Lisa and I made it home from Wyoming to find the house still standing, the heat still working, and the kitty still happily away at his little resort until tomorrow afternoon. We have completely unpacked, and Lisa even set out all of the Christmas decorations. That’s a little easier to do this year, since we aren’t decorating a tree. We love getting a Christmas tree, but it doesn’t make sense to put one up just to let it dry out while we’re spending the week around Christmas in Oregon.

I was a bit nervous about today’s journey. Casper was forecast to have two inches of snow, starting right around the time this morning that we were to leave. And somehow I got us a the Casper to Denver to Chicago to Boston itinerary with tight layovers of less than an hour at each stop. But after the frustrating travel experiences we had last month on our way to and from Kansas, we had good travel karma today. We even walked out the door at baggage claim just as the Logan Express to Framingham rounded the corner. That never happens.

We very much enjoyed spending time with my mom and seeing friends in Wyoming, but it’s nice to be home. Nice to be back to sea level. To be back to my pile of reading.

While my two shelves of books will persist into the new year, my periodicals stack won’t. At the beginning of the year I set myself a goal of cleaning up the big shipping box full of various magazines and issues of the New York Times Book Review that I had amassed over the two and a half years that I was in grad school. What I haven’t finished at the end of the year goes into the recycling. “Out with the old” and all that.

Sadly, I haven’t made much progress throughout the year. But I did manage to read a bunch of magazines on the flights last Sunday and today, so maybe there’s hope after all. The Runner’s World article on 1980’s hurdling phenom Danny Harris, who destroyed his career with cocaine, and the National Geographic Adventure feature on a new hiking trail across Nepal were my favorites. The Scientific American article from last year about how the Large Hadron Collider will likely reshape physics reminded me that when I was younger I wanted to be a particle physicist. Oh well, something more to read about next year.