1) The last, delayed leg of my trip home left DFW one hour late. We endured what I thought a rather turbulent flight, and it made me remember a VERY turbulent flight many years ago on which, by happy chance, my late cousin Susan was sitting next to me. While I was calling on the Almighty to preserve us every moment, she was calmly folding origami paper into pieces to make an origami globe.
2) Younger Nephew Who Must Not Be Tagged and his wife collected me at the airport and drove me home. He has scrawled my name on his smartphone to hold up as a sign, which gave me a big laugh.
3) Mother was sound asleep when I let myself into the house, and no wonder.
4) On rising the next morning I became aware of three things almost simultaneously: a) I had an urgent need to get to the bathroom, b) Mother was awake and about and I didn't want my first sight of her to be cut short by a dash to the bathroom, and c) the sensation of a hot vibrating baseball being injected into my right calf - CHARLEY HORSE!
5) Mercury retrograde provided a frustrating morning for the entire household. For me, complete absence of internet service for which there was no remedy before Younger Nephew Who Must Not Be Tagged could get off work late in the afternoon. All the more unfortunate since I had to run a committee teleconference for work at noon - and as it happened, many things were sent since I left the office Monday that I couldn't access. At least the telecon went well.
5a) For Mother, it was getting the runaround between being asked to provide a proxy for some sort of meeting, but having to get a PIN to do so, and then being provided a PIN that wasn't associated with her name or something. Plus that, the housekeepers fiddled with the thermostat in such a way that Mother couldn't correct it and now feels too cold.
6) Younger Nephew Who Must Not Be Tagged did come over, and eventually diagnosed the need for a new router.
7) I then took the family out to dinner at Big Daddy's, the Doyle's of Holly Hill. Two attempts to order a manhattan led me to go behind the bar to discover that they had one bottle of Jack. So I had Jack on shaved ice, a sort of whiskey Slurpee.
8) After dinner I was decorating the Christmas tree when one of the neighbors stopped in, freshly returned from a trip to New York, to give mother a bucket of cookies from the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. Sounds like they had a wonderful trip, and I am so much looking forward to going next month!
9) Finding old ornaments so often brings back happy memories. I'm sure it's the same way for you.