 years there. And more falling. Big-honkin' snowflakes, too. This was *Blacksburgian* snow, and it was falling in *Tidewater*. This was somewhat discongruent to me.
But Truman loved it. Part of it was hyperactivity, I suspect, but when he was let out that morning, he started running in circles and digging in the snow and would chase snowballs and everything. I had to let him out on several occassions not to relieve himself, but just to go play.
Then came the attempted trip back. vtkatt was going to go to Glouster to visit some of her family for the morning; she returned several minutes after she left, two fishtails later, learning a lesson us locals knew well: one of the downsides to never getting snow in an area is that you generally don't have snowplows and the few you do have you don't get onto the roads nearly fast enough.
The part that really amused me, though, was that the storm was coming up the coast... this was a Nor'easter winter storm, which I don't think I've ever heard of before. (I mean, really, how the hell do you get cold air coming up from Florida?) Due to its positioning, it was dropping on I-95 in North Carolina, and it was dropping on I64- east of Richmond, but west of that, the sky was clear as could be (according to dopplar radar, at least).
So, around 11am, the three of us get back in the car and attempt to make the trek to Glouster, then home. Town Pt Rd hadn't been cleared. 164 hadn't been cleared. I-664 hadn't been cleared. (But hey, at least it had a tunnel which was wet without being icy!) I-64 hadn't been cleared, and that's when traffic got thick enough to be problematic. It was basically moving at 30 or so as we got onto I-64, and slowed down to beltway rush hour speeds by the time we got to Jefferson Labs. A trip that would've normally taken 60 minutes ended up taking 150 minutes or so. Thus, it was around 2pm that we left Glouster through West Point (a spot I remember because it was usually the drop-off point for me when I'd get a ride from Mandy when she went to visit her mother in King & Queen Co.). My blood sugar was low, since I hadn't eaten breakfast, and I was tired from being woken up the night before, but the line of snow really did end right at Glouster (it was rather funny to go from 4"-6" snow to light dusting to nothing in the stretch of about a mile), so once we got back onto the interstate, it was clear sailing. Traffic back was thicker, which slowed us down a little. We stopped in Richmond for Quizno's, which has the distinction of being about the only "fast" food I'll touch these days. (I've never really thought of sub shops as fast food; they cheat on food prep in a different and healthier way than other fast food does in my mind.) I really wanted Zero's, but since we left Tidewater around 11, and since the phone books for Southside don't include Hampton/Newport News, I really didn't have a good mix of Zero's I knew the location of that would be open when I passed them.
Then we drove into the sun for a little while, but made good time once we got outside of Richmond (traffic let up a bit after the I-95 interchange; normally I'd take the 295-loop around Richmond, but, as noted, I needed food), and were home by 6-something.
I think, based on this weekend, that I like overnight weekend trips more when I have a three-day weekend. Instead of coming home from it and feeling that I didn't really have a weekend, I take a Friday off work, *then* go do a weekend elsewhere.