December

I can't believe it's December already.  I seriously don't know how 2013 flew by as quickly as it did.  It feels like it should only be about half over, not almost completely over.  It feels like I barely got much of anything done this year.  Hell, I was off from work all last week and I got next to nothing accomplished.  I thought about that on the drive in to work this morning.  I decided I was finally ready to get to that list of things I was going to do.  

I guess I got a little bit done, though.  I pulled out the Christmas trees and set them up.  Last year I never got around to doing that at all.  I cleaned the house, though to be honest, I didn't do that until this past weekend.  I got my teeth cleaned.  Whoopie.  And I have to go back in two weeks because I have a chipped filling with a little decay behind it.  I'm not looking forward to that.  When my teeth are good, they're really good.  When there's a problem, it always seems like it's a bigger problem than anticipated.  I'm going into the new filling with that in mind so that if something bigger is wrong, it won't come as a shock.  I intended on writing here more, but that didn't come to be.

On Thanksgiving Day, Ken and I traveled to Connecticut to have dinner with my Aunt and her wife.  I've been reconnecting with her lately and it's nice.  She's only about five years older than I am, so growing up she was more like my cousin and not my aunt.  She's the black sheep of the family, too.  Lives within a few miles of everyone else, yet has no contact with anyone.  So this visit was nice.  Seeing the area of Connecticut where she lives was nice, too.  We would travel there usually twice a year when I was growing up.  I don't know the area well, but I have some very strong and very fond memories of it.

My aunt lives about 40 minutes from a casino, so Ken, still feeling lucky from the cruise we were on a few weeks ago, wanted to swing by there on the way home.  He had a game plan, too.  We'd get there, walk around to see what was what, then set our timers for one hour.  We'd each play $100 and whoever had the most money at the end of the hour won.  I played for a little bit, but didn't win anything.  While searching for a machine about ten minutes in, I passed Ken who had already turned his $100 into $200.  Naturally.  I didn't see him again until time was up and we met at the pre-arranged spot.  He managed to get as high as about $225, he said, but ended up with $0.  He lost it all.  Me, on the other hand, didn't.  I turned my $100 into $100.09!  That's right.  I took nine cents from the Native Americans.  So I was the winner, but my prize sucked.

The drive home from Connecticut was kind of fun.  There was no traffic on the drive to my aunt's, but there was quite a bit on the drive home.  Every time we'd pass an exit with shopping visible from the highway, the traffic would automatically thin out.  Looking at the different shopping plazas we could see from the road was kind of sickening to me.  Lines and lines of people waiting for the stores to open.  Seriously, it's worth all that to save $5 on a piece of shit that you don't need anyway?  I did go out on Friday afternoon, but to the grocery store.  I didn't know before this year, but Black Friday is the ultimate day to buy groceries.  There was almost no one in the store.  It was glorious.  On Sunday afternoon, Ken needed to hit the grocery store because he wanted to try to make chicken noodle soup from scratch, so we ventured out to get his ingredients.  On the way home we stopped at Toys R Us to pick up a couple presents for these little bastards I love more than life itself.  The store wasn't busy at all.  I was a little freaked by the thought of shopping in a toy store on Black Friday weekend, but it felt like everyone had shopped themselves out by Sunday afternoon.

I need to find just a little time to get back to my year by year playlists.  The posts aren't quite coming out the way I'd hoped, but I'm still having fun writing them.  I just started 1998 at work today.  I should really be done with the 90s, but I took a little extra time off in between years.  My goal is to find do at least one this week, though I've got a lot going on again.  ::fingers crossed::