A whole new year in which to make bad decisions! Yay!

I definitely finished out the old year and jumped right into the new in the true spirit of this blog: I went to my parents' house and did not write a thing for close to a month.

A month! I don't even know if I know how to write anymore. What is this thing I am banging on with my fingers? A keyboard? What IS that?

Instead of writing, I ate. And ate and ate and ate meat and bread and banana pudding and candy and chicken salad and cheese, all topped off with beer, wine and eggnog. Bad decisions, to be sure. I think I gave myself gout. I definitely gave myself a stomachache, and, like a truly crazy person, refused to learn from my gourmet mistakes, instead making new ones every day.

Even on the ride home - a bad decision all on its own, for reasons I will describe shortly - I could not tame the eating beast that I had cultivated throughout my ill-deserved vacation. We ate at Sonic (bacon cheeseburger AND chocolate cream pie shake), then we ate at Wendy's, then we ate beef jerky and sour patch kids and Pepsi. And we didn't move for 20 hours.

Yes, twenty. Being the incredibly wise and forward-thinking people that we are, we (Gerard, the dog and I) decided about half-way through our trip that we were not going to stop in DC, as planned, but, instead, would drive all the way to New Jersey in one crazy road adventure.

This was stupid on two, maybe three, counts:
1) Not stopping in DC meant we would not get to see the lovely Alejandro, who I had just called the day before to drop the last-minute bomb that we would be invading his house. I had to call him back and even-more-last-minute cancel, probably ruining his plans for the evening and being an all-around terrible friend.

2) Twenty hours is long and exhausting for even the most well-rested and alert of drivers. We were not well-rested and alert. We had gone to a wine-tasting/ridiculous-fest with my family the night before and were driving on 6.5 hours of sleep and the slowly dissipating remnants of 6 glasses of wine in our bellies.

3) Snow happened. AGAIN. "The blizzard of '09" struck the night before I was supposed to ship out of New Jersey to get home, and even after having to shovel myself out of a driveway and make my first attempt at snow-driving alone, I did not learn to plan my travel around the weather. Just after passing DC (where we could have stopped!) on the drive home, the snow showers started up. We had to make he rest of the trip puttering along below the speed limit, unable to see more than a few feet in front of us.

We made it home (well, to NJ) at 3:45 AM.

We are now back in Brooklyn, where our new year will really get up and running. School starts back in a few days (Monday for Gerard, the next week for me), I go back to the admissions office tomorrow, I have faith that one day I will actually get assigned to teach a Kaplan class, and the great "stop Lauren from eating so much" experiment will begin. I feel that this year will give me much to write about, especially once I begin my student teaching in February. Stay tuned.