Back from my trip to Florida. Had a good time. Saw my grandparents (all three surviving ones). Got to meet my paternal grandfather's girlfriend. (Girlfriend seems like such an odd word to apply to someone who's eighty-three, but 'my paternal grandfather's lover' sounds weirder. Anyway, I met her and she's cool.)

A combination of flight cancellations and flight delays meant that I spent most of Christmas Day in the Atlanta airport. Of course, my flight home went off without a hitch. I suppose it's not really the airline's fault, and since Christmas isn't really my holiday, I can't really complain that they ruined my Christmas. But still - there were eight extra hours that day that I could have spent with my grandparents.

Instead I spent them drinking coffee and reading Robin McKinley's Sunshine. Which is by no means the worst way to spend the day, but I could have done that at home instead of in the Atlanta airport with my entire family waiting for me to catch that last measly hour long flight to Daytona Beach.

Went boating on the Intercoastal Waterway and saw egrets and blue herons (a blue heron in flight is the coolest thing imaginable) and what I think was an osprey, and an anhinga. The anhinga is a rather curious bird that swims with it's body entirely submerged under the water, with just its head sticking up like the periscope of a submarine. Evolution declined to equip the anhinga with oily secretions on its feathers to keep them dry like other waterbirds have, so it can often be seen spreading out its wings in the sun to dry them.

We went to the Castillo San Marcos (the old town fort) in St. Augustine, which was one of my favorite places in the world when I was a child. Daniel and I climbed all over the old cannon (which I also did as a child) and read the Latin inscriptions on them (which I couldn't do as a child). There were a bunch of cannon there which, as far as I could tell, had never belonged to the actual fort, but which were from the correct period. Most of them were Spanish-made cannon which had been captured by the U.S. during either the Mexican War or the Spanish American War. We found a pair of cannon that had been made in Seville in 1724, and had been captured in the Spanish American War in 1898. Kind of amazing that the cannon would be intact and in use after all that time.

I discovered that, "No, thank you, really, I've eaten enough" is still not a phrase that has any meaning in my grandmother's dialect of English.

My mother gave me a yo-yo that plays the dreidel song, and as I was changing planes in Atlanta on the way home, it began to play from somewhere deep inside my carry on lugagge. Fortunately, it stopped.

It's good to be home.