Daily Journal: Day 19 of 365

It’s Christmas Day. I just finished smoking a brisket for the girlfriend’s birthday tomorrow. The smoking process didn’t go as well as I would have liked, but I think I got enough of the smoke flavor into the beast. We’re going to pour some cola over it and bake it low and slow in the oven tomorrow to finish cooking it. Hopefully it’ll come out tasting delicious, but I guess we’ll see…

We got up a little later than we wanted this morning, which seems to be a pretty familiar situation for us. The girlfriend made corn casserole and cookies to take over to her aunt and uncle’s place for Christmas. She didn’t want to roll out the cookie dough in the fridge, mostly because of the hassle of rolling them out, cutting them, and trying to get the cut out dough off the counter without demolishing the shapes. So she made some cookies with chocolate, peanut butter, and butterscotch chips as well as pecans and almonds. They were pretty good, but we wound up leaving most of them over at her aunt and uncle’s.

The drive over was much less harrowing than the drive home last night. There were still a few slick spots, but for the most part, the sun had burned off most of the ice. Between the drive home last night and the drive to Plano this morning, I counted at least 10 accidents or cars off the road. I’m quite sure there were plenty more that we didn’t see. It’ll be a busy day at the body shop on Monday, I’m guessing.

The actual Christmas lunch was fun. Most of the girlfriend’s family was there, as well as a few extended in-law type people who I met for the first time. I don’t remember most of the names, but that’s not really unusual, and I doubt that I’ll see most of those folks again for another year or more anyway. But the company was nice, and the food was good. We brought home a bit of food, but for the most part we decided to pass on leftovers.

On the drive home, we actually watched an accident happen. Two or three cars continued through an intersection right in front of us after our light turned green, and when traffic on our side started going, one lady who was turning across traffic was pretty much forced to stop in the intersection and the car behind her hit her from the rear at a fairly decent clip. The girlfriend thought there must be something wrong with the traffic signal or something, because too many cars were continuing to turn after our light turned green. I’m not so sure, but we’ll never find out. We weren’t effected and were already pretty well turned onto the freeway frontage road by the time the accident happened. It seemed like no one was really injured, and there were plenty of other people around, so we headed on down the road.

Tomorrow, we’re going to do a bunch of shopping. Looks from the girlfriend’s list like it’s probably going to be nearly all day, so I should probably go get some sleep now…

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