the kentucky moon

My my my, Kentucky was blast. I got in late the night of the 22nd, Yale and Keebler coming to pick me up. We actually ended up seeing Amanda Mills (Jesse's halfsister) at the airport. She was on her way back from the Bahamas where she had been for her honeymoon. We made a few calls and then headed over to a party to meet up with April and Shelley. The host of the party was apparently a wedding photographer and he had set up a photobooth in his living room. I don't know how it worked since the equipment was all boxed up but it worked fabulously and I got a number of new pictures to look back on in nostalgia. At then end of the night, I also had the chance to showcase my Rubix Cube skills.


So the following day, I traveled from Louisville to Georgetown to see the Willetts. It was the first time in a long while that all of the Willetts kids and all of the Adkins kids managed to be in the same place at the same time and it was fantastic. Topics of conversation ranged from time travel to television to books. Another one of the reasons I miss New York is having Simon around the same city. I headed back to Lancaster later that night and the following day was Christmas Eve. I spent most of the day shopping, as I hadn't done any Christmas shopping. Katie took me around and brought Leah with her along with her friend Eva's couple children. Leah is just as adorable as I remember her from last May. She greeted me with a hug and during lunch put her french fries in her hair. That night, Katie and Leah came to Christmas Eve Mass with my family and got to see all of my uncles, aunts, cousins and Grandmother at the same time. This was a first for her, and a welcome reunion for me. After mass, we went back to the farm and ate oyster stew. Again, this was a first for Katie (both seeing the farm and eating the stew) and I was really glad she got to spend the night with us. Jerry (who I'd met for the first time the previous night) brought a bottle of Elijah Craig which Kyle and I (and a number of my relatives) highly enjoyed.


Christmas was as it always is, my absolute favorite holiday. It consisted of snack foods all day, lots of wonderful presents, games of Balderdash, and a movie at the end of the night. The entire day was with my family and it was fantastic. We should have Christmas every month.


Most of the rest of my week was spent with my Mom during the day and with Katie and Leah for a few hours each night. A few highlights throughout the week were seeing Chris and getting drinks with him, Katie, Chris' lady and Ty, my mom cooking fried chicken and fettuccine alfredo and Katie and Kyle joining my family for dinner and a game of Apples to Apples and Taboo. I also got to go back down to my farm again for our extended family's gift-giving and Hot Wheels race. We actually managed to win first place in the race for the first time in fifteen years of racing with our car "Erasmus" (named after John Blackthorne's ship in "Shogun"). My last night in town I went to Winchester and helped Katie study for the ACT and said goodbye for a while. My final day in Lancaster was spent with my mom and we eventually said goodbye before I headed to Louisville. I'm really going to miss my mom over the next six months or so.



I got into Louisville and spent New Years at the Pour Haus watching some cover band that April and Shelley knew. They were surprisingly good for two reasons. One, they didn't bother doing their own "take" on the songs. When they covered a song it was as close to the original as possible. They also had an amazing stage presence. They were dancing the entire night. I even asked a random girl if she would take me on stage and she did. I stood there for a few minutes, waved to the audience, and then got off stage. I ended the night fairly early since I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep the night before and the next day I ate with Dougie and Shannon, watched football with Bryan and Keebler, went to see "I Am Legend" with Brian and Brendan, and then drove around in the freshly fallen snow with Yale. I actually got a bit worried that my flight would be cancelled because of how hard it was snowing at times.


The snow in Kentucky was magical because it came just in time for me to see it. If you know me, you know I love snow and that week was the only chance I'd really get to see snow the entire year and it was provided for me. Then I flew home and ended up seeing the snow covered tops of the volcano as I landed back in Hilo.

When you do things right, they'll hardly know you've done anything at all

So, I made it home. Hooray! My flight went pretty uneventfully. I watched "Flushed Away" during the flight (Meh.) and an episode of "King of Queens". Once I got back, I waited oh so long for my damned baggage (not the emotional kind, silly) while the late night airport attendants played on the intercom (they were pretending to be cats, apparently). I got home to a kittenless apartment. That actually requires a little bit of explaining. Jesse and Willie informed me (via myspace comments to myself and each other) that they had gotten a kitten while I was gone and that it was staying in my room. Well, I wasn't entirely excited about the idea but reconciled myself with it throughout the week and was ready to meet the kitten when I got home only to find out that they had been lying and had actually forgotten about the lie until I asked where it was.

Jesse went to bed after not too long and Willie and I went to the Country Club to meet up with Daris and Luke. Aria came out as well and over all it was a nice little first night back in New York, although nothing overly exciting happened that I remember. The following night, I did my taxes first (rock) and then Yale came over and we went into town to a place I'd gone back in September with him called "The Peculiar Pub". We stayed for a couple drinks, Aria met up with us, and then we attempted to go to Aria's friend Caitlyn's party. We failed.

We walked about (I swear) 700 blocks trying to get to the JMZ (a subway) while I complained about just taking a cab. Apparently there were no cabs in New York on Saturday night, however (this is not true). We finally did find one, drove about three blocks in the wrong direction before realizing the cab driver didn't know where he was going. We got out and walked back to the JMZ and stood and waited for it for about twenty minutes before realizing that we didn't know which direction to take the train (both direction lead to Brooklyn and we didn't know where in Brooklyn we were going exactly). We got back out of the train, back into a cab and just went to the Country Club instead. Rachel, Willie, Daris and a few other met up with us there and it was a successful night in the end.

Yesterday was Super Bowl. Bryan Hamilton called me a bit before the game to wish me happy Super Bowl because he said he remembered how much I liked it. I thought that was awfully sweet. He said that Super Bowls haven't been as much fun since I left. We chatted for a while and the Jesse and I went to Hifi to watch the game. The crowd at Hifi was fantastic. All the regulars were there and even Sky and his girlfriend KJ (who Aria apparently knows). I played a couple games of pool with Jesse, a couple games of pinball with Mitch and even a game of Scrabble with Shawn and Steve. Again, it was a very good night, even if the game itself didn't do too much for me.