Christmas in Boston

We’ve been sooo busy that I haven't had time to post any blogs, so I'll get caught up now.

We had a lovely white Christmas visiting our daughter Suzie's family in Boston. The back story is that we flew in on the same day that the worst “nor’easter” in 50 years hit the New England states. Airports closed, flights cancelled. Luckily for us it happened just before we took off. There was just enough time for the runways and roads to be cleared. So we cruised in, one of the first to land at Boston's Logan airport.

We weren’t so lucky on the way home. We wanted to spend every minute with the kids that we could, so we left late in the day. Our plane arriving from Chicago was delayed to the point that we could not make the connections to El Paso so we called the kids to come back to get us. We got smarter and started early the next day. With the recent terrorist attack, we allowed 2 hours to check-in, but as it turned out we didn’t need it. We didn’t need it as our flight that was originating from Toronto was having trouble getting boarded because of the heighted security.

It was delayed so long [4 hours] that American Airlines had to find a different plane and crew to make the flight. Well as you can imagine that started a series of missed connections that would boggle your mind. We have to give American credit, they worked tirelessly to keep us on the move. We were re-ticketed and re-ticketed, my head was spinning. The best example was when we were in New York the agent saw that we would miss the last flight out of Chicago to El Paso so he rerouted us to Dallas. He even upgraded us to first class for the last leg. The only rub… the flight was already boarding. We boogied over to the new gate and jumped right on the plane. The rest of the day was uneventful with one surprise. When we got to El Paso we went straight to the missing baggage office to let them know that our bags would arrive on another flight. The agent looked and lo and behold our luggage arrived with us. Way to go American!

We have lots of photos, but we can't do a better job than what Suzie did, so check out her blog for the rest of the story…

http://molonfamily.blogspot.com/2009/12/emme-9-month-gramma-and-gramps.html

Talent Show

We have a lot of fun and while we bring in professional entertainment we sometime entertain ourselves. In this case we decided to have a talent show or in my case, lack of talent show. We started out singing Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. Did I mention we’re not great singers?

Since we’re not great singers we had to settle for spicing it up with gimmicks. We started out emphasizing the not so great part and it worked as planned. First you heard some giggles like they thought we were singing badly on purpose [we were]. Then you heard silence as they started thinking that we really were terrible. Then a few groans. At that point we stopped and started talking amongst ourselves.

Next we huddled by the piano and voila transformed into… well, see for yourselves.

All in all we had a great time and so did the residents! BTW we got a bunch of toys for the Marines’ Toys for Tots program.