I’m back. I’ve missed you, blog. I’ve missed you, too, blog readers. But as the great Roman poet Ovid once wrote, “What is without periods of rest will not endure.”

Random fact related to Ovid #1: Ovid is generally ranked alongside Virgil and Horace as one of the canonical poets of Latin literature. Now you know.

Random fact related to Ovid #2: Around the time I first heard of Ovid (at some point in high school), I began to read more scholarly-type books that had footnotes and endnotes. In scholarly writing, when you give a reference the first time, you list all the title/author/publisher/page number info. If you then reference the same publication right after that, you simply write Ibid., p. 43 or whatever. It’s an abbreviation for ibidem, a Latin phrase meaning “the same place.” During that span of time, there was a period where I confused the poet Ovid with the reference Ibid., and the result was that I kept reading books and thinking, “Man, this Ibid guy gets quoted everywhere! And about everything! I’ve gotta read some of his stuff.”

My teenage fascination with the incredibly popular and well-rounded Latin poet Ibid was brief but intense. Also very, very dorky.

Well. That was a really weird way to ease back into blogging for 2009. Anyway, my Ovid-inspired period of rest is over so now this blog can endure. Tomorrow I will list my new year’s resolutions and invite you to do the same, so be thinking about that.

But today? Today I want to tell you three cool things I experienced over my Christmas and New Year’s break and invite you to list the three coolest things you experienced.

The Three Coolest Things I Did Over Christmas and New Year’s:

1. I accompanied my mom to a tattoo parlor, where she got her first tattoo. My mom, oddly enough, has long desired a tattoo. For at least the last ten years or so. (She is cool that way.) So for her 60th birthday in November, my brother and sister and I treated her to a tattoo. With everyone in town over Christmas, we took her to a local tattoo place where she got a tiny little daisy on her foot. My sister got a matching one.

2. I did a CrossFit workout with my sister. I’d read some stuff about CrossFit — it’s a highly intense, full-body, overall-fitness workout system-slash-philosophy that’s popular with military personnel and law-enforcement types and really well-rounded athletes. My sister, a former gymnast, is NOT in the military or law enforcement. And she just had a baby in June. So I expected, being a sort-of triathlete who is still in decent shape, to be able to hang with her. But I could barely keep up. I was limp-limbed for the rest of the day. And I was sore for the next week. CrossFit may be controversial, and it’s not exactly what I’d describe as fun, but I can certainly see how it might be beneficial.

3. I dug a snow cave. My family and I spent the last couple days of 2008 and first day of 2009 at our good friends’ cabin in Angel Fire, New Mexico. Behind the cabin was a pile of snow nearly five feet high, where the results of a recent 30-inch snowfall had fallen from the roof. My two kids and I looked at that big pile of snow and thought: Let’s dig a big hole. The hole turned into a cave. The cave turned into a tunnel. The kids and I could all fit in it at once, side-by-side. We could have survived an avalanche in that thing. It was awesome.

So…those are my three most different and cool holiday experiences. What were yours?