I am going to have to put in a change of addy with the PO. My new home will be Dulles Airport.

I dragged my littlest brother up here for Thanksgiving. I bought him a ticket, a present for my mom’s birthday, and told him when to be at the airport! Surprise, he showed up! Go Big Bill! He was further coaxed with the promise of a Cadillac STS, seems Dad found a deal on a Mercedes convertible and gave Bill the Caddy. All he had to do was come and get it. Problem is time off, Bill is a world champion flare bartender. He’s going to train Friday’s guys in Morocco in January! So short story is Bill flew up on Thursday and left Friday afternoon. Saturday morning while tooling through Georgia he was awarded with a Peach State Driving Award, to the tune of $1200.00. With a courtesy trip to jail until the ticket was paid! Sorry Mike, but GA troopers suck. Bill was only going 108, or so the ticket says. Remember Caddy STS, goes Faaasssstttttt.

Back to Dulles, Friday morning Travis had to be back at Dulles, we were at the beach house in Royal Oak, this meant getting up at 4:30 to be at the airport by 7:00am to catch an 8:40 flight to NC to see his best friend, Josh. The drive was especially great because Aunt Bo went with me and when I complained that I needed new glasses she let me try hers! They were perfect! I can see again. I am going back to the eye Dr. and get new lenses to go in the pretty pink frames of my reading glasses. These will be my very first real glasses ever!

T had a great time in NC and Kevin finished the heating in Court House Square. I got my whiskey sours and had lots of turkey. Aunt Majda is coming to our house for Christmas, along with mom and dad and all my kiddos. All in all a very happy holiday! Until….

5:00 Monday morning I started calling Travis to check and make sure he was going to catch his 7:15 flight back home. He answered at 5:50 and said they were almost there. I thought it was a little close but not too worried. I asked Josh’s mom to take him somewhere to print the boarding pass the day before so she could drop him at the curb and he could check his bag and go on through security and she wouldn’t have to deal with all the airport stuff. Travis is a seasoned traveler, and knows how to maneuver airports like a pro. Well, I guess she thought they would get the boarding pass at the ticket counter and check the bag there. She also thought the flight was at 7:50, so he missed his flight. Thanksgiving air traffic, and he missed the flight. The nice people at Flyi.com got him on a 1:00pm flight and he hung out at the airport all day. No worries, he found a compilation of Lewis Carroll short stories and a coffee shop and pretended he was a traveling college student. He looks about 18 or so with his newly short hair and his height. So he gets in at 2 and we will be almost complete, Ben will be here soon!

Next post is Grandpa and the cell phone.

Bye

OK, I skipped the beach house and let everyone else do all the work, Bo painted and Kevin worked. Not really sure what Pete and Bunch did, but I’m sure it had to do with the sailboat. My mom was sick so my dad worked. Anyway, I didn’t go. I stayed home, I played taxi, Travis went to Macbeth.

Then I found out what I missed; possibly the last time I would get to be on the bay until next spring, the chance to browse the new shops that have moved into the mall while I cleverly pretended to paint (!), visiting with mom. All things I would have enjoyed immensely.

Instead, I stayed here. I pumped my own gas, yeah, I’m I real liberated girl. (Ha, there are no full serve pumps and my charming and buff hubby was gone.) Well, did you know that you ‘can’t’ talk on the phone AND pump gas at the same time? I didn’t. The station has music playing loudly for all the patrons to enjoy as we fuel up our gas guzzlers. For the record, I drive a 1999 Taurus I purchased in 2001 on eBay for 3400.00. Yeah Yeah Yeah, I hear it all the time from my friends, buy a new car, a fancy shiny car, leather seats, DVD player, maybe a H3? No way, I like my car. Plus its paid for and still gets 23 miles per gallon. Insurance costs me 125.oo every six months, full coverage. But I digress, this toothless little cashier girl comes stomping out and starts drawling at me in tones I couldn’t understand. Loud music and my husband on the cell phone. Anyway, she is yapping at me and I signal that I can’t hear, incase you don’t know I am pretty well hard of hearing from an unfortunate eardrum ‘accident’ when I was 23. My husband tells me she is saying not to talk on the phone, then he explains that a pump ‘blew up’ last week because of cell phone interference (?) Ok, never heard of that one. About the same time I am telling him I will call him back the little wretch turns the pump off on me! So I get the pump turned off on me, screwing up my meticulous mpg chart and forcing me to continue down .75 miles to Sheetz and finding the gas .03 cents cheaper! While I was ranting at the injustice of the situation and the rude manor of the toothless cashier my husband mentions that he is going to go into the kitchen to get a refill. Refill on what? Why what else, Aunt Bo’s Whiskey Sours. Why me?

Kevin took off for the shore this morning. He’s going to put in a new gas boiler in the old hardware store. He most likely won’t finish this weekend and have to finish up over Thanksgiving. I decided to stay back and get the house ready for the holidays. I really want to spend the weekend at the beach house, but Travis would have to come with me because Sarah isn’t home. And the dog, dragging all 120 lbs of Noah is so much fun, especially since he cries with excitement as soon as he sees the water when we cross the Bay Bridge. Then the whole time we are there he is in the water, and he doesn’t care if its cold. He tires himself out so badly that he has to be carried up the stairs to go to bed. And the beach house is over 100 years old and the stairs are quite steep. Plus the family will be gathering for Thanksgiving and if I went it would be more work than if I stayed here. But I could see my mom and my Aunt Bo. Guess I will decide this one as the day goes on…

The hardware store is so cool, its an old 3 story brick building in Easton, directly across from the Courthouse. About a million years ago it was my great-grandfathers hardware store. The first floor is a mall sort of thing, lots of little shops and restaurants, very cool browsing places. The second floor is really nothing, but it will probably be renovated into offices, it would be very convenient for law offices. The third floor is the treasure, all the junk that my packrat family can’t find a spot for in their homes is carted up in an amazing old freight elevator and stored on the magical 3rd floor. Mom also uses a cleared out room for her ‘clubhouse’ aka, Quilt Guild meetings. The quilters meet to finish off tops into quilts that they give to shelters and hospices. Very nice quilts and a good cause.

Ok, decide. I am exhausted, I don’t feel like driving 2 hours to get there. I took T and a whole bunch of his friends to the 12:01 opening of Harry Potter late Thursday, early Friday. Yes, on a school night. He did is homework as soon as he got home, had a snack and got into jammas and bed by 5:00. I woke him at 11:30 and we grabbed his friends and all went to see the show. Good thing I bought tickets Thursday afternoon! It was crowded! Anyway, we didn’t home until 3am. Kevin had to leave by 5:30 to pick up the boiler and T had to be up by 6am for school. I slept. Lazy me. Then I paid for my idleness with a nice raging sinus headache. It was worth it. The movie was fun and the 3 girls were silly. Did I forget to mention that it was 3 girls we took to the movie? There were boys there, but we only drove the girls. I forgot how much fun teenage girls are. All they do is giggle.