How I Spent My Holidays

Ahhhhhhhhh.

(That's a relaxed sigh, not a scream, just to be clear.)

A two-week trip to Florida is a lot of fun, but it's nice to be home again. Especially when going there and back again involves a 12-hour drive each way.

To begin our tale... actually, I'd better begin by relating the fact that Doug and I got engaged in October (on the Haunted Mansion ride at the Magic Kingdom, awww, etc. etc.). We're getting married next October, and because we're in NC and the wedding will be in Florida, planning has been a bit hectic. Thus our tale begins...

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I'd like to take a moment here to declare for the record that XM Radio is the greatest thing currently in existence on the planet. Doug's brother TJ gave us the basic receiver as a Christmas gift, and Doug's parents gave us the home system that goes with it -- basically a little boom box. I listened to it non-stop while working last week, and we stuck it in the back seat of the car on the drive home yesterday -- crystal-clear reception the whole way, and fantastic music selections on every channel we tried. I've heard songs I love that I've never heard on the radio before (Elton John's "Birds," for example) and new songs I'm unlikely to ever hear on the regular radio (Amy Rigby's "Are We Ever Gonna Have Sex Again"). All this with few commercials and DJs who seldom speak (and when they do, they say intelligent things about the music, rather than idiotic things about current events). I've already got a lengthy list of new artists I'm planning to look up, and it's only been a week. After we end the post-holiday freeze on frivolous spending, we're planning on getting the car adapter installed, so we can just pop the receiver out of the home system and stick it in the car when we want, and vice versa. Mmm.

Well, I think that's enough to make up for months of not updating.