I woke up early this morning at six thirty. That was ridiculously early for being home alone. I ended up just getting up and getting a jump on the day since I was awake. I worked from home for an hour or two and then headed into the office.
Since it is Christmas Eve there was nothing going on at work. I had maybe one package installation all day. The office was pretty empty too.
A little after noon Dan and I went out to do some last minute alcohol shopping, mostly because he needed rum for eggnog, and we discovered that, it would appear, that nearly all liquor stores in the region of the city that we normally go to are going out of business or something and it was impossible to buy anything. There were hordes of people driving around from one “everything must go” sale to another trying to find anything that they could, which was incredibly little. We hit three or four stores before Dan was able to find a single bottle of rum. A weird problem to have in the fourth largest metro area in the while in the main liquor buying area of the city (Dallas is partially dry so only certain streets and areas can sell alcohol – a really backwards and antiquated zoning practice.)
We hit Burger King for a quick lunch and went back to the office. The office was totally empty when we got there and no one needed us for anything. It was so early that I decided to change my plans and instead of waiting until tomorrow morning to drive down to Houston I figured that it would make more sense to run home, pack up and get on the road right away and get down to see the family. I really miss my girls.
So I ran home, packed up, got the house ready and ran out the door to get on the road. It was a little after three when I headed out to take the Spark on what I believe is its first trip down to Houston.
I was very surprised to discover that there really was no traffic at all on the way down. It made for a quick drive, maybe my fastest ever. Only a little more than four hours for the entire drive. Both Dallas and Houston were traffic free as I crossed the metro areas. I made one pitstop to refuel along the way and that was it. It was a quick in and out there, very efficient being on my own. I was anxious to get down and see my girls.
So it was just after eight when I arrived. I was exhausted but very glad that I am down in Houston and don’t have to get up early and do that drive tomorrow. That worked out pretty well. I got to see Liesl and Luciana tonight, both of whom were very glad to see me. I hung with both of them until they went to bed. Liesl loves getting to sleep on her cot in Madeline’s room. I think that it makes her feel like one of the big kids. Garrett was already asleep when I arrived.
We had to wait on a UPS delivery until around eight tonight and one of the packages was lost. There were so many packages that we didn’t figure out that one was missing until really late, though, so there is no way to discuss it with them until the day after tomorrow. The volume of Christmas logistics that needs to be handled here are quite staggering.
Netflix was down tonight because of an outage with Amazon’s network. We were hoping to watch our annual White Christmas tonight but Netflix is down. And, of course, it appears that Hulu is down now too – most likely due to the traffic of people heading over there because of Netflix not being available. It was a few hours. I was following the outage on Twitter. The whole world was freaking out as no one could watch anything tonight.
After the kids all went to sleep Netflix came up and we watched White Christmas and drank a bottle of wine that I brought down from the big sales up in Dallas. So we managed to maintain our holiday tradition but I was sad that Liesl went to bed before we watched it. This would have been her first year watching it with us and I was looking forward to that. I really hope that she is able to watch it with us next year.
It is weird not celebrating Christmas tonight or tomorrow. All through my younger years we celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve and then once Dominica and I were married we celebrated Christmas day itself with the Tocco clan. Traveling on Christmas Even and not celebrating the holiday at all until the day after Christmas is really disorienting, and it means that I will have to work while we celebrate Christmas. That’s not a big deal, I just have to remember what day it actually is rather than what day we are treating it as.