livin' la vida loca

I made it home safely, despite the fact that the drive from Kansas City to my ancestral home took four and a half hours rather than two and a half hours due to the ridiculous ice storm going on in the midwest right now. My parents and brother picked me up, and rather than stopping to have dinner for my mother's birthday, we drove through a McDonald's so that we could keep on trucking. As a sign of how bad the ice was -- while we drove, the side-view mirrors accumulated five-inch icicles, and the antenna was nearly .75" wide from ice by the time we got home (after having been cleared once when we stopped for diesel halfway home).

However, we had an entertaining time nonetheless -- or at least Dad, Michael, and I did, since we spent the last couple of hours singing along poorly to the "90's at 9" satellite radio station. My poor mother didn't sing along, but I discovered something crucial about her -- you can sing for hours, you can tease other people in the car, you can (like my brother) tell a story about drinking a bottle of rum in a swimming, but you cannot, under any circumstances, make fun of Iowa public television's "CreateTV" programming, which she watches religiously for their gardening shows. Lesson learned!

Driving through an ice storm and singing along to "Livin' La Vida Loca" with your dad and brother is a surreal experience that I recommend to everyone. But, I made it home, and while this may have been nearly equivalent to last year in terms of treacherous driving conditions, I didn't lose my luggage and I didn't have to pay $200 to rent a car to get me out of Chicago, so I feel like it went blissfully by comparison. I can't wait to see what adventure my Christmas trip will provide next year -- I'm thinking I should take the train and see if it gets held up by the last of the great western train robbers. I'm sure one of them has been laying low for the past eight or nine decades, waiting to strike again.

Finally, double happy birthday wishes to my mother and to my Chandlord! Strange that the two people who have provided me with a place to sleep this month have birthdays on the same day...