Vacation All I Ever Wanted

It is Sunday night and I just got back from a very nice holiday gathering at casa Greg and Mary Jo (aka "Dr. Overboard & Prof. Evenkeel") in Glenview and wanted to thank them again for their hospitality. It was great to catch up with friends, enjoy a nice home-cooked meal and drink a few glasses of wine. Sorry I forgot the food, MJ :)

OK, so I am not even going to try to rationalize how little I have posted lately. Not going to try to blame it on the craziness of the holidays, taking my work home with me, having a pregnant wife, a Netflix addiction, a hangover from the Red Sox World Series run, depression over the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike or anything like that. The reality is that I can't make as strong or as entertaining a case for my absence from the blogosphere as my buddy Chris (aka "Our Man in LA") did recently, so let's just say that the dog ate my blog mojo (or whatever the homework equivalent is) and move on.

Anyway, I had a little time off from work and just got back from a nice week long visit to northern California for Christmas with my sister and her family, a Blair/Fenyo family tradition since 1999. My mom was out there, too, as well as my brother-in-law Ken's parents from San Diego. At first, it was a little weird spending the holiday in a place where the odds of a white Christmas was somewhere between that of a tiger escaping from its habitat at the San Francisco Zoo and mauling someone and Britney Spears not making a fool of herself. However, as a veteran of many white Christmases growing up in Connecticut and a current resident of frequently snowy Chicago, I have come to appreciate the snow-free and more fall like December weather conditions in Silicon Valley. It may not be 70 degrees like southern California, but I'll take the 50's and sunny in late December thank you very much.

The visit got off to a most auspicious start when I found out that I would get to use the finished office/guest room at my sister's house, as my mom would be upstairs in my oldest niece Caroline's room. They recently installed one of those fold out beds that drops down from the wall, and when you couple that with my own full bathroom as well as Internet access I could pretty much have stayed in that room for a week if: a) I was a crappy, unsocial guest; and b) You brought me food. Not that it hasn't been a treat to sleep in Caroline's room, with its yellow walls, pink pillowcases and, well, it's an 8 year-old girls' room so you get the picture. When you consider I started out sleeping on a couch for my first few X-Mas visits, we have made tremendous strides here.

Since I only make it out to visit 2-3 times a year, I always marvel at how much each of my nieces worlds has changed in the time I was gone. By this I mean what they are talking about, the things that they are interested in, etc. After a few days in the Blair/Fenyo home I realized that Disney's "High School Musical" and Webkinz reigned supreme for the moment. Unless you have been living under a rock you have at least heard of the former, but the whole Webkinz thing was a bit new to me. Basically, you buy a stuffed animal with a secret code that allows you to enter a virtual "Webkinz World" where you care for your pet, answer trivia, earn KinzCash and play games. Caroline (age 8) has like 6 of them and Meredith (age 6) has some also. I would imagine this hobby is the adult equivalent of juggling multiple fantasy sports teams in terms of the amount of computer time it requires and the amount of potentially productive time that is wasted on it. As I quickly learned, if you want to hit Caroline and Meredith where it hurts these days, you take away their Webkinz computer time.

This time around I was able to do a lot of bonding with Erica, 2 1/2 years old going on 20. Every day after X-Mas she said "Santa came while I was sleeping" and then asked "Is Santa Coming?" as if this would be a daily occurence. We got in some quality horsey ride on Uncle Grant's knee time, practiced identifying different colors at the Gap Kids store at Stanford Mall (according to Erica, her vast knowledge of colors is self-taught) and sat next to each other each night at dinner. I struck gold early on with the choo-choo train method of getting her to eat. I'd take a spoon/fork of food, say "chug a chug a chug a CHOO CHOO" and pretend like I was pulling down on the train whistle before I said "Next stop: Erica's mouth in 5 seconds" and she literally ate it up every time. It was perhaps my crowning achievement of the visit.

No vacation of mine would be complete without a heavy slate of movie viewing, and this one was no different. I saw "Charlie Wilson's War" and "Enchanted" in the theater as well as "Superbad" (even better the second time), "Eastern Promises" and "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" on DVD. "War" is solid entertainment with an all-star cast, a non-threatening war/political movie. Despite big name actors like Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts around him in larger roles, the brilliant Phillip Seymour Hoffman once again steals a movie with his portrayal of a CIA spy. "Enchanted" is cute, a clever send up of the Disney animated princess movies with enough humor, McDreamy and Amy Adams to keep the adults interested. "Promises" is a good drama/thriller with personal favorite Naomi Watts in a lead role, but rather graphic with the violence at times so be warned. "Order of the Phoenix" is just so-so.

As this will be my last post of 2007, I wanted to wish my readers a safe and happy New Year and all the best for 2008. I know that you have a lot of choices when it comes to reading blogs, and I hope that you consider G's Spot again the next time you are avoiding work or are unable to sleep for some reason.