The rest of the Arizona trip went fine. I once again skipped the Christmas Eve service at the local UU church. The gift exchange the next morning was good--among other things, I got a replacement for my favorite watch, last replaced in Hawaii. We went to the weekly Encanto park folk thing Wednesday night with Sara's dad, but struck out--the first performer was OK but forgettable, the second hard to listen to (mainly thanks to some iffy singing), and by the time we got to the third, which was actually good, I was just too worn out to appreciate it. Fortunately her dad ran through some of his banjo repretoire Friday night for us, in preparation for his Saturday morning gig at a local livestock show. So we still got to hear some good music, and I had fun trying to figure out how the banjo was tuned and what sort of picking patterns they use to get that busy banjo sound.
Friday night I got some earplugs, loaded up on food, and carried on plenty of clothing as nesting material, but it wasn't enough to get me more than two or three hours of fitful sleep on the red-eye back to Ann Arbor. We got back around 6, with the idea we'd catch breakfast across the street at Café Marie when it opened at 7, but instead we fell promptly asleep, Sara in bed, me on the couch. By the time we woke up it was a much more reasonable hour, so we called our neighbor Ajit before setting off for the café.
Sunday and Monday we did some reading, house cleaning, and cooking, the latter in preparation for a New Year's Eve. We had a few friends over, along with my parents who were making a planned stop on their drive to an extended stay in Boulder, my dad having just retired.
The party went fine, but when we got up the next morning the world was completely blanketed in white, so my folks decided to stay, putting off till this morning the next leg of their trip, to Iowa.
I was too tired to get real work done today, so I did a bunch of cleanup instead. I traded David a desk for a table, picking up four file drawers along the way, and tinkered with the arrangement of drawers and file drawers. Turns out the various modules that attach to these desks are all removable, which I hadn't noticed before, so I got to do some tinkertoy-like play for a while before launching into a huge collection of all the random crap lying around. I threw out a vast quantity of paper. When I left work there was maybe an inch-high stack left deal with.