Monday: when I woke up, I was dismayed to see that it was already after 6:30 AM. I logged straight into work, but all my extra time was eaten up with HQ groups, so I didn't get through as many groups as I wanted before the end of the day. Julie works from home this week. On lunch, I tried to catch the Grinding Gear guys live whenever possible, as they tend to pull their live videos and replace them with edited streams quickly, which I find a little disorienting; today's was an end-of-year awards ceremony for the stuff they enjoyed in 2025. (The big winner was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 again, but at least Blue Prince got some recognition.) After my shift, I got changed for Stogie Joe's, but I was around ten minutes earlier than we would usually leave. We might have been better off leaving when I was ready, though, because the restaurant was bursting at the seams with people waiting for a table. Despite the crowds, we did manage to get seated pretty quickly in the middle of a row of three tables, and I had a sloppy stromboli. It felt like we had a good handle on the questions this week, but the last week of Christmas music once again mystified most of the teams playing. We ended up in second place. Back home, I only stayed up long enough to finish my latest career attempt with Tiaki Shuttle before I went to sleep.
Sunday: a typical chat support workday, after which we finished the leftovers. Decided to do our own things, since we'll be leaving out-of-town soon. I decided I'd been wasting to much time on unnecessary prep for the Ratt's Revenge challenge in World of Warcraft, so I ended my evening by playing through the first five orb challenges.
Friday: today marked our last day in Colorado. After we got everything packed up in the basement bedroom where we'd been sleeping, Julie and I went upstairs to drop off our linens and enjoy a brunch of a pair of blueberry muffins. I worked on a few object descriptions in an interactive fiction project, but eventually my parents returned from their shopping trip, just in time to round up almost everybody for a trip to On The Border for lunch. I had an enormous burrito, and the girls distracted themselves with these "deconstructed Koosh ball" toys they'd received earlier.
After dinner, we took another trip to the Garden of the Gods so that the girls could clamber on some rocks. Listening to Mom and Dad try to coordinate with Kelly and Joe via text messages and phone calls was bad enough, but once they added the difficulty of using their phones' GPS apps, I started to find the drive a little unbearable. Our first meetup point didn't provide access to any appealing overlooks, but a hiker we encountered recommended we relocate to another stop a short drive further into the park, which was at least an improvement.
The original plan had been to continue on to the Colorado Springs Zoo to enjoy their holiday lights, but at lunch, Kelly determined that wasn't possible. She purchased tickets for a different light show at a nearbye raceway, instead. Once we'd all had our fill of rock formations, we tried to make our way there, though those coordination challenges from earlier returned with a vengeance. The show turned out to be a long stretch of road flanked by dioramas constructed out of Christmas lights. Every so often, a tunnel of lights would break up the experience into areas with different themes, like "tropical Christmas" or "dinosaur Christmas". We didn't wait around once we got to the end and proceeded directly back to Jim's house, as Julie and I needed to get the last of our luggage picked up so Mom and Dad could drop us off at the airport. I think we might have also had dinner before we left, but I can't remember what (if anything) I ate.
Our flight this time was a direct flight on Frontier from the Denver airport to Philadelphia. The line to drop off our checked bag was the biggest we saw all night, though it moved pretty quickly. Security was a breeze by comparison, and there wasn't much of a wait in the terminal, either. We got seated and began the final leg of our journey just after midnight....
Today's the day I finally uploaded the new version of my website to neocities! I had the day off from work, so I just wasted time on WOW (level 70!) and Hearthstone, and in the evening Julie and I finished watching Joseph Anderson's Life is Strange playthrough on youtube. We finished the leftover scalloped potatoes, and the cats were still tense about having Phil's cat Cliff staying over.
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Friday: we met up with Chuck and Jen at Buddy's Pizzeria before we went over to the Michigan Zoo for our vitamin Z. Lots of light displays!
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Sunday: home again from Christmas with the family in Oklahoma City. We enjoyed Frank's antsy snoozing on the ride back.
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Saturday: some kind of blizzard hit Wichita. Not sure if I was out of work or if work got canceled, but it seems like I was able to stay home.
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