And whee!

I'm up at a ridiculous hour, made to appear more ridiculous because I don't change my timezone on Blogger when I travel. For the record, it's just before 7:30 a.m. in St. Louis.

So after bunches of fretting, I made it here just fine. There was some running while at the Denver airport involved, and my levels of loathing for that airport continue to grow, but I got here. The glitch with getting a rental car was easy enough to deal with, AND it ended up meaning that Dad bought Megan and I lunch that day, so who's complaining? :)

Of course, it didn't feel much like Christmas until yesterday, as I had only received sporadic gifts to that point. Not that I was super worried about gifts for myself, but the sporadic receiving was accompanied by sporadic giving, which meant that I still had a box of presents in my suitcase. :) I know that several of my gifts were pretty well received, but the overstimulated children who had stacks of presents two or three times bigger than them didn't quite get to look at all of what they got. My cousin's sons, who had smaller piles, were pretty pleased though. :)

I also managed a pretty good haul for the fairly limited gift giving that we did among the adults in my family. More exciting is the fact that due to some initial miscommunication with that, Sarah had already picked out and bought what she wanted me to have. So I knew which gifts to pull in one gift exchange (Tin Man on DVD, a book about Serenity, and a video game), and I made a very last minute trade in the other gift exchange to end up with Rummikub, which looks very much like a game that I played with my Grandma Vogel as a kid. And who doesn't like more board games? :)

Today, after Christmas with my dad and then painting all of the bedrooms in my mom's house, I get to make my trek to Carbondale. Even though I was there only 2 months ago, I'm still super glad to be heading down there again. Because though I've been wishing I was back in Seattle already, especially amidst the chaos of the childrens' present opening yesterday, it'll be nice to spend some time just relaxing with my friends at my other home.