pa-jammy
TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY!!!! (Did I not tell everyone on Earth yet?!? Just making sure.)
I may have mentioned that I’m in Barcelona, so my coworker Deborah and I went on a run early this morning. I like to run on my birthday, it makes me feel virtuous. Like, a good way to start the next year of my life.
We left the apartment at 7:45, and we made it to the Mediterranean right as the sun was rising. (It rises really late here!) It was just stunning.
My brother made this. That’s me!
Well, I’ve made it to Europe!
Traveling a long way is kind of surreal, isn’t it? Seems weird that just this morning, I saw the boys off to school, and now I’m in Zurich. Granted, it’s been the longest day of my life (well, close to it) but I haven’t slept since then, so it counts.
So, I won’t bore you with a play by play of my travel thusfar, but just wanted to remember some things.
Once I got to Newark, I had a bunch of time to kill, so I mostly wandered around, trying to get 10,000 steps in while also looking for a charging station. I tell ya, if Newark had fewer payphones and more charging stations, we’d all be better off.
Fortunately, my plane took off without incident and the flight was mostly good. (Well, the landing was the scariest in ever because it was super foggy, the runway was white, and we were in the mountains, so I thought we were still way up in the air when BOOM we landed. It was kind of terrifying.)
I was seated in Economy Plus again (so much legroom!) and despite the fact that I had all of the possible accoutrements to make sleeping possible (fancy pillow, eye mask, headphones, white noise on phone, cozy socks, non-restrictive, comfy clothing, blanket, melatonin) I just couldn’t fall asleep.
So that’s the last time I’m going to try it. Every time I have ever flown to Europe I’ve tried to fall asleep on the flight over (or back) and I have never, ever been able to. Nothing works. So I’m going to stop trying.
Consequently, my eyeballs are very heavy and I am somewhat punchy from exhaustion (I also tried going to bed late Sunday night and waking up early Monday to wear myself out, and those laps of Newark’s terminals were also with that in mind) but at least it’ll be 2 in the afternoon when I get to Barcelona and I’ll be excited to see everyone so hopefully that will help keep me awake until bedtime.
Okay, just a few more pictures…
I’m on day two of my attempt to get to Barcelona. My first flight yesterday was cancelled, and so let’s all cross our fingers today goes better.
The upsides of my new itinerary include:
– getting to see the boys again
– opening my birthday gifts from Kiki, which included this magnificent piece of bling:
(Yes, that’s my name.)
So you must get imagine my dismay when I saw this on the information screens upon arrival at the airport.
Fortunately, so far the delay is only four minutes. Let’s just hope I got all my bad travel juju out of the way yesterday.
So far so good, because I was able to eat these (at no cost, thanks to a food voucher) without getting any powdered sugar on my all-black outfit. Win!
This morning, the boys and I were sitting on the sofa, and somehow we got on the subject of why I started taking monthly pictures of them, and after looking through all 84 of the previous photos, I think they finally started to get it a little bit. It was pretty sweet, actually.
It may have made them a tiny bit more cooperative for this month’s pic, especially after I explained how difficult the younger years were. They may have felt a smidgen of remorse. Or something.
Since 2/3 of the boys missed fireworks Wednesday night, I got some sparklers from a friend. The boys were a bit terrified of them.
And I have officially created the world’s dullest post.
New Year’s Eve…do you say the year that just passed or the one coming up? I guess it’s the one coming up. One of those things that always confuses me but I’ve never actually just figured out once and for all. Okay, so let’s say it’s New Year’s Eve 2015 (but Eve is in 2014, that’s why I get confused, but it’s the eve of 2015, so yeah. Confusion.) Since the boys were born, most years the boys have spent the night at Granny and Grandpa’s so George and I could go to the pub.
And the year after that, they had their tubes in/adenoids out on New Year’s Eve, so that was a quiet night in.
Except the year they were a month old. Or maybe we did go out – I think my mom came to stay that night. That time is a bit of a blur.
But ever since then, we’ve gone to a friend’s house or the pub or done something. But since I leave for Barcelona in a few days, I told George he could go to the pub and I would stay home with the boys. No problem. I’d finish the book I was reading, have a little wine, go to bed early and wake up refreshed in 2015.
Except…I opened my big mouth and asked the boys if they wanted to stay up til midnight. Linus and Miles were gung-ho, but Oliver noted that on previous attempts to stay up late, his eyes would just close because he got tired. Heh.
So, we stayed up. At around their usual bedtime (8:30ish) they started getting a little sleepy. Hours yet to go, but they were determined.
Now, I know what you’re thinking…why not just put on that Netflix countdown at 9:00? Well, we live close to the river and you can actually see the fireworks from our front porch, so I’d actually told them they could see the fireworks at midnight.
Which also makes it impossible for me (a light sleeper) to be asleep at midnight anyway. So. Midnight it is.
The boys played video games, we watched some TV, I put on a movie, and I gave a late snack of sugary cereal.
At around 10:45, Miles and Linus waved the white flag. They went to lay down in their beds, but with the lights on so I could wake them at midnight. I humored them, but I knew that they would be impossible to budge later on.
Indeed, when I went back at around 11:45, they briefly opened their eyes and told me they’d rather sleep than watch the fireworks. Alrighty then!
Oliver, though, the one who thought his eyelids would fail him, was still full of good cheer when we watched the ball drop on Times Square at midnight.
We went out on the front porch, where, through the trees, we could see the big display that the city puts on over the river. After all that anticipation, though, Oliver was too cold to stay outside more than a few minutes. Ha ha!
Linus and Miles woke up this morning rather perturbed at me for missing the fireworks. Ha! I told them we’d get some sparklers today and light them tonight for our own mini display.
Happy New Year 2015! (Now that, I know.)
Went to my first meetup as an Automattician in San Francisco, where I turned 39.
I got a pink bike.
Linus played soccer.
Went to Portland, Oregon for another meetup.
Started a Whole 30.
Got a new car!
Chicago meetup
Miles started baseball
Molly got married. We restaged some old family pics.
Kindergarten ended.
Started kitchen renovation
Playa del Carmen meetup
Completed my first triathlon!
Went to the beach
Visited my childhood home.
Boys started 1st grade
Park City meetup. I made a video and showed my colleagues. I got inked again.
Completed my second triathlon!
(it was a slow month.)
Boys turned 7.
Christmas happened.
So, I guess this year was more eventful than I thought. Here’s to hoping 2015 is just as fun and happy!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 190,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 8 days for that many people to see it.
Even though I support bloggers all day long, I still tend to post more on Facebook and Twitter than on my blog. I guess because I get more immediate feedback, and I crave feedback in the form of likes and comments. (At least one thing I’ve learned as a Happiness Engineer is that I’m not the only one.)
But there are of course huge drawbacks. Even though, of course, Facebook will store everything we ever write or think and use it against us one day, it’s really hard to go back and find old posts. So I’ve decided I’m going to start sharing some of my FB, Twitter, and Instagram posts here on my blog so I can archive them better.
So here we go, the week of December 21-28, 2014:
December 24, 2014, 1:37 pm
Rip my heart out, Oliver. “I like shopping alone with you because then no one says, ‘ooh triplets!'”
December 25, 2014
December 27, 2014, 9:20 pm
December 28, 2014, 7:14 pm
For the first time ever, I can hear the boys talking to each other in French!*
*it seems to be about poop, the universal language of boys.
Ah, social media. Ain’t it great?!
The house we grew up in. See also here.
pyjammy dot blog 