stripethree

Monkey, Llama and their Christmas gift from my parents. Also the first video I shot, edited and threw to YouTube completely from the iPhone.

The holiday’s have come and gone and I have to say I’m kind of glad they are done. The last month and a half has been a blur and I knew these holidays wouldn’t be the same as I wouldn’t be spending them in Maryland with family. I talked to family back home on Christmas Eve and to my parents on Christmas Day and I certainly missed being there in person. On the other hand, it probably won’t be the last time it happens so, might as well learn to deal with it. Summer and I still did our own Christmas which was fun, and we hung out with a friends and their family on Christmas Day. For New Years one of the VW guys hosted a party at his house which was excellent.

So, a year ago I laid down some goals of the financial variety. For the most part I accomplished them: the car got paid off, the student loans got paid off, and I resisted the expensive temptation of track weekends. Sounds like I nailed them all, but, really, I didn’t get as far as reducing my overall debt as I would have liked mainly because I pickied up a second car and upped the ante with autocross.

I really don’t know what expectations I have for the new year, and I’m really not interested in forming any right now. Resolutions be damned, just because the month, day, and last number of the year change, does that really change much else? Who knows.

This time last week was probably about the time that Summer and I were trying to figure out how to get to Omaha. See, we got to Dallas after waking up at 3:30am to catch a flight out of Tucson only to be greeted by the cancellation of our connecting flight to Omaha. The first person we talked to wasn’t all that helpful and we walked away on standby for a 3:30pm-ish flight and booked on a 9:40pm flight. Speaking with another American Airlines person, we found that there was literally zero chance we’d get on the earlier flight. There was enough room for our bags, but not us. We ended up getting on a plane to Chicago (where it was snowing as we landed) and then running through O’Hare to make the connecting flight to Omaha. We got there and our bags did to, just an hour and half later and mine missing a wheel. Then off to Summer’s parent’s house south of Lincoln.

I always through Summer was exaggerating when she said their nearest neighbor was a mile away. She wasn’t, as her parents live on farm land that has been in her family for over 100 years. Her Dad still works the land and because of weather the last few months, he was still out there on a daily basis the first few days after we arrived. Summer, being the Maid of Honor in the wedding we were going to, had to tend to all sorts of things before the wedding, so much of the first two days I hung out with her Mom, her older sister Betsy (both of whom I met when they visited Tucson), and her younger sister Melanie who is currently at UNL. We had lunch, they showed me around Lincoln, we did some stuff around the house to prepare for the Thanksgiving and Christmas we were going to hold, and we traded stories about our families and the very different parts of the country we were from.

Friday night was the rehearsal dinner and I got to meet some of Summer’s old friends including the bride and groom. Saturday was the wedding and reception, the third we have been to in three months, and we stayed in downtown Lincoln overnight. Sunday I met some more of Summer’s family as we did an early Thanksgiving followed by an early Christmas. It was very nice, and actually very new to me, since I’m usually on the other side of things in this respect. I’ve brought guests to my family’s Thanksgiving and Christmas before, but never the other way around until this trip. Her family was very generous and it was a lot of fun, and a LOT of food. We spent a good deal of the night playing bowling on the Nintendo Wii Summer’s parents got us for Christmas.

On Monday, our last full day on the trip, I got a good tour of the Severin farm. Her Dad showed us the last Volkswagen Rabbit he has right now as well as his ’78 Cadillac Eldorado, which is absolutely huge, sitting in a barn. He talked about how old some of the equipment and what he still uses – two tractors pushing 50 years old and still running! I also got to see somethings from Summer’s childhood like the horse tank they used to use as a swimming pool and the ‘Cabin Cruiser’, which was basically a pickup truck bed turned into a homemade RV that can sleep 5. They used to take road trips as a family and tow it behind the Cadillac, I wish I had a picture of that!

After the farm tour we went into Lincoln and Summer showed me around to the places she’d talked about that she worked at or spent a lot of time at. We strolled through the UNL campus and over to the football stadium where the flag line and band would march into games. We went by her old job at Paint Yourself Silly and got ice cream at Avana Cone.

I forgot to mention the food on this trip and it was a pretty important part, Summer was insistent on getting me to Runza, Valentino’s Pizza, and Amigo’s Tacos as well as the Indian Oven on this trip, and we manged to take care of all of them. We went to lunch on campus with her sisters on Monday and had dinner with friends Monday night and Tuesday afternoon in Omaha before we headed back to the desert.

It was a fun trip and we’ll probably be back next year after a wedding in Manhattan, Kansas which is only a few hours drive away. I’d never seen anything close to that part of the country so it was a bit of a surprise for me.