Christmas in Review

As usual, I made my pilgrimage to Wichita for the Christmas holiday. It was definitely a nice and needed break filled with sweet treats and gifts.

Here's a clip of Megan (my sister) and I making Christmas cookies:

One of the low points of the trip was the crappy weather on Saturday. It was snowing and the wind was blowing so hard that you couldn't even see the street from my parent's house:

It pretty much did this all day until the afternoon. Since the weather had calmed down by the evening, I had planned on going out and seeing friends that I never get to. I didn't even make it a mile from my parents house when I ended up in the ditch on Webb road. I was traveling North bound when I gave the accelerator a tiny push. This whipped my back end 180 degrees and I ended up bumper deep in the snow on the other side of Webb. Luckily, within a few minutes, a Durango with 4WD stopped and helped pull me out. I was stuck really good and it took around 5 good tugs to get me out. The amazing thing was that my Pathfinder nor myself sustained any damage.

Christmas Eve we had a big dinner with smoked pork and all kinds of desserts with the grandparents. Needless to say, I put away at least two plates and 7-8 Christmas treats. On Christmas day, I think I ate an illegal amount of food. Seriously, if over-eating was against the law, I'd be serving 40 to life for the obnoxious amount of food I ate on Xmas. Starting in the morning, we ate breakfast casserole at my parents like we usually do. I headed down to Megan's parents around noon where we had a very tasty crab leg lunch served with baked potatoes, green beans, and jello salad. I then made it over to my aunt and uncle's house, Jean & Archie, around 3PM. They were serving authentic Mexican food of which I ate at least two plates full. The selection ranged from deep fried tacos to tamales to tostados, all of which were so good. I grazed on and off for the rest of the day and felt pretty crappy by the late evening.

I definitely made out well with the gifts this year too. Among many things, I received 3 new Wii games, several books, new tools, tailgating grill, and much much more. As always, I'm grateful for all the great stuff I get every year.

Yesterday, Megan and I took advantage of all the sales and got a crap ton of Christmas lights for next year at Target where all their Christmas stuff was 75% off. Megan had already bought us a tree and a few other things, but we picked up a bunch of icicle style lights and other lights to drape over the bushes.

Santa didn't get Ember the FURminator. I've been getting more and more frustrated with the amount of dog hair in the house, so yesterday I splurged and bought her the $45 medium size FURminator. I can't believe I spent this much on a damn dog brush, but it ended up being a worthwhile investment. The propaganda accompanied with the FURminator always has a picture of the dog next to all the hair extracted from the tool. So, I had to take my own FURminator picture the first time I used it on Ember last night. The one on the left is a picture of a Shiba from the FURminator website and the one on the right is my Shiba Ember:

I could have gotten more hair off of her, but after 30+ minutes she was starting to get pretty pissed and wouldn't let me do much more brushing. I put all my pictures from Christmas here. Here's to having less hair in the house in 2008!!