Christmas and New Year's

I was doing the dishes when I decided to see what Emily was doing. I went into the living room and was floored when I saw that she was writing a blog post. She never writes blog posts! It was crazy.

I've actually been meaning to write another blog post so that we could have the memories of our first Christmas and New Year's Eve being married written down. That way in 20 years from now, if our kids ask about how it was, we'll be able to tell them.

It continued to be snowy around Christmas time, as shown in this photo album I put on Facebook. Our plan was to spend Christmas Eve with my family and Christmas Day with Emily's. We were somewhat concerned about going to my parents' house in Silverton since it's about 15 miles away from where we live. However, we made it out there just fine. It was a pretty quiet Christmas Eve. My nephews were a little bit crazy, but not too bad. That's to be expected of kids their age (one is one, one is two, and one is three). We had spaghetti for dinner, which my sister, Jacquelyn, and Emily made. That's kind of a non-traditional meal to have at Christmas time, but it was good. Our original plan was to leave that night, but we ended up staying because of the weather. The next morning (Christmas), we opened presents. We got a lot of nice things. I really liked my Firefox shirt and Gorillapod. It was nice to be able to spend the morning there. We left at about 10:30 and made it home pretty quickly. The roads were very clear, which kind of surprised me. Also, the fields that were white the day before were now mostly green. When we got home, we got things ready at the apartment and then Emily's parents came over in the early afternoon. We talked and had a nice French onion soup, which Emily made. It was very good! We also played Rummikub and watched a few videos on YouTube. Emily's parents are really great people (I promise I'm not just saying that). A lot of people have issues with their in-laws, but I really do like mine. It was very nice to spend Christmas with them.

Since Jacquelyn was going to be heading back down to California on Sunday the 28th, we spent time with her on Saturday the 27th. On our way to meet up with Jacquelyn and my mom, we saw this:



It was pretty neat to see. Once we met up with Jacquelyn and my mom, we did a little shopping at Target. Emily got some earrings and some kind of body spray and I got some audio stuff and a headset. I got the headset so that I could record nerdy screencasts. After that, we ate at Taco Del Mar. It was then that we decided that Emily and I would spend the night at my parents' house, so we went back home afterwards to get our stuff together. Then we met back up with Jacquelyn and my mom at Good Will, then spent the rest of the night at my parents' house. We played Speed Scrabble, which is always exciting. I also took some random pictures while we were there. I like how this one turned out:



As for New Year's Eve, it was so different than it has been for the last few years. For 2005 and 2006, I was on my mission in the Philippines, so it was very interesting (especially with the fireworks). For 2007, I was with my best friend, his wife, her brother, and his wife. That was when I first played Apples to Apples. For 2008, I was at Scott's old studio with several friends. This year, however, we just stayed at home. I had a pretty bad headache and fell asleep at around 10:30. I woke up a few minutes before midnight and heard people making noise outside and then fell back asleep 30 or 45 minutes later. We had a New Year's kiss, though, morning breath and all. It was nice :) That was about it for the real New Year's. Emily already talked about our New Year's celebration last night. Before we left for Eugene, we were at Fred Meyer looking for a toy for Chloe and we found an awesome Elmo toy. I was having a lot of fun messing with it. We got a video:



Emily's reading Harry Potter right now. I'm going to see if she wants to play a board game or maybe Dr. Mario.

first blog post of 2009

it's finally 2009!! and by finally i mean holy crap it's 2009!! we had a fun christmas season and new year. we had a lot of snow days and i ended up having over a week off. if was nice to stay home and be domestic. i actually kind of like it. we were finally able to organize our spare room and find homes for the things we have. i never thought i would be excited by cleaning, and i guess i'm not such a freak that i am excited about cleaning, it's more the results that i like, the process sucks. how do you like that run on sentence?
last night we went to autumn and alvin's apartment for the first time. it was fun :) we got to see chloe for a little while before she had to go to bed. she is an awesome kid. cody and scott were also there. this was our new years celebration because we couldn't really do it on thursday. we had a white elephant gift exchange. we took home a HUGE tub of black licorice and this amazing light bulb:

on the way home we got a little lost trying to find our way back to the freeway. we found it after about ten or fifteen minutes...or maybe more, i don't know. so we start following the signs to "portland" and after not too long we saw a truck diving on our side of the high way in the wrong direction. kind of crazy. luckily he passed us without incident, we called 911. hopefully they caught him. but because we were caught up with the 911 operator we missed our exit and went into springfield. oops! we were able to get turned in the right direction and safely home to salem in just about two hours. (it normally takes about an hour)

...ok the end