Once More, With Blathering

It was a long trip home. We didn't get back to our house until 2:30 AM. Grim. We rode jetBlue, which has now spoiled me. There's more leg room (and at 5'2", I don't really need a whole lot of leg room), they have snacks (some Dorito/pretzel/Sun Chip thing, blue potato chips, cashews, animal crackers, "breakfast biscuits"--which are cookies, good chocolate chip cookies, and maybe one or two other ones), and they have the usual selection of beverages. There are also TVs on the backs of the chairs. This is sort of okay...Fiona loved the episode on the History channel on George Washington and then wanted more shows on presidents. That was not to be had (we watched a bit on the Civil War, but that didn't hold her interest as well). Then she found SpongeBob. She's never seen SpongeBob before, and I wasn't impressed with what I saw, I have to say. She seemed to like it. It stayed off pretty much the rest of the time and she was surprisingly good about it (I caught her watching some sort of talk show before we turned it off...the look on her face was total fascination. Mouth slightly agape and eyes wide.)



Here's Sophia winking at either her reflection or some fish.

So there is still not an official offer yet. Still waiting. I think the kids would be okay living there as long as we find a good school. I'd prefer to live closer to family, but at least we could get up there fairly easily. Still a little worried about living in a hurricane prone area. Traffic is mostly normal big city/bad drivers/jammed traffic, but during one very small traffic jam (it was Sunday and they were doing some construction, so two right lanes were closed), people were not only freely driving over the median between the frontage road and the highway--you could see lots of old marks on the grass showing that this is done all the time--people were getting off the highway in a line via the entrance ramp to the highway. What the hell! I only saw that once, and hopefully, that was a weird fluke. The traffic honestly wasn't even that bad. I've been in Vermont for 10 years, believe me, there is no traffic here and if I thought this traffic jam was not bad, it wasn't. I was astounded.

In other news, apparently the l-i-c-e may indeed be...gone? I still check and check because I think now is about the time when new ones would hatch (EW), but nothing so far. We did give Fiona another chemical treatment right before the trip and did not put anything else in her hair for a few days. Hopefully, that did the trick. It does seem to irritate her scalp, though, just mildly.

My first day of (part time) work at a local bakery (wholesale) is Friday, and I'm both nervous about it and excited. Hopefully, I won't be blowing my nose every 5 minutes like I am now and the coughing will be gone. It's a little awkward working in any food service job when you have a cold. Ideally, you'd stay home, of course, but this is the real world we work in. I won't even wear my whites. It looks like we all wear comfortable clothes and baseball caps. Most people wear shorts.



Okay, one more picture of the trip. This is Sophia at Moody Gardens Aquarium ("Yes! We are open!"). I love this picture because it reminds me of this one:



This is Sophia in February of 2006 at the Montreal Biodome. Cool place. Great city. Not a whole lot to do with small kids in the winter, though.

I'm really looking forward to April 3rd through the 7th, when I will be flying to Las Vegas to see my friend Annie for her 40th birthday! I have the plane tickets and everything. I'm really going! We're all staying here (you may want to turn your volume down, there's music). Don't look at the prices. We're getting some sort of group rate, which is far more sane. I am very excited! I haven't seen Annie in way too long and I'll also get to meet her sister, a friend of hers from Maine, and see my friend Andrea, who I haven't seen since we were all at NECI. Has it really been that long?