Eight??  It’s eight freaking degrees out?  Shouldn’t there be a zero after that?  And shouldn’t all that white stuff out there be sand?  Eeeesh.  Grim.  I had a heck of a time getting into work yesterday, even with the city’s new snow removal plan.  (Was that a cruel joke Funk?  The streets looked just the same as ever, which is to say “untouched.”)  My first snag hit when I remembered we’d stopped our mail while on vacation, and therefore I had no January bus pass.  Not a huge issue, but we are literally so broke I didn’t have the $3.00 it takes to get downtown and back on the Metro.  That’s broke.  We scavenged around the couch cushions and came up with an ample number of quarters though.  I caught my 6:30 ride and was cruising merrily along, but didn’t get too far and the bus got stuck.  Hmmm, didn’t see that one coming.  I mean he got stuck good too.  Sideways in the road, up in some poor guy’s yard, the whole nine yards.  Several other riders seemed a bit put out, but I thought it was rather entertaining.  Kind of like a carnival ride.  He was banging off the curbs, fishtailing everywhere, and smoking the tires like he’d just won the Brickyard 400.  It was never really close though, there was no way he was getting up the hill.  Full fifty minutes later, he finally got backed up across Main street to a spot where he could get started, and just cut that part of the route out.  We made it about three more miles and he gets stuck again.  Unfortunately I had my headphones in and didn’t hear what he said, because I bet it was worth hearing.  At any rate, he just shut off the bus and got out.  So, everybody else followed suit, and got on the next bus to come along.  All told, an hour and half ride to work.  Which is much better than an hour and a half ride home.  Today, I afforded myself the rare luxury of driving the car to work.  Not that I was worried about the bus getting stuck again, but our two weeks of mail didn’t show up yesterday and I still ain’t got three bucks.  Anybody got a quarter?

Wow, I am so glad to be back home in KC.  This nice little snow-fall provides me a timely reminder of how lucky I am to live in a climate that has these changes of season, so I don’t have to look out the window and see the same ol’ 79 and sunny weather every single day.  Yes indeedy.  That’s exactly what I was thinking as I was stuck on the bus in a snow-drift for an hour and a half this morning.  Indeedy.

I do apologize for the lengthy website outage, that was quite unintentional.  As a matter of fact, I had planned to keep a running update of our island time while we were gone.  Alas, in my zeal to save an extra 48 cents on the light bill while we were gone, I apparently flipped one switch too many on the way out the door.  Oops.  That leaves me with an entire two weeks of updates to type in here, so here goes.  Day 1:  Sat on the beach and did some snorkeling.  Grilled some fresh fish for dinner.  Day 2:  Sat on a different beach and did some snorkeling.  Grilled another kind of fish for dinner.  Day 3:  Sat on another….  OK you get the idea.  With the exception of one rain-out day, one off-shore snorkel trip, and one dinner cruise, that pattern effectively describes every day of our two-week trip.  We did take a few (literally, “a few”) pictures, which have been posted already, before I mess around and never get it done like after our Colorado trip.  I also have a ton of videos taken with our super-duper new GoPro camera, some of which are rather cool, which I haven’t quite decided what to do with yet.  I’m not so sure this site would handle them, maybe I’ll just link to utube or something.

So anyway, the vacation is over and it’s back to the routine.  My New Years resolution is to update this page a bit more regularly (although I really can’t imagine with what) so we’ll see how that works out.  I guess this week could feasibly be spent covering some of the highlights and lowlights of our trip…  After that things might get dicey.

I hope everyone has a merry Christmas. Updates may be a bit sporadic over the next few weeks as we enjoy ours. So I will throw in “Happy New Year” while I’m at it too.

Ahhhh, Christmas week is upon us.  Already.  We’ve managed our share of celebrating too.  Heck, I’d go so far as to say I am looking forward to Christmas this year.  I’ve definitely been to more holiday parties than usual.  For instance, Thursday night we headed down to the Brooksider for the annual Christmas Caroling event.  Several of the “regular patrons” there go out singing every year, always starting (and ending) the event at the Brooksider.  They hit a packed house too this year for whatever reason, there wasn’t an empty table in the place.

Friday evening was the “official” annual Christmas party at the Brooksider, so we headed down there again.  As usual for this party, it was over-crowded, loud, and nearly annoying.  Free food will do that I guess.  Luckily for me they fired up the heaters on the back porch, so me and a few other guys retreated out there for the evening.

Saturday was, for the most part, spent on the couch watching basketball.  Several entertaining games on, even if they didn’t all come out quite as I wanted.  Around 5:00, we wandered down to the Brooksider of all places.  Our friend Brooke was in town, so she and several friends met up with us down there.  We stayed for quite a while too, later than usual for us old folks. After a while she and her merry band of youngsters headed out on the town.  We, on the other hand, did not.

Sunday we expanded our horizons a bit.  No trips to the Brooksider, whew.  Instead, we went to O’Dowds and watched the Chiefs game.  You really can’t beat the ol’ Brooksider for watching TV, but O’Dowds was certainly a serviceable alternative, and much less crowded.  There was another contributing factor too:  They are in the KC Hopps group of restaurants, and they were running a special Christmas deal where we got $10 off our meal and 100 bonus “points.”  The points are something of a running joke with us.  We like to accumulate them, and if they come out with a deal like that where you get extra points we will show up every time.  But, we never actually use them, just keep building them up.  Who knows, some day we may cash them in and throw a party or something.  At any rate, we had a quite tasty lunch and loaded up our card with yet more points!

Here are some swell gift ideas if you were wondering what to get me, which I am sure is the case.

Tattoo Arm Warmers.  These things are awesome.  Munkirs would be so jealous if I rode in these he wouldn’t know what to do.  I’m hoping they come out with a matching skull cap too, but I haven’t found it yet.  Oh yeah, these things are “me.”  Note that they are, in fact, “inspired by real tattoos.”

New Computer Combo.  I never really had any interest in a gaming computer until I saw this sucker.  The thing that really makes it sweet is that it comes with a set of dog tags and a tee-shirt, which I assume you are required to wear while playing games on it.  Naturally you’d probably want to cut the sleeves off immediately.  The deal-breaker is the shirt only comes in a large;  Bummer.