Very Christmas-y

Is it just me, or does nothing say "Christmas is coming" quite like red snow-covered berries?

Ice Storm

The worst of the ice storm came after dark last night, and it was hard for me to get a picture at that time. It was raining, and cameras don't usually like rain, particularly not rain that freezes on contact. But I was able to capture this shot taken at Palmer of the windows completely glazed over with ice:

Every window on campus looked like this. It was kind of eerie to walk through the halls and not be able to see out any of the windows.

Baby Shower

Well, it was a crazy day for a baby shower yesterday. Davenport got hit with an ice storm, which certainly made things interesting. Originally, the shower was going to be at our friends Matt & Kelly's house, but they live at the bottom of a hill and there were concerns that with the amount of ice we were getting, people might not be able to get back up the hill. So, we moved it to our house. Not even 2 minutes before people arrived our power went out. We had 2 options: light a bunch of candles and have the most romantic baby shower ever, or take our chances and move the party back to our original location. We went with option 2 (I was voting for option 1 :-P). After all the craziness the party was great, and the baby quilts that Amber (left) and I made were a hit.

Left to right: Amber, Renee (& Abri), and Me

Oh, and it should be mentioned that on the game where you guess how big around the Mom-to be is, my guess was exactly right. I rule. :-)

Merry Christmas, Moose

We got Moose a new cat bed for Christmas this year. In the spirit of giving, we decided to give it to him early so that he could start enjoying it now.

Naturally, he much prefers the pile of laundry:

Random Kinds of Factness

A completely random and useless (though still blogworthy) piece of information about Brett and I is the fact that we love to collect ornaments. We collect new ones every year. We like ornaments of places we have been, we get an "Our Christmas Together" ornament every year, and most recently we started collecting chiropractic ornaments. We have decided to get a chiropractic ornament for every year we are at Palmer. Last year's was a snowman couple holding a heart that said "Chiropractic Christmas." This year, what better way to celebrate the season than with a snowman caduceus?

A Funny From Outback

While at dinner at Outback this evening, Brett and I were amused by the sentiment on this coaster:
Its times like these when I'm glad I have a blog... and a camera. :-)

Happy Birthday

I had a very fun 22nd birthday. It snowed which was exciting. It was the perfect kind of snow: the kind that falls and looks pretty but melts as soon as it hits the ground. We had dinner at a restaurant called Granite City which we had been wanting to try for a long time. It is a restaurant/brewery with a very nice atmosphere. I would recommend it to anyone who has been thinking about trying it. Other than that we pretty much just hung out around the house, which was nice to do too. Here are some pictures from the day:

Tree Hunting

The Friday after Thanksgiving is our traditional Christmas decorating day. We went to the same tree farm we went to last year to cut down our tree.

Jack Frost Pines Tree Farm:


THE tree:


Trimming the tree:




The Finishing Touch:


In all it's Christmas glory:

I'm Dreaming of a White...Thanksgiving???

We had our first taste of winter Wednesday night. Snow fell for a good portion of the evening, but due to ground temperatures being so high, not much of it stuck around. We did see a little evidence of winter on it's way when we went to cut down our Christmas tree yesterday:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! Even though we were not able to be back in San Diego for Thanksgiving we still had a pretty good day. We went down to our neighbor's house for dinner, but being big fans of leftover Thanksgiving food, we decided to do our own Thanksgiving at home first. Here are some pictures from our day:

Brett's Delicious Turkey:







Some things never change, but I think my fingers may have gotten a little bigger:








My delicious home-made apple pie ready to go into the oven:







Ready to go to dinner:

Bowling

Well, I may have spoken too soon about our bowling team kicking butt. We got our butts kicked last week on bowling night. The guys we played bowled multiple turkeys each game, which was certainly difficult to compete with. Although, according to the score board our team won because the guys we played were not so smart and deleted their handicap. In an effort to keep things on the up and up we let them count their handicap on their total score and we got totally clobbered. Better luck next week. Fortunately for us, one of our team-mates has a good friend who is a semi-professional bowler. He will be giving us pointers when we practice next week.

Hilarious

Anyone who has ever played Wii can appreciate this:

Update

I realized today that I have been a little bit of a slacker when it comes to the blog posts, so I thought that I would update you on what's been going on lately.

1.) My knee. As many of you know I injured my knee recently. Not terribly, but bad enough that I couldn't walk on it for a few days. I am happy to report that I am walking much better now. Luckily, I now work for a chiropractor (see #2) and she is working to make sure that my knee recovers. Just for fun, I thought I would post the picture above. Through the magic of digital x-ray, that is actually MY knee that you are looking at. Pretty cool, huh?

2.) My job. This is my third week working at my new job. I landed my dream job (with pretty decent pay, too) in Durant, which is about 20 miles west of here. The only downside of the job is the fact that it is 20 miles away, but I figure if that's the only downside I am pretty lucky.

3.) Bowling. Palmer League bowling began last week. Every Thursday night from now through early next year we can be found at the bowling alley. Last week our team did pretty well. We won, and our team score was into the 500's for all three games, while most other teams were only in the 300's. It looks like it is going to be a pretty good bowling "season" (is that what you call it when it's bowling?). I plan on taking some pictures tonight, so hopefully I will have those posted in the next couple of days.

Today is October 30th

Today is October 30th, but (for reasons that I do not understand) trick-or-treating is going on tonight. Not tomorrow. No, we wouldn't want to actually hold Halloween festivities on Halloween. Is this just some weird Midwest tradition that I do not understand? I also had someone tell me that trick-or-treating is usually done the Sunday before Halloween. That information is inconsistent with the fact that trick-or-treating is taking place on this fine Tuesday, but it still brings up 2 questions: 1) Why Sunday? It's still a school night (the only logical reason I can come up with for the change) and 2.) Why not just have it on Halloween?!?!?!? If anyone has the answer to this please let me know.

Black Mold

In recent news: we may have black mold living in our walls. We had our (downstairs) neighbors Ken & Jen up Sunday night for pizza and a movie. They told us that there is a bit of a mold "situation" brewing between our two apartments, and they think it may be black mold. Apparently there is evidence that our wonderful apartment complex just painted over some water damage from a leak rather than repairing it properly, so this time we have a city inspector coming out to verify that it is in fact black mold and to force the complex to fix it properly. The unfortunate side of this is that if it is "toxic" mold and they do have to do some serious work to fix it, it is very likely that we will have to move. The mold inspector just called Ken today to make an appointment, so I will update more when we know more about the situation.