My Winter Vacation - Kansas!

Yes, B&E readers, it's vacation time. My mother has a wireless internet connection she's got absolutely no use for, but it's always there when the kids come for a visit.

It was a mere 22-hour drive from Queens to Topeka, but it was easy because we did it over 11 days, figuring that two hours a day would make the whole thing manageable. OK, so we did it in two days. I'm consistently impressed with our totally unimpressive car. One doesn't expect a free car more than a decade old with more than 140,000 miles on it to run quite so flawlessly, especially since we left both mornings of the drive in ice and drove through windchills well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, it looks like a total piece of shit, but our '96 Saturn was built to last. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the company. Way to go, General Motors.

My mom and step-family (does one really have a "step-family" when one is in his mid-thirties?) were sitting at the dining room table when we arrived, and a laptop was open to baldandeffective.com, a website some of you may have heard of. They told my mom to smell me because I'm a tourist here in Kansas. Fair enough. I stank. I'd just spent 22 hours in a car. Stand by your comments, Senator!

Yesterday, the step-bro asked if any Topeka-related posts were percolating. (People from Topeka who no longer live in Topeka enjoy mocking the old hometown.) Nothing really was yet, but I was still recovering from the drive. My sister let us play a little with her iPhone. She's got a restaurant finding application that lets you put in your location (and several other information fields). So when we put in Topeka and gave the iPhone a shake, Subway came up. "There's your post!" exclaimed the step-bro. Indeed.

My sister was also kind enough to bring her copy of Newsweek from right after the election, with the in-depth How He Did It coverage. I couldn't find a copy of it on newsstands when it came out. It's kind of great reliving the whole thing now, more than a month after the election, with hindsight letting me feel all relaxed. Political campaigns are completely fascinating.

It's good to be here. Very relaxing. So can we open presents now?