I’ve been home for two days and have not taken a single photo since we got home.

Our flight from Omaha to DC on Saturday was at 6am. When I woke Annalie up at 4:15 Saturday morning, she sat up and immediately started crying and saying it was too early. My mom and I knew exactly how she felt. We’re both night-before-travel insomniacs, and we had to wake up at 3:30am to leave for the airport by 4:30. My mom and I were pretty much zombies all day Saturday, and Annalie was ten times crazier than usual, which is how she gets when she’s really tired. We all went to bed by 8pm Saturday and slept peacefully for 12 lovely hours.

Except that meant I went to bed at 11pm tonight and couldn’t get to sleep. After a while I got tired of tossing and turning so I got up and watched bits of the last six or seven episodes of Chuck on iTunes.

I’ll be honest; it’s been hard to love Chuck this season. The characters have to change for the show to not be completely boring, conflict is necessary for good story-telling, darkest before the dawn, blah blah blah. Even knowing those things, though, I still just didn’t feel as interested in it. I’ve decided there were three main reasons:

1. I’ve been keeping up on the Chuck news and reading the episode reviews. I think it’s been a bit of overkill for me.
2. Because of the addition of a new character (Daniel Shaw) to Team Bartowski, the team was often split up or working at cross-purposes. One of the things I love best about Chuck is the chemistry between the three leads. Take that away and the show just isn’t as much fun to watch.
3. I managed to watch the first two seasons of Chuck, all 35 episodes, in the span of one week. Maybe if I’d had to watch them one episode at a time, waiting a week or more between times, I wouldn’t have enjoyed them nearly as much.

I’ve been theorizing for a while that once Season 3 is over, if I were to have a marathon and watch the whole season in a day, I’d probably enjoy it much more. And after fast-forwarding through the last half of the season, I was happy and relieved that I was right, and I enjoyed the bits I watched much more than I expected to, both because I knew what was going to happen (I hate suspense, remember?) and because it was like watching a long movie instead of a serialized TV show. Also, I had forgotten how many great moments this season has had…

*SPOILER ALERT*

Morgan’s stunned and joyful reaction to finding out Chuck is a spy…Morgan and Awesome learning that they both know Chuck’s secret…Casey realizing he has a daughter, and later telling Chuck he has to decide between love and love of country, and that Walker is a good woman—who’d have ever thought in Season 1 we would get Casey encouraging Chuck to go after the woman he loves, in Casey’s own inimitable style!?…Chuck’s straightforward declaration of his love for Sarah…Chuck at a low point, drunk in his boxers and holding a plastic guitar, while Sarah sweetly admitted she fell for him before he even defused that bomb with a computer virus…Sarah and Chuck, in handcuffs, kung-fu-ing the bad guys in the bakery together so awesomely that it was like dancing (and Casey and Morgan pitching in with a re-enactment of a previous fight scene with Casey & Chuck).

*End spoilers*

Yeah, I find that I’m still liking Chuck quite a bit, rough patches and all. I will say, I loved episode 3.14 and have high hopes for the remaining five episodes. Now let’s hope they get renewed for Season 4 so we can have a whole season of Morgan annoying Casey and Chuck and Sarah fighting awesomely. And maybe a few more performances from JEFFSTER!

(All that said, Castle is still my new favorite show. And it already got renewed for next season, so I can watch its last few episodes without worrying about its chances for renewal!)

Okay, now that I’ve let my geek flag fly again (all over my blog, at 3am), I think I can go to sleep now and dream about the list of things I need to get done week before Annalie’s birthday party this weekend.

p.s. New banner’s up! Thanks again, B.