Got back last night from a last-minute, long-weekend trip to NYC and Connecticut.  It's a real treat to be in Manhattan at Christmastime!  I have nieces and nephews that live in the city, and a brand-new GREAT niece my mom and I couldn't wait another day to see!  Beautiful Baby Jane Kiely has a long, diagonal fauxhawk that makes you want to see her in a little leather jacket.  Mom grossed us all out by showing how she pressed our hair down when it stood up like that when we were babies -- by licking her fingers and using her mom-spit  -- GEEZ! I could have lived forever without knowing that!  I finally got to see my nephew Tim's band perform live -- The Canon Logic -- they are awesome, and the band packed the joint!  My niece Amanda's office is in The Empire State Building, so we got to skip the line and go to the top to check it out. I have a picture of the last time I had been at the top.  I was about 17 and am sitting on what looks like the ledge of the roof with a couple of friends.  You go up there now and there's a fence atop the ledge so you won't throw yourself off. The view is still one of the greatest you'll ever see, though my heart will always ache not to see the Twin Towers in that view. My brother and his family live in Connecticut, about an hour outside the city, so we stayed there, too.  Whoever wrote "Over the River and Through the Woods" HAD to have written it about Connecticut during the holidays!

So on our way home last night, the airport security door beeped as I tried to pass through.  I took off my chunky ring, the only thing that I thought could have been the problem, but it still beeped as I went back through.  Now I'm thinking it's some hardware I have in my ankle from a bad break a few years ago, although that's never made the security gate beep before.  "M'am, please stand over there," I'm told as a security guard pointed to a glass booth.  Uh-oh.  I look over at my mom and she looks totally embarrassed, like I've done something wrong.  A huge, burly woman comes over to me and asks me to follow her.  Has this happened to you yet?  I'm telling you, it was the damnedest thing.  I had to bite my tongue, HARD, not to holler out to my mom -- "Aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh, they want to touch my junk!"  'Ms. Burly' asked me if I had heard about the new security procedures.  I wanted to die laughing, but I bit my tongue hard again and said, "Yes!"  I got the major pat-down -- right there in front of everyone.  It wasn't so bad and I decided that, since there are crazies that want to blow us out of the sky, I could easily handle the latest inconvenience.   A sober reminder is what's missing in that beautiful NYC skyline.