Shifting plans and hanging in the Christmas/New Year limbo
The week between Christmas and New Year’s day is a curious void of strangeness. Everyone who has to work, really isn’t working (you know who you are) and those that aren’t working are wishing they were (kinda anyway, we could use the money!). I really think Uncle Sam should just run a week long holiday from Christmas right on through the New Year, just my two cents 
Hopefully everyone had a very merry and relaxing Christmas, I know we did our best. It’s been a few days since I posted last, so I wanted to catch everyone up on a few of the recent events that have happened.
First and foremost, having a December birthday isn’t an easy draw. Having your birthday the night before Christmas is at the Apex of the equation, and I’m sure by now you all know that SJ manged to draw that straw. Every year we try to do something extra special to help her celebrate, and this year we gathered up a good crew of friends and went to dinner at her favorite local Mexican food spot, El Cholo in Santa Monica. Afterwards we made our way over to her favorite hotel bar (Loews) on the beach for a night cap. Little did she know that I had planned ahead, and booked us a room for the night. Once the party started to die down and people began to filter home for the night, I pulled out our room key and asked her if she was ready to call it a night. Needless to say, she was very excited to get to jump around on the big fluffy hotel bed.
Sadly, the next morning we woke to any early phone call from Linda (SJ’s mom) telling us that her grandmother had passed away during the night. We quickly switched up our holiday travel plans, cancelling our flight to MT and booking a last second flight out to NC for the funeral. We made the executive decision well before hand that if/when the good lord decided to call her grandmother home that we would make it a top priority to get out there as quickly as possible and be with the family. Although it happened to be right before Christmas, the decision was easy and we found a great deal flying on Southwest leaving on Monday morning (12/21). Let, me pause for moment to reflect on experience of flying Southwest airlines. I’ve done a great deal of flying in my day, but Southwest takes the cake for the craziest boarding procedure I’ve ever witnessed. For those unfamiliar with the process, our ultra reliable friends at wikipedia provide the following details:
Customers are not assigned seats; rather, they are assigned to one of three “boarding groups” depending on their check-in time (earlier check-ins get to board earlier), and are left to choose their own seats on the plane, which helps the airline to board passengers faster.
…
Southwest has implemented an update to their Boarding Procedure in which passengers are now assigned their Boarding letter (A, B or C) along with a number which provides them a specific place in line (Example: A32). The idea behind this is to allow customers to not have to wait in line and spend their time relaxing or catching up on work.
While this may seem a simple model, it left me quite confused and I’m sure the masterminds that thought up the brain child were left secretly snickering in their executive offices high in a skyscraper in scenic Dallas, TX. Regardless of the process we managed to make our way from LA via Las Vegas over to Raleigh/Durham on Monday just in time for the viewing on Tuesday, funeral on Wednesday, SJ’s birthday on Thursday and finally Christmas on Friday. I could go on for several more pages about the details of the trip, but leave it to say we had lots of good family time and an amazing Christmas.
Back in LA, we looked into several options on how to re-book our trip to MT. At first we thought it would be best used by doing the quick turn around and ringing in the new year MT style. However, after we ran the numbers we quickly realized that it wasn’t a good option. It turns out the best option was to utilize our next paid holiday (who wants to miss work without getting paid for it?!) and make the trip over President’s day weekend February 13-15th.
Those of you we missed, we’re terribly sorry and hope you understand. If you are around in February let us know, we would love to see you then! Those that we were able to catch up with in NC, thanks so much for being there through the thick and the thin and helping to make the Holidays truly amazing!
0