2012 Bites the Dust

Another Christmas down, another new year born.

The New Year's Eve celebration in our house was low key. In fact, if you hadn't had a calendar on you, you might have mistaken it for a standard Monday night. Except, I did go to bed much later than on a regular Monday. I only made it to 11pm. I think my excuse is pretty good, though. We had driven 14-1/2 hours. Those winter time roadies are tough on the car.

It's worth it, though. Spending the holidays in Utah is always nice. We split the time between Chelsea's parents and my parents. I really appreciate that neither family piles on a bunch of pressure to spend time there. It makes it much nicer when we do get the chance to be there.

It was also fun because Chelsea's sister was able to be around along with the nieces.

On Christmas morning we went to visit my Grandpa Cornwall. I hadn't seen him in a while, nor been over to his house. Places like Grandpa's house are always interesting to me, no matter how much they change, they're still that same place. I took some time while I was there to take some pictures around the house. I remember playing in the crawlspace, and the big dollhouse that used to live at the bottom of the stairs. It's also clear to me now that my affinity for old books (particularly old engineering books) is surely genetic.

Through the magic of the interwebs we were able to have a teleconference present-opening-session with the rest of our family that wasn't around this year. Byron and his family were at their home and the rest of us were at my parent's house. It was nice. It's funny to see how many presents this year were unwrapped in Amazon boxes.

On Christmas eve my family always puts a jigsaw puzzle together. Of course, a puzzle or two usually changes hands during the gift exchange also, so many times the ritual is completed repeatedly. This year someone (sorry, I forgot who) got Dad and set of eight (eh-igg-ht) puzzles. They varied in size from 100 pieces to 1000 pieces. Not surprising, the 100 piece puzzles were done in short order. Here was the Sunday before we left. We all descended on one of the 1000 piece puzzles. Good times.

But, as usual, it's good to be back home.......

For everyone.