Home of the Soul Cookie

One week down… And I’m still in it.

…you end up doing silly shtuff like this.

The Bet: That I won’t exercise for 1 hour, three times per week without fail for the next 3.5 months.

The Opponent: The blogmistress.

The Stakes: Besides pride? (She really doesn’t think I can do it…) A round of drinks when I go visit her in April.

The Outlook: Confidence level is high, but these next few weeks will be the keys to success - or failure.

Flew out to see my parents for xmas. It was busy and tiring:

Since my flight left at 7:40 Friday morning, I wanted to go to bed early Thursday evening. It didn’t happen, so I changed gears and stayes awake all night. Dropped my car off at SD airport long-term parking and took the shuttle to the terminal.

As we were pulling up to the Southwest terminal about 5:30am, I was assaulted with lines upon lines of people - it was a giant populous mass stretching out the doors and snaking its way all the way to the curb. A woman across from me asked the driver which line was for Southwest. “All of them,” he replied too nonchalantly.

Luckily, I don’t normally travel with checked baggage, so I got to go straight to the gate. Or as “straight to the gate” as possible with the security increases. To quote Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, “The guy with the rubber glove was surprisingly gentle.” I ended up having to go through four different checks/checkpoints to get on my plane:
1. Stopped before x-ray and required to show picture ID and a copy of my e-ticket.
2. X-Ray screening, now running at super-slow (they want you to think “super-attentive,” but I know better) speed.
3. Show photo ID and answer the questions at the counter to receive my boarding pass.
4. Show photo ID and present boarding pass to actually board plane.

They were also doing random carry-on searches at step 4. Plus there were the soldiers there with their semiautomatic rifles. That was… strange.

Flew from SD to Las Vegas (slept on the 1-hr flight), then out to Lubbock TX (no sleep - didn’t get to sleep until about midnight Friday; excepting the nap, I was up for 35 hours).

Christmas itself was good. Had a big dinner with a bunch of relatives at my [great-]aunt Vicki’s house. She once again outdid herself, preparing a big turkey-and-all-the-trimmings meal for 24 people! Got some good xmas swag (mostly tools - I’d mentioned to my mom that I really didn’t have any, and she relayed that information to the relatives), and had a surprise hit when, after an epiphany, gave my sister a breadmaker. (She actually squeal-yelped in glee.)

New Year’s was good. A couple of friends came out and spent a few days here. We spent the New Year’s changeover playing games with the goal of “staying awake until the sun came up.” None of us actually made it (I “broke” first about 4:30). Tried some more tequila (just a shot - had to share, after all). Ignored TV for the actual “big-ball-dropping-to-ring-in-the-new-year” stuff in favor of music, but turned the Sci-Fi Channel’s Twilight Zone marathon back on about 2am.

Spent New Year’s Day lazing about the house, sleeping in far too late (pretty much out of necessity), checking out the special features on my much-anticipated Moulin Rouge DVD, and puttering a little with housework.