December 17-28th, 2003
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December 17th - 20th - Indiana (Purdue) visiting Alecia
It was a looooooong drive. But it was a good 3 days with Alecia. She was still working through finals so I wasn't able to capture her whole attention. I got to meet even more of her friends and hang out for a little bit before heading back out of town for the rest of the Christmas Holiday. December 21st - 22nd - Kingsport, TN visiting Mom & Dad It was a decent visit home. Mom still brings out the worst in me. I still can't figure out why she has soooo much stuff. I swear that I'm going to go home some day soon and just nail the attic shut. That place is a death trap. She lives alone in a 3 bedroom house and she's got every room FULL of stuff. Plus the garage. It's sad. I know I harp on this every Holiday, but it is still messed up. Helping her clean up is like beating a dead horse. It doesn't help, and the horse is still dead. I did my list of chores between visits to see my dad. She and I were to travel together to visit Lauren & Mike & Makayla in Chatanooga. She got a head start on me because she darted across 4 lanes of traffic before I could get out. I get to the next intersection and she's hit someone. It was a low speed hit, but it was still not good. She did around $200-$300 of paint damage to the other car which doesn't count the amount she did to her own. After this, she stopped for tea at Pal's and then got a few cars ahead of me before hitting the Interstate. Turns out that this was not a good thing. I thought I'd do like 20 MPH over the limit to catch up with her. I tried that for a little while and didn't catch her so I bumped it to 40 MPH over the limit. I was doing over 110 in a 70 and I was still not catching up to her. Jesus! I called her on her cell phone to make sure that I hadn't passed her, but she was still miles ahead of me. I caught up to her just before Knoxville (40 minutes into the trip) and she was still hauling. She was ahead of me when she got pulled over by an officer because she was doing 70+ in a 45 MPH work zone. I think the officer was being really kind for letting her off with just a warning. That would have easily been a $300 ticket. By the time I got to Chatanooga, I was extremely stressed. I don't know how she is able to do it, but she really can find every nerve I have and put it on edge.
But I did get to visit my Dad a little while I was home. We played golf and
I did pretty damn good considering it was 38 degrees outside when we
teed off. I thought I was going to freeze my hands to my clubs, but I
turned out to do pretty decent. I also made it into town in time for
Dad & Carol's Holiday Finger Food Fest which was a good social
event. We celebrated Christmas that night.
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December 23nd - 25th - Chatanooga, TN visiting younger sister and 6 month old neice
I've never been able to visit my younger sister as often as I'd like. There have always been things that kept me from doing so. Right now she's a 7+ hour drive from Raleigh which is just hard to do for a weekend. The visit with her and Mike went very well. I was originally planning to leave on Xmas Eve, but I decided to take advantage of the visit and extend the stay an extra day. This gave me more opportunity to play games with her and Mike and his parents. They're awesome. Carol Hicks is a very mean cook. She can whip up some amazing meals in a very short amount of time. I had a good visit with them and I hope to go back sometime this summer. I know it will be a long time before they can come to visit me. I celebrated Christmas with them very briefly and then headed on to Atlanta. December 25th - 28th - Atlanta, GA visiting older sister and 5 year old neice I let my mom drive a day ahead of me. So she was already in Atlanta when I arrived on Christmas morning. We celebrated the American non-religious Christmas with the opening of gifts and no mention of Jesus, Christ, etc. I wonder if this is the reason that most children don't really associate the holidays with anything Holy. It doesn't really matter much to me, but I can just see the decline of religion in America happening first-hand. I'm not a deeply religious person, but I like reading spiritual texts... I highly recommend the Bhagavad Gita. I spent 4 days in Atlanta hanging out with Leslie, Robert and Danielle. We played around alot with Danielle's toys. One of her presents was Care Bear Dominoes, so we played dozens of games of that. She's actually pretty good at the game and can name all the bears. Robert, Leslie and I played You Don't Know Jack quite a bit when Danielle was watching TV. She got a Spongebob Squarepants DVD as well, so she spent several hours watching that over and over. On Sunday, Robert and I went to the Atlanta Falcon's game and made it through 3 quarters before Danielle got real anxious to leave. She still doesn't have the attention span to make it through a full football game yet. It was a good game to watch. After that I headed back to Raleigh.
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More photos! These are from Christmas 2003 as well.
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