My Christmas Vacation So Far...

I'll start with my drive home. Mapquest told me it would take 12 hours and 53 minutes. I knew I could beat that. You can always beat a mapquest time. But driving that long is going to require gas and food breaks which I raced through, the sole intent being to beat the Mapquest time. I was halfway home at 5 hours and 15 minutes and feeling good. I gave a little honk as I passed the NASCAR speedway in Bristol. The sun was shining and I was listening to "The Old Man and the Sea" on CD. Then my grandmother called and told me a winter storm was headed my way and when I got 50 miles from home I would hit it, so I should just stop and get a hotel. I'm so sure I was going to drive 750 miles then stop when I was just 50 miles from home. She demanded this actually with a tone that instilled enough fear in to me to consider not answering the phone if she called again. But then she would probably think I had been killed in the winter storm. You see, my grandmother is an alarmist. Once she called my mom at work and told her I had been kidnapped after she demanded the landlord let her into our apartment where no one was answering the door. Where was I? At school, where any good 12-year-old girl would be in the middle of the day.

As I drove along, the rain started and just as she had warned me it started getting bad about 50 miles from home. Because of the weather I had slowed down to 50 mph. I said to myself "only one more hour to go." Then at 40 miles from home, I had slowed down to 40mph. "One more hour to go," I thought. And at 30 miles as the weather increasingly worsened, yes I was going 30mph. I determined at this rate, I would never get home. Finally I did and as I ran down the hall to the restroom, I made my mom call my grandmother to tell her I had arrived because I was too scared to talk to her.

All in all, my trip ended up being 13 hours 45 minutes. Mapquest wins.

My 4-year-old brother hates buttons. I don't know where this came from but all his clothes must have only zippers, snaps and velcro. Sometimes we chase him with buttons to make his scream. When he sits down to breakfast at the dinner table he asks if there is a button in his orange juice. When you come up to him, he makes you open your hands to make sure there are no buttons in it. He likes to call them butts for short. He probably learned this from me and Carly. When he says "fish" it sounds like "B**ch." He grabs my cheeks and makes a fishy face and says "you are a B**ch" over and over while my mom and I laugh until we cry. We are crossing our fingers he doesn't do this in front of my grandmother who will think he has learned it from us.

I found out my mom is more irrational than I am. First of all, her heat is set on 85 degrees. She thinks Ruby Tuesday's is the greatest restaurant ever. "Think of how fun it is to eat here," she said. "They have those delicious black croutons." She also sleeps with her blinds partially open so she can see any terrorists who may try to break in. I guess there probably are a lot of terrorists in Jackson, TN breaking in bedroom windows.

My grandfather asked me how much I got paid and then went around telling everyone. My grandmother told me, again, that I need to watch Brigham City. You can only appreciate this by knowing that at least 3 times a month she tells me I need to watch it, relaying the same stories about how my cousin Ryan said it was the best movie he's ever seen, etc, etc...Seriously, I cannot believe how much she talks about Brigham City. So my mom and I were sitting at her kitchen table and she had her back turned to us and said, "I'll tell you what you should have gotten at Blockbuster." I quickly looked at my mom and whispered, "Brigham City." My grandmother immediately launched into her same stories about it and I was laughing so hard I was crying. She turned around and asked what was so funny. My mom was giving me a dirty look but I couldn't help myself. I just made up something about Ethan and moved on.

Last night we were playing Balderdash after Christmas dinner, a tradition at my uncle Cotton's house. This is always a treat because Cotton is hilarious and loves to talk in funny voices during the game. Last night he was doing his "Mississipppi Delta" accent. And really, what is funnier than people with Southern accents making fun of people with even thicker Southern accents. And my aunt Karen can't win for anything so she just resorts to making us laugh by writing things like: The definition for Shilleebeer "Shumting to drink when you are feeling a little bit Shillee."

So now I have written a really long blog that is probably one of those "You had to be there" things. Hope you all are enjoying the Holidays...