We flew out on the 22nd to Michigan and got to the airport super early. From experience, traveling for Christmas is crazy stupid busy… Covid changed that. The airport was definitely not as busy as it was in the past.
We did an early home Christmas because Jaime was going to spend time with her family and I was going to spend time with mine. So we opened presents up early.
I was able to get away from work, though tethered to my phone, to spend some time with our friends for brunch before the holidays and getaways and new year.
We went thrift store shopping afterwards and didn’t get much, but it was fun. It got too warm. That’s the dangers of December in Arizona! LOL
Our friend Leanne married her best friend, Dylan, who coincidentally is the twin of our of our cosplay friend, Johanna. We stayed in Tombstone for the wedding, which was super cute. Unfortunately, I had to work due to a world wide log4j vulnerability, so the fun factor was very limited for me. We tried to make do though. Here’s some pictures.
The next day before leaving, we tried to see some of Tombstone again. We visited several years ago and the place hasn’t changed much. It’s a fun little town with friendly shops.
As usual, our city of Glendale, AZ puts up a nice lightshow. There definitely wasn’t as much people and things going on this year due to pandemic stuff. Which is good, because it’s normally so busy and packed. At the same time, with fewer people, we got less attention :(
We had our Harry Potter group do their thing and we did our Star Wars thing because it was easy accessible for us and we just got lightsabers, so we had to show them off! We finished the night off at Haus Murphy’s which we’ve been wanting to Octoberfest at for some time!
For our birthdays, we decided to celebrate with Mickey, for his birthday! He’s 93.
It was an excellent and much needed vacation and we spoiled ourselves! Treat yo’self! I think I ate churros every day!
It’s a small world, as with most vacations, we met up with someone we knew. Mindi!
Our friends had a fall party and it was a great time. Food, learned about loofah sponges, and there was some axe throwing as well!
It was weird to not have Mariah at the party… It was supposed to be at her house and that had to get canceled. We still showed up and had some fun at the other location. It was a fun time though.
We are going to make this a regular thing, ever since Brent’s 50th last year. We watched and helped out with so much fishing with the kids and friends, that I think we might even start doing it ourselves for fun/food. Why not?
As part of my new role of Senior Director over the Security Operations Center, it made sense to learn more about Purple Teaming and this training was free and came with a cool certificate, so I got that going for me.
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