Christmas Birthday

Well, this weekend we had our last Christmas and first Kaylee birthday celebration, and yes I realize it is mid-January now. ;) Friday was a pretty good day, so we packed up a plane and headed to MO for a Christmas/birthday celebration with Kaylee's Grandma & Grandpa Shaffer. When we left here, it was around zero degrees, and it wasn't much better down there. But Saturday arrived with what felt like a heat wave of about 44 degrees, and that I can handle! The boys went and did man shopping, and we girls went to a couple of stores so Kaylee could spend her birthday money. A lot of the stores had some serious deals going on-I picked up a couple of things myself. Gayle's daughter Casey and Casey's husband of 3 months Antonio joined us for dinner; that's so strange to me that Casey is married-I still think of her as a pre-teen, and she's married, her younger brother is 18, and it just seems like the last time I saw them they were...little. Anyway. We came home today, made it back by 4:30, got all our stuff unpacked, and are getting ready for tomorrow. Kaylee has school even though it is Martin Luther King Jr day, because they are making up for all the delays and snow days they have already had this year.

Speaking of delays and snow days--global warming sure needs to kick it up a notch here. I'm tired of being well below freezing, thank you, and it's only January. This is going to be one long, cold winter.

Kokomo had reported their braking action "poor" on their surfaces, but I found the runway and taxiway to be just fine. However, getting the airplane back into the hangar was a whole other matter. The ramp was covered in snow and ice-enough so that we could push the plane around by one wing and just slide almost 3 tons worth of airplane easily. Trying to get the plane hooked up to the tug just was not working-the tires would spin and we couldn't get enough traction on it to get it to pick up the nosewheel even with one of us standing on the end of it. I don't know how long it took us before we succeeded, but it was long enough that we then huddled in the heated bathroom as a family for a few minutes to thaw out afterwards. ;)

When we got home today, I turned on my computer only to find that my internet was down. After a bit of rebooting fun, my internet was still down, and that was a little more concerning. A call to Comcast was rewarded with the pre-recorded message that they were experiencing outages in my area and that they had technicians working on it and that reporting this outage to them would be pointless so just hang up and keep your pants on. (Paraphrased, naturally) ;) But I had been offline all weekend-I wasn't in the mood to be patient. As you can see, their technicians read my mind, and we are back up and running...

It's good to be home-the house is clean, I have hot chocolate, things are put up and away, and I'm sleepy. Ahhhh