Christmas Vacation

My holiday season this year started a bit delayed. I planned to start vacation on the 23rd and head to Oklahoma and then to Kansas City with a return to Houston planned for New Year's Eve. But as I was packing the car, I got a call that one of my servers in Norway crashed.

It took me and one other guy from the office until mid-day on Christmas to get it fixed. So, for the first time I can remember, I didn't get to spend Christmas Day with either friends or family. Even Mouse (the cat) was in boarding. Kinda sucked.

But it was just a bit of a delay. It turns out that nobody else is on the road on the 25th, so traffic was really light. And I got to spend the last half of the drive enjoying the solitude of rural America at night.

Even though it was something like 30 degrees and windy, I had to take a couple of minutes right before I pulled into the folk's place to stop the car and enjoy a couple of minutes outside in the absolute quiet and dark. Living in a city the size of Houston, it's easy to forget what true dark and quiet is like. The stars on clear nights like that are amazing.

I got to catch-up with the family in Kansas City the next day. We got some really, really cheap rooms staying at a Marine Base. That was kinda cool.

We didn't do anything especially cool, but we stopped by a couple of notable places.

The first was Grinders. That's a really sweet pizza place featured on "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives". (check out the segment here) That was some dang good New York-style pizza. And how could I not love a place with a painting of Tom Waits and a graffiti'd poster of the The Daily Mirror Bush cover? It was a cool little Liberal oasis in the middle of the Bible Belt.

We also got to check out the Truman Presidential Library. That was really well done. I've also heard that it has the most faithful replica of the Oval Office anywhere. That was impressive. It was also interesting to see how people instantly stopped talking entirely when they walked in. It's impressive that even a replica of a room can invoke that kind of respect.

(* ok, this was the first part of a longer post, but it's getting late and I've still got some other stuff to do tonight, so I'll finish this up later...)