Holiday Plans

Well, it looks like I'm going to be heading back to New Jersey for a big family-get-together thing over Thanksgiving. To be honest, I kinda have mixed feelings about this. I've been doing a lot of travelling lately, and, frankly, I'm starting to get a little tired of it. My idea of a perfect vacation right now, really, would be to take a week or two off of work, lock the front door, take the phone off the hook, and spend all my time catching up on my reading and writing and DVD-watching and housework and sleep and quality time with the cats. Plus, I think I've spend more time in the company of various family members in the last year or so than in the previous five years combined. So, nice as it is to see them all -- and it is nice -- I'd just as soon put off a return to the ancestral homeland for another year or two.

But I'm definitely going anyway, because my mother brought out the one argument that she knew was guaranteed to persuade me. "Your grandmother would really like you to be there," she said. Hell, I could never deny my Grandmom. She almost never asks for anything at all, but if she told me she wanted me to jump off a bridge, I'd probably do it. Also, my sister and the baby are going to be there, which is definitely a plus. It's always super-good to see them, even if it hasn't been very long since my last visit.

One annoying thing: I planned out an airline itinerary online last night, but didn't want to book the reservations until I'd had the chance to talk to my mother again about optimal flight times. When I went back today to buy the tickets, the price had gone up by $58. Yeesh!

One cool thing: Turns out that the flight I was looking at for the second leg of my trip from Albuquerque to Philadelphia was the exact same flight my sister's going to be on for the second leg of her trip from Portland to Philly. So I did go ahead and book it, despite the fifty-eight dollars, and was able to request a seat on the plane directly behind her. I can't help but think, though, that it would have been even cooler if we'd just turned up at the same gate in Cincinnati without either one of us knowing the other was going to be there...