My family and I have been in San Francisco for the past 5 days or so, all of us coldy-sick the entire time, but it didn’t much matter. Despite being pretty miserable, we managed to have a great time being together in our favorite California city. We’re all determined to move there one day.

Paddy, David, and Andy did a great job keeping TPC chugging away, and I did my best to check in when I could on a teeny tiny notebook ‘puter that refused to cooperate. My sincere thanks to all of them for allowing me to get away for awhile.

I was forced to cancel most of my vacation plans (including Tweet-ups) because of the endless cold that still lingers to this day, but I pushed myself hard to go out to dinner on Day One with @AliKat747 and one of my all-time fave people and MSNBC contributors, Joan Walsh, who is even more wonderful in person.

But first this happened: If you’re familiar with Laffy’s Big Road Trips, you remember our 2010 Big Road Trip from Hell. This vacay threatened to rival the one in ’10, but thankfully never attained that awful status. Two hours on the road, we stopped for lunch at… ta daaa!… Pea Soup Anderson’s in Buellton when Mr. Laffy suddenly turned to me and said, “Uh oh, I think I have some bad news for you.” I couldn’t imagine what it was considering we were all together standing in line to get a table and nothing new and scary had happened in the past 5 seconds. At all. It was most certainly a WTF Moment.

“What?!” I asked in a more confused state than usual.

“I forgot to pack your clothes.”

Dun-dun-dunnn!

Mr. Laffy has always been the official clothes packer. We lay out our stuff, he packs our stuff. It’s been that way for years. But this year our cats decided to trample all over my laid-out stuff, so Mr. Laffy moved it, and then forgot to pack it.

As Rick Perry would say, “Oops.”

I was too sick to buy new stuff, let alone fight the Day After Christmas shopping crowd in SF, plus who knows if I’d find anything? And I had that dinner coming up that night with Joan and Ali. All I wanted to do was rest up so I’d be well enough to see them. So, around we turned and back home we went to pick up my clothes.

12 hours after we first took off for San Fran, at about 11:30 pm, we arrived at our hotel and fell into bed. The rest of the trip was great, if you ignore the semi-permanent coldy, coughy, laryngitisy state were were all in.

It’s good to be back, but it was soooo nice to be away. I hope every one of you had a happy holiday and I wish you a slightly early but very happy, healthy New Year.

Now we’re home safe and sound, still coughing and hoarse, but as Ed Schultz would say, let’s get to work. Because, from what little I saw while I was gone, we have a whole lot to do.