Yeah so it took me nine hours to go what should have taken 3.5. I gave up and got a hotel room but I’m so annoyed!!

Oh jeez. Are you going to carry on in the am?

I am going to get up v early and go as far as I can but doubt I can make it to Portland tomorrow, which was the plan. Minor problem being that my temporary registration expires tomorrow. And the plates are in Portland. So if I don’t make it there tomorrow I’ll be tempting a ticket.

Good luck. It's a long drive but doable, if not enjoyable.

I'm with you on the legal car being super annoying thing. My tags are still not here. My postal worker likely thinks I've been replaced by a pod person because I've checked my mail every dang day for weeks.

That said, safety is way more important than a fix-it ticket.

Upsides: I got upgraded to Comfort+, my luggage arrived in good time, and I'm in a taxi on the way home.

Downsides: that flight was five hours worth of one absolutely catastrophic baby poop after another. My god.

Yay almost home. Shrift! But boo smelly baby!

I tried to go to sleep at 8pm and have tossed and turned all night. Woke up a few minutes ago and since I’m fairly awake, contemplating just starting now.

I stayed up watching reels on IG for HOURS last night. why? no clue. do I remember anything really good? no do I regret it? yep.

Good chance I try a mini-nap later.

Hi, y’all. I’m 200+ messages behind, so there was a lot of skimming. I’m sorry about the fraught family stuff and the COVID and other health issues among them.

I went to my sister’s for Christmas. Her church is anti mask, so she hasn’t been going there lately. (They’re also really conservative, so I don’t really feel comfortable there in non-pandemic times—but I’m willing to suck it up once a year to make my sister happy.) Anyway, she has a friend who invited her to her Methodist Christmas Eve service, and as we were raised Methodist it was a total nostalgia trip. It was also in Oxford, the small town that had a school shooting a few weeks ago. Which is how I found out that my sister lives 20 minutes from that school and was correspondingly wigged about it. The copycat threats—including one kid trying to bring in ammo—at her own school didn’t help. Ugh. Wtf, kids?

In better news, we all went to the Detroit Zoo Lights, where the zoo sets up this huge LED installation. It’s very cool, as well as being outside, with masks required. (About as safe as a public gathering can be, COVID-wise.)

Now I’m home, with my regular post-travel cold. I was rigorous about masking, so I’d hoped to avoid it. Anyway, my rapid test was negative (the PCR test is scheduled for Monday), so it’s probably just a cold.

Dad is back on his way home. He stopped here this morning and we took a short walk and we visited and I was able to give him the last present I had for him. He was looking through some pictures I took at the beach and really liked one of me and M so I got that printed and in a frame for him.

My brother and SIL sent me a gift, after talking to them they will be happy with donations in their name so .. now I'm trying to figure out which orgs to do that.

In a small nice thing about end of the year I'm getting my Vyvanse picked up today and so I have one more month before having to pay the high price for it. Still nothing in the mail from workers comp so I'll be working on an email to send , cc-ing to HR people at work and then calling until I get a hold of someone next week.

Betty White died. I'm sad that she's gone, but it's hard for me to feel angry when she had such an amazing and long life.