Saturday morning, the 22nd (read: a week ago) was very nasty. The remnants of Draco had left my area back home a mess -- once it had started snowing on Friday night, it didn't stop, and the storm moved through the area very slowly. Meanwhile, south and west of us, Winter Storm Euclid was ramping up and getting ready to hit.
However, not much could be done -- no matter the weather, my parents and I had a mission: to finish Christmas shopping at all costs. My dad had not yet finished his shopping, and as it was the Saturday before Christmas on Tuesday in between two major winter storms, this was the only time we really had to get anything done. So, upon getting up that morning, I logged on to Facebook and said that if anyone wanted to see me and could dig out of their homes, I'd be out and about shopping that day.
The roads were horrible, much worse than the night before. The snow was still coming down pretty hard, and -- as I said, it didn't stop. I made the remark to my mother that Daisy would love living in West Virginia, as it never stops fucking snowing there for about four months out of the year. Mind you, I lived in West Virginia until I was 23, and on top of a mountain for almost ten years of that -- this is a fairly accurate depiction, most of the time, of the winters there. When I was in high school, for example, there were years where we had a full month off of school because of snow days -- snowstorms hitting one after another after another. It was and still is customary to have three feet or more of snow on the ground at any given time in January or February.
But, again, I digress.
Draco hadn't hit my parents too hard, though it had hit them much harder than it hit here in Kansas. I estimated about 8 inches or so on the ground, as it was above my ankles in my high-top basketball shoes I wore home (simply because they were thicker, had good arch support, and I knew I'd be walking a lot in them). And in that, we got into my dad's Envoy and made our way into Morgantown for shopping.
I had my own mission that day; I only had to get a few things. I told my parents that I wanted to go to Gabe's to see if I could get any WVU-branded clothing, and I needed to find a sleeve/case for the laptop Daisy had given me, so that I didn't get it all banged up in my backpack. That's all I needed; my parents' Christmas gifts had been taken care of, though I wasn't opposed to picking up something else for them had I been able to find something else (I did pick up a Captain America shirt for my dad, actually). My mother needed to go to the local Giant Eagle (a grocery store) to get stuff for Christmas dinner, and my dad needed to finish his shopping, so for the most part, I was tagging along with them.
I found a lot in Gabe's; I ended up getting my mother two jackets (to add to her Christmas presents total) and found about five or six shirts/sweaters for myself, one of which was a cardigan that ended up being too small, which I gave to my dad. Mom bought me two of them to make up for the cost of ordering one of my dad's Christmas presents for her with my credit card, and I wore two of them home yesterday to save money on shipping them to me. With my laptop in my backpack with me, the amount of things I could bring back home was rather slim.
However, I did not find a laptop case. All I wanted was a simple neoprene sleeve with a zipper and handles, and a little padding. In desperation, and fighting off scores of holiday shoppers, I found one in Kmart, unpriced. I didn't care how much it was, because I needed it -- it was either that or get my new, expensive laptop banged up and possibly damaged in my travels. I should've checked the price first -- it was nearly $40. Luckily, I'd already gotten some Christmas/Birthday money, and used that to get it -- along with the smaller present of a six-pack of Coke in glass bottles for my parents. We then went to the mall to get my sister a coat for Christmas, and then had Mexican for dinner before heading back up the mountain.
We had planned, mind you, to visit my grandmother that day. However, we knew how bad the roads were at home, and that they would be much worse out where she lived (about forty or so miles to the west, on top of another mountain of her own). We called her and told her we'd reschedule for Monday, Christmas Eve. There wasn't a whole lot we could do about that with the snow, and we were hoping that by Monday, the roads would be more clear and less awful. The only reason we'd gone out at all that Saturday was because we needed to do shopping -- otherwise we wouldn't have left the house at all.
That night, I fixed the issue my computer had with Skype by downloading and installing the older version as a band-aid sort of measure for the time being. It worked for the moment, which was good. The laptop has a built in camera/mic, as most newer machines do, and Skype on Linux doesn't like it; I had to disable the "automatically start my camera when a call starts" feature because every time it did, it crashed my machine. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. Even after I upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10 a few days later, the problem still persisted.
So that's the story of my first full day back home. Between flying in on Friday and running around all day on Saturday, I was already exhausted. Coupled with the fact that I am not used to my old bed back home, I wasn't sleeping well, either -- my back was killing me from that and being unable to sit at an actual desk and use the laptop. I could never get comfortable, and when I did, my parents' furnace is so nice that I would quickly get too hot. But, I was home with my family, Christmas shopping was finished, and I still had a lot more to do before the trip ended...
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