What is going on with America right now. With all these stupid things I'm reading about that the government is doing, it's not looking good. And it's starting to affect Laura's work as well. We should really consider moving to Canada or something. I don't understand how everything is being ignored.
A quick review of the last couple of months. Christmas was fun. The McGuires came for a few days and for the first time in a few years, NO ONE WAS SICK! Well, I think a lot of us had runny noses, but it wasn't anything that stopped activities. That's really about it. Did the normal stuff we do during Christmas. I really can't remember the weather during Christmas break. I think it was cold and rainy for the most part. One thing that I thought was that it didn't feel like "Christmas" this year. I may have wrote that already in the last blog, but because it was so warm leading up to Christmas, it just didn't feel the same.
After Christmas, we actually went down to my Mom's new place since she moved to a more complete care apartment about an 40 minutes from Rockwall. It's still about the same time for us to get there, strangely. We stayed for a couple of days, but my brother was actually heading out there at the same time, so we met up with him and Reiko and Steve while we visited. That's probably the last time we'll all be together for a long time. That was the first time we saw Ken and his family since Justine's wedding, I think? He invited us to Vegas over Spring Break, but, that's in a couple of weeks and I don't think we're going to be able to with all the stuff going on and we're just (at least I am) tired of having something going on EVERY weekend. Spring Break is literally the next open weekend with NOTHING going on. I actually might take this time and take the kids down to Dallas for a couple of days because Laura wanted a weekend to herself without the kids. Currently, I'm contemplating Meow Wolf or Medieval Times or something and then visiting my Mom for a bit. It's just a lot of driving.
Other than that, I've been getting quite overwhelmed with helping out at school between academic bowl and clusters/electives. The good thing is that cluster and 4th grade acbo ended at the same time at the end of January, so that was an immediate load off the back. In addition, 7th grade acbo only has 1 more tournament next week and for electives, I have 2 more sessions before the showcase. Basically, after Spring Break, a lot of things are ending, so that's good. Not sure if I'll do both clusters and electives next year, but we'll see. In a way, it was nice to be busy, but only until it wasn't nice to be busy. The cluster showcase actually went really well. I would really say that our booth was the best. I think I put in the most work overall, but maybe a couple of other clusters did as well. Not sure though from what I saw. Some of the obscure ones I don't even know WHAT they did over the course of a few months.
Anyway, that's about it. Oh, we did finally buy all our plane tickets for our Ireland trip in July. I guess that is happening! The flights were pretty expensive in total, but probably about the same as Japan, actually. And that was with using points for the majority of it! I don't think we're going to get business class for either leg, sadly. For now, we have main cabin extra seats, which is coach with a little more room. We'll see if we can snag a cheap upgrade to premium economy on the way back for a couple hundred more each. It all depends on the availability of the seats prior to departure.