I survived the Holiday!

I was much more unplugged from the Internet than usual over the Thanksgiving holidays, though probably not as much as I should have been. Anyway, the family survived the usual return to the ancestral homelands for the Thanksgiving gathering.
As I reported last time, my mom came in during the previous week to help take care of the Tornado. That Sunday, she and the Princess returned to San Antonio so my parents could have her to themselves for a couple of days. It seems kids these days get the whole week off for Thanksgiving, but nobody told all our employers, so Momma and I still had work to do. As usual, work was difficult, although less so since many people were out.
We headed into San Antonio ourselves late Wednesday night. It was a pleasant and quick drive as traffic was light and fast moving, and the Tornado fell asleep about 20 minutes into the trip.
We slept in late Thanksgiving day and enjoyed a non Turkey lunch with my family. These days, it is just my parents and my aunt who are with us. Since my grandmother passed away and since all my generation of the family have scattered to the far corners of Texas, Thanksgiving is no longer the big family gathering that it used to be, but it is still a good time. In the afternoon, we rested, watched football, and planned our traditional Black Friday assault.
While we weren't in the market this year for the ubiquitous Flat Panel TV deals, we still found plenty of things to go after. For the first time, the wife and I split up (she took my mom with her). I lined up at Best Buy around 3:45 for a 5am opening to score a 22" widescreen LCD monitor. When the doors opened, I was able to easily get to the monitors, pick up a few other things, and actually was out of the store by 5:20 due to a lucky find of a register with a short line. I'm actually writing this post looking at my new monitor is all its 1680x1050 resolution magnificence.
My next assignment was Toys R Us. However, by the time I got there, the big item we were looking for was already sold out and the line to checkout wrapped all the way around the store to the front door. So, I bailed on that one. Your loss, Toys R Us.
Meanwhile, the women folk hit Wal-mart, Target, KB Toys, and even Walgreens. They came back to the house with a full minivan of stuff. We were both back at my parents by 8am and somehow managed to get all our Christmas shopping done. That is a first, I think.
After that, we kicked the kids and my parents out of the house so that we could get everything wrapped up in order to take it back home without the kids seeing what they were getting. We also enjoyed the quite surprising victory of A&M over UT that put the finishing touch of taking UT from defending national champs down to Big 12 also ran. After the way this season has gone, I'm still not sure I believe that we won that game.
Saturday was for recovering, packing, and traveling. The tornado had been doing extremely poorly during the nights, so we were not getting much sleep. We ended up napping on Saturday afternoon. The wife and I managed to get away to dinner by ourselves before making the final packup. We planned another late evening run in hopes that the kiddos would sleep. However, this time the boy would have none of it and decided to scream most of the way. We had to make a couple of stops to settle him down and he finally gave up about an hour away from the house. It was another rough night.
Sunday brought unloading, unpacking, and the start of holiday decorating. We've decided that we just can't have a real tree in the house. As much as we like them, they just make everyone in the house sick throughout December. The wife found a used artificial tree at the church rummage sale for $9. I put it together on Sunday and it turned out pretty well. I didn't get a chance to put up the outside lights yet, but I did buy some more today. So, perhaps I'll get around to it tomrrow.
And, my dad has turned into the shutterbug since he got himself a digital camera earlier this year. You can checkout his handiwork from the long weekend here.