Over the holidays I was able to go back home and spend 3 wonderful weeks with my parents.  Before that, I worked with my supervisor so that I could telework at home.  The process was very simple and I am extremely grateful to my supervisors for taking the time to work through the process with me.

I left Oregon the day before a huge snowstorm and managed to make it back to Ohio and back home.  Everyday, I would work from 7am to 11am so that I could spend the rest of my time with my wonderful parents and my cute puppy, Jasmine.  Jasmine just turned one and is still a ball of energy.  I got to play with her in the yard, and attempt to snuggle her.  I played board games and watched movies with my parents, and all in all had a great time. We headed over to my mothers side of the family for a pre-Christmas celebration.  The kids spent most of the time downstairs, which left us adults to have a peaceful time.

Back home we prepared for our own Christmas celebration.  We decorated the tree while listening to Christmas music.  It really brought back memories from childhood and it felt great to be spending time with family.  As for Christmas day, it was a quite peaceful event which went off splendidly.  Shortly after Christmas, my brother came to visit, so we had the whole family back together.  We played even more board games and got outside and visited some parks while walking Jasmine.  Eventually, he left and I got to spend the final days with just my parents and dog.  Towards the end, some part of me just wanted to stay home and forget about work, but I boarded my plane and headed back to work anyways.

I originally planned on working on the plane ride home, but I saw that they had free movies through their wifi service, and couldn’t pass that up.  I watched some decent movies, but heck they were free.  Towards the end of the flight I was pretty stressed out as we left late and arrived even later due to a mix up with the flight controller.  Eventually, I got off the plane and I ran towards my next flight.  I made it just in time before they left, my heart pumping.  Then I proceeded to wait on the flight for another 20 minutes, while we were apparently waiting for another passenger.  I didn’t mind since I could have almost been that passenger.  Eventually, I arrived in Redmond and my roommate picked me up at the airport.

Shortly after, I arrived at the house and I went to sleep immediately (time zones are a real pain).  The next morning I woke up to snow falling, and it just continued to snow and snow.  The snow really piled up over the weekend, but I braved the elements and made my way to the grocery to pick up much needed supplies.  As the weekend faded into the week, my telework-athon faded back into office work.  It was actually nice to be back in the office and be around a bunch of my colleagues.  As the winter weather continues, the office actually closed a couple hours early on Tuesday.  It was almost like a snow day, except it was only a couple of hours.  Well that about sums it up, I look forward to being back in Oregon and continuing to work over the winter.