Christmas in Connecticut

This past weekend we traveled down to Simsbury CT to Kristin's parents for an early Christmas. We did it this past weekend because Kristin is working all of next weekend including Christmas day. There were two noteworthy aspects of this trip; the speakers, and everything else. The speakers will be handled in a separate post, which will actually wind up above this one on the site because that's how blogs apparently work. That also means that you already either read that entry, or glazed over it and came down to this one. In any event, this one deals with the rest of the trip.

The ride down was a pain in the ass. The car was full of precious cargo (speakers), and every fuck-nut who shouldn't have a license seemed to find the Turnpike on Friday, myself being one of them. As I almost got run over by a car rapidly approaching from behind as I merged onto the 'pike, I quickly realized that the good ol' Camry is a gutless pig above 50mph. The well chosen gear ratios in the transmission and in the differential provide tolerable acceleration dispite the anemic motor, so long as you're going under 50mph. Once you are at 50 and try to accelerate, as I quickly discovered, you'd better give yourself PLENTY of room, because you're going to be doing it for a while.

Anway, we got there and nobody got killed this time. On Friday night we went to a Wolfpack game. As always, that was a great time. On Saturday morning I finished the speakers, then did a little Christmas shopping for my parents.

On Saturday night we exchanged gifts, which is always very interesting. Kristin got a bunch of girly shit that she really seemed to like. I was the proud recipient of a Johnny Black gift set that included the booze and a couple Johnny Walker glasses. I also got a badly needed pair of pants, a neat t-shirt, Dunks Coffee, a Camaro sign, and other trinkets. Kristin and I together got a Target gift card from her grandmother, and from her parents we got an outdoor fireplace thingie and an ass-ugly painting for our living room. I can call it ugly without offending her parents because she picked it out, not them. :) It's a painting of some kind of bowl with twigs sticking out of it. I can't imagine why you'd want a painting of that shit, but who knows. I couldn't find any cars or breasts anywhere in the painting, so I quickly lost interest. The fireplace, though in reality a good gift that will probably prove to be very useful, was a bit disappointing to me because I had planned on constructing a very nice stone fireplace at the back of our property. But, since Kristin is afraid of basically everything, she'd probably never walk through the back yard, so the fireplace would never get used. Though this shoots down my aspirations of building such a grand container of nature's fury, in reality this will probably get used much more often.

I spent sunday hanging around and listening to the inlaw's new stereo. I must say, they have great taste. It sounded wonderful. :)

Overall, it was a very good weekend spent with Kristin's (and soon to be my) family. Every time I go down there, I feel a bit more "at home" and feel more welcomed all the time. This christmas felt more comfortable than last year, and I also noticed that their gifts had a level of thoughtfullness that made me feel like part of their family.