Christmas Tetris and other Feats of Strength

I had to pack up all my Christmas presents this weekend and ship them. This is always a fun task. I stopped in to the UPS store earlier this week to pick up some bubble wrap and one of the people working there (no, not my boyfriend) offered to have them pack up my stuff for me. No way I was going to add to the already outrageous shipping costs by adding packing costs too. I told her this and she said, “So you want to do your own form of Christmas Tetris?” I thought it was such a clever way of putting it. Yes, that’s exactly what I decided to do.

Seven boxes later, I was ready to haul all that stuff down my stairs and into the car. Somehow I managed to do all this without killing myself or dropping anything. The heaviest box weighed in at over 40 lbs. Needless to say, I took a pass that day for going to the gym.

When I got to UPS, the same girl was there to help me again. She seems nice. While she was fixing one of my boxes that needed a little reinforcement, I had one box that was going to my Mom that I needed to have them pack for me. (I just didn’t have a small enough box, so I decided to let them do it for me.) One of the other guys working there took the box (it had a gift tag on it with Mom’s name- this is important to know) and he asked me “is this fragile?” Without missing a beat I said, “no, just the relationship.” He stopped and looked at me and then started to laugh because he had seen the gift tag.

So that all worked out well. I got everything sent and I also reclaimed my living room. After that, I cleaned the apartment and then started packing for this week’s trip. Trying to leave Las Vegas on Sunday was insane. The National Rodeo Championships were ending and so the whole airport was swamped with cowboys and their groupies heading home. Once again I was stuck flying United. I am convinced that they must schedule about 12 flights to leave at the same time. I have never seen such as f**ked up system as the United ticketing area of the airport. You have to stand in line in order to get to the kiosk to check in and get your boarding pass. Then you have to get in another line to check your bags. I arrived at the airport just over 2 hours before my flight. I spent an hour and a half just trying to get my bag checked. That left 30 minutes before my flight left to get through security and to my gate. You can imagine how crazy that must have made me. I literally walked on to my flight (because I refused to run) with 5 minutes before departure.

I ended up spending my flight filling out my Christmas cards. I’m almost done, so keep an eye out for those!

Once I landed and went to baggage claim, I found that my bags didn’t come with me. Luckily there was another flight coming in later that day and they delivered my bag to my hotel by about 9pm last night. Travel can be a real pain, but I have to say that for all the years I have been traveling, I have never lost any luggage. And, this is only the second time I can recall when my bags didn’t make the flight with me. That’s a pretty good record, I think.

Heidi just today sent me some pictures of the two of us before we went to her Christmas party, so I will post one of those. When I get home later this week, I’ll have some other pictures of the tree to post. I did get a comment about posting one of the entire tree, and I will. I am still trying to take the “perfect” picture of it. I don’t like the ones I have so far.