Network Solutions has finally resolved the complications involved in my transfer of hosting plans.  That means all the images and files that I host on JustMorons and link to from here (including the lovely logo, above) are finally active again and will remain so into the future, since I also got a whole bunch more storage space in the new, cheaper plan.

 

America is as big and beautiful and boisterous as I remembered it, and then some.  I'm drinking oceans of Diet Pepsi Twist and eating all my favorite American foods to excess.  (And, starting today, spending a little time at an American gym to counteract all those American calories.)  Molli has had a rough go of it, struggling first with the seven hour time change from Denmark to Chicago, then with what we thought was a bad cold but turned out to be a sinus infection.  She's on antibiotics now and getting better every day.

 

(Anyone got any tricks for getting a kid to take that awful sweet pink antibiotic serum they give kids here, by the way?  What's America got against suppositories?  Molli loves suppositories.  Seriously.  She even loves her rectal thermometer.  It's kind of disturbing, to tell you the truth.  Are we in the next Freudian stage here?  If we ruin her relationship with her thermometer now, is she going to end up stacking her shoes in alphabetical order when she gets older?)

 

I haven't been paying much attention to the news or current events: this whole trip has been--and will for another week be--all about seeing family and friends and sucking the marrow out of every precious moment we've got here.  Molli is drinking the English language as though by sheer osmosis, and even at her sickest she was learning a couple of new words a day.  (Personal favorite: she knows that frogs say "ribit" now, but she pronounces it "RIB it!" -- as though offering an emphatic answer to the question, "Should we have ribs or chicken tonight?")

 

I got to watch the Bears clinch their division in a Chicago sports bar on Division Street (and even won three out of four squares during the game).  I got to watch the Patriots smack the Jets around at my parents' home in New England.  I've seen my actor friends on stage, my singing friends--er, friend--singing at a club, and got to watch my nieces torment my daughter with glee.  It's been a great trip and there's just no point in pretending I'm going to do any significant blogging before I get home early in the new year.

 

Hope you all had a great Christmas and have a brilliant new year!