What a day...

(Written at 4am on December 31st)

So I just returned from a Walmart trip with my sister...but before I get to that story...

This morning I got up at 5:30 (after 4 1/2 hours of sleep in my new bed!) and headed to the Jacksonville airport. I got some reading (Christine Cain=stellar author) done, enjoyed my awesome new iPod (5th generation pink Nano=thanks padre!, had soup in a bread bowl at Atlanta Bread Co. during my layover, read some more, and by 1pm I was in Lynchburg. Lindsay and I did some shopping, ate amazing Chick-Fil-A,and saw The Blind Side (highly recommend it). Then Linz dropped me off and I got to see my adorable niece. Awesome day-time for bed, right? Uhm...apparently not....

See tomorrow is our family Christmas so logically it was time for my sister to go Christmas shopping. Clearly the fact that Christmas was actually 5/6 days ago, completely managed to escape her. (We may look alike, but....) So yes, we headed out to shop...and of course Walmart is the only store open in the middle of the night.

So we started on our adventure...aAfter taking pictures for youth group scavenger hunt kids, searching relentlessly (and eventually successfully) for socks with "grippies" for the madre, and staring at way too many candles and diffusers for...EVERYONE, and over 2 hours of general middle-of-the-night-Walmart-fun, I was exhausted.

So exhausted, in fact, that I couldn't find turkey bags and had to ask a man for help. When he pointed to his ear and shook his head, I almost forgot I knew sign language and was almost as surprised as he was when I asked again in ASL.

To add to the comedy, as we were looking at books for my brother and sister-in-law, Jeremy called to ask if my mom would like a Nicholas Sparks book (keep in mind it's about 1am)...apparently, he too was Christmas shopping at his neighborhood Walmart in West Virginia to prepare for his trip down tomorrow/today.

As we were leaving some crazy old man started telling us jokes, but I was so delirious that I was almost in tears laughing before he got to the punch line. I tried to control myself, but the task quickly proved impossible. The man then took my laughter as encouragement and mistakenly assumed I thought he was funny. This lead to many more jokes. (something about the dead sea being sick and a 400 hundred year old man...oy) We were finally able to escape and head to Jes' house.

Since there was ice on the car and windshield, it should have been no surprise that her driveway was completely frozen. Yet it still caught me completely off guard...and I almost wiped out. We wrapped a few presents and now I'm off to bed.

Pretty sure, I've been up for almost 24 hours and I was in Florida this morning! Wow....what a night!