First and foremost, I waited with excitement and enthusiasm for my daughter to come home for the long holiday weekend. She had classes at William and Mary in Williamsburg through Tuesday night and then another test (the Praxis II-- part of the teaching certification process) late Wednesday morning. Fortunately her drive home wasn't hampered by too much traffic, and she arrived home around two pm.
Side note: In the time that it took her to drive one hundred fifteen miles home, it took Ray the same amount of time to drive home from work forty miles on Tuesday afternoon. Besides actually going to work everyday, this is the reason he needs to be done. The commute with all of the traffic is crazy in the Northern Virginia/DC area.
Ray and I had just finished decorating the outside of our house when Carly pulled up. We had four wonderful days with her before we had to kiss and hug her good bye for another four weeks. I will never get used to her going away.
Second to this, I slowly inspected my face daily to see which brown spots would disappear off my face (one large freckle at a time) as well as the patch of tiny red thread lines (early start of rosacea). How many days would it take and when would the mud splats go away completely. Today, they are for the most part gone.
Third, Thanksgiving dinner comes and goes. The holiday dinner has been at my sister's house for the last two years. She gutted the first floor of our parents 1970's house into a new and huge open concept kitchen, dining and living area. She now has the space to house many guests along with cooking many dishes in the double oven and on the stove. The prep began Wednesday night, the turkey went into the oven late Thursday morning, and the chaotic cooking frenzy that occurs, I am sure, in most houses across the country on Thanksgiving day began at two pm. By four pm, the turkey was gone. The plates were clean and clear.
Along with clearing my plate, the fourth thing that I always notice around the holidays is my waistline comes around again. My diet, or my change in eating habits, needs to come back. It simply goes away with any holiday. Why is it that this time of year everyone feels the need to bake everything now? Is it to keep us warm with the extra pounds? Is it to keep the house warm with the oven running more? In my house, we have stock piled all the ingredients we could possibly need to make all the different kinds of cookies we never make the rest of the year. Five pounds come, so five pounds need to go.
The fifth thing that came with the start of the holiday were the warm temperatures and they left just as quickly. We went from sixty degree temperatures on Thursday to forty degree temperatures with wind today. We left our coats in the car while shopping Black Friday sales and added gloves and scarves two days later.
Doorbuster items were six in line for things I could say that were put on the shelves in a frenzy by overworked store employees and that left the shelves in a frenzy on Black Friday. And we contributed to those items leaving the shelves quite a bit! Ray came home with $$$ from the attorneys at his office. They throw in any dollar amount they want. He is given this money to buy gifts for the Christmas Party raffle. The support staff (about 65 employees) get chances to win the items that he buys on Black Friday. He is "retiring" from this part of his job (somehow he ended up with this task years ago) after this year. We have been shopping Black Friday for a few years, because the money can go a lot farther with the huge sales. This year we stood on line waiting for tickets to buy two computers and a tv at Walmart. He also bought a computer from Staples (online though). Other things bought within hours of the Thanksgiving dishes being cleared were E-readers, tablets, gift certificates to the movies and to several different restaurants, along with one hundred dollars in lottery tickets. It was an easy shopping adventure this year since we could wait inside, there were bathrooms and all of the employees were cheerful and helpful. We did not experience mayhem, pushing or shoving. It is always so great to see the twenty plus gifts the staff will have a chance to win. I enviously wish I could keep them all. The money easily came, and it went just as fast.
I try not to think too much about where Ray and I will be for the holidays once we retire to Panama. Our conversations come and go with our daughter about her future. With every assignment that comes her way and with every test she has to successfully pass, she is trying to take one day at a time. Her hopes are to find a job and live in the Northeast part of the country. And when it comes to our thoughts on retiring to Panama now that Thanksgiving 2012 is behind us, Ray and I are continuing to get into the mindset that our move to Panama will be a little easy in the sense that we will be leaving our jobs, the commute, the traffic, and the little time we have to see and do things. But it won't be an easy go at all to leave our daughter, our families, our friends, our job that provides us security and our neighborhood that provides us with a sense of community. Panama--easy come. Leaving Carly, the safety net of our family--not so easy go.
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