Home, and back again.

I took a trip from the LA (to the Phoenix to the Chicago) to the Cleveland to the Columbus (to the Phoenix) and back to the LA lately. On the way home, I took pictures of all the empty aeroports. I also took some pictures of joyously reuniting family members, but you can just get a copy of Love Actually if that's what you're looking for.

The things the terminals had in common were being empty, festooned with holiday decorations, and being ever-so-slightly creepy. Apparently I wasn't just flying United anymore:

And over here, the stanchions keep people from walking through the big empty space:

The most remarkable of the considerably-larger-than-I'm-showing-you-here set of empty airport photos was this. I meant to capture the frustration of being in an airport for a couple hours and able to see food and beverages, yet unable to obtain them. Instead I seem to have captured the image of a child and his dog in the midst of a great adventure.

And last is something fantastic available in Chicago's O'Hare-port. There's a little placard nearby that explains that the bones are totally fake.

While I was home, I collected a lot of heavy books and DVDs that I then hauled back across the country. I saw more family than I expected to, and some other peoples' families who were all super, super-nice to me. I spent some time with Kristy, who is my favorite, and I gave her an enigmatic Christmas present that she has not yet solved. We found a geocache together and were finally rid of a cursed (dancing) pirate DVD. I won games of scrabble with words like 'squeeze' and 'zulu' and lost games of Mario Party with spaces like 'this one means you don't have stars anymore.'

Most of all, the weeks spent back in Ohio cast into sharp relief what I'm giving up in order to be in California, making movies, or jokes, or terrible terrible video projects that nobody will ever see.