Warm Weather Christmas

It's kind of weird to have a warm weather Christmas. I can remember growing up as a child living in New Orleans. One just never knew whether it would be warm or cold. It's kind of like that here. Except here we expect it to be nice weather with very occasional rain. Between Christmas and New Years it was very nice. I think we had some rain one night. The day and night time temps have been low 70s/mid 60s. Pretty nice weather for winter.

Craig finally arrived after spending almost two days in Amsterdam. The surprisingly early snow storm in Europe definitely caught everyone by surprise. There were flight cancellations in German and both airports in London were closed for a short time. Craig's flight going from Amsterdam to Frankfurt was canceled because of weather conditions. They put him on a flight going through London. He doesn't wear a watch anymore because he relies on his mobile phone for time. His mobile phone would not work while in Europe because he did not have it unlocked before he left the US. Therefore, he asked someone what time it was. Unfortunately, it was a British person and their watch was one hour off. Therefore, Craig thought he had plenty of time to get to the gate. When he arrived at the gate 15 minutes before flight time, they had already started to off load his luggage. He went back to the check in counter to get on a different flight. They put him on a flight through London that would still let him get to his connecting flight on time. He gets to his gate at Heathrow 30 minutes before flight time and they tell him that he is not signed in for the flight. He shows them is boarding pass, but they tell him that they will put him on standby. Finally, they let him on the flight. All of this left me with a couple of sleepless nights, trying to get him on the right track. The first night in Amsterdam, he went and spent the night at a friends house. It was very snowy there also, so getting around on public transport was a chore. Everything worked out in the end.

We had a nice week showing Craig around Doha. To his surprise, he discovered Doha has a lot more to see than he first thought. He had a relaxing week enjoying some mom & dad time and getting over 9 hours of jet lag. Craig had not been up that early in the morning since he did this last year in Holland. He managed to be over jet lag before returning to Holland on Dec. 30th. He wanted to have New Year's eve and some additional days to spend some time catching up with his friends.

Jim and I had a nice quiet New Year's eve. The compound had a party in the clubhouse, but we were very tired. We sat outside for a while enjoying the Blue Moon and turned in early.