We’re back from a weeklong trip to Nebraska for Christmas during which we somehow managed to avoid being killed, arrested or frozen until spring. You can find the pictures here.

Things started out on slightly shaky ground when I had minor surgery four days before we were scheduled to leave. There wasn’t any real health risk associated with travel—other than the fact that I wasn’t supposed to lift anything heavier than ten pounds. Needless to say, this made navigating the check-in process more interesting and fun for Julie.

Just to make things more interesting, I somehow managed to shave off one of the knots holding my stitches in place the morning we left town, which left open the possibility that my wound might reopen, and my head simply roll off my neck at some point during the flight. That was the image I had running through my mind throughout the day, at least.

Nobody flies directly from San Jose to Omaha, so we had a convenient, two-hour stopover in Denver. This was perfectly fine in theory: it gave us plenty of time to get from one gate to the next and to grab some dinner, since our flight was scheduled to arrive in Nebraska sometime after 10:30 that evening. Unfortunately, United had something altogether different in mind, and our outgoing flight was delayed. Not just delayed, but delayed a full four and a half hours, until 11:40 Mountain Time. Now, instead of a convenient two-hour break to stretch our legs and have a relaxed (if preposterously expensive) dinner, we had six and a half hours to kill.

Now, a six or seven-hour delay really doesn’t seem that bad in the grand scheme of things. In fact, at that very moment, my friend Steve was in the middle of a two-day delay in New York with his mother, during which he had to make his own arrangements for lodging and travel to and from the airport. So a few extra hours in Denver wouldn’t be so bad, except for two child-sized factors.

As it turns out, though, we underestimated the kids. All things considered, they behaved extremely well while we waited for our departure, though there were a few times I thought security was going to drag us off to the bowels of the airport for spending too much time doing laps on the moving walkways. Fortunately, we were at the far end of the terminal, and there weren’t too many people for us to disturb.

Incidentally, Denver International Airport has the worst WiFi network in the history of the known universe. I know it’s churlish to complain about Internet access that is, after all, free, but still: worst ever.

We finally arrived in Omaha around 2:30 the next morning, and thanks to Julie’s brother Bill, we made it up to Madison by 5:00 and settled in for a nice, relaxing visit. In fact, things ended up being even more relaxing than we’d planned, as the region was knocked for a loop by a combination of snow, wind and cold that left us virtual shut-ins for the second half of the trip. Roads were closed throughout the state due to drifting snow, so we didn’t even make it down to Julie’s brother Dave’s house, and Julia was extremely disappointed that she didn’t get a chance to see her only cousins in the world.

The one other piece of news worth noting is that I think it’s safe to say that Julia is officially reading. She was already doing a pretty good job of sounding out words and parsing sentences when my parents were here for Thanksgiving last month. Now, she’s pretty much reading whole books—when motivated—on her own, and she’s picked up the trick of reading random roadside signs aloud when we tool around town in the car. Obviously, this is just one step in her development, but it’s a pretty nifty one.