Christmas comes but thrice a year
First, our Christmas decorating efforts are here. Behold, in particular, the bear and the HUGE snowman. Also, yes, you are correct, that IS Phoenix Wright hanging on our Christmas tree.
Secondly: Aww, today we've been married six months. How cute.
Now, the meat of this post.
So, two weeks ago Aaron and I drove up to Michigan for an early Christmas with my family. On the way we stopped at a gas station and were consumed with nerd when we saw this in the gas station's insubstantial grocery department.
We arrived at my parents' on that Friday, ate dinner and hung out with my parents and two of my siblings, and began to eat some of the several dozen cookies I took along. Also we had to reacclimate to the presence of many stuffed cows - as much as cows are a running joke in our own household, there's nothing like visiting my mother's cow room. I looked solemnly at Aaron and informed him that "The cow have started to moo."
Also we let my brother play Picross on my DS after a Nintendo commercial on the TV prompted my father to ask if we had "that Brain Age game."
On Saturday, it was snowy but we made a couple of field trips just to get out of the house. One stop was a nearby Blockbuster, where we used some store credit to buy a DS for my brother Jeff. While debating which color to get, an employee asked, "Is it for a boy or a girl?" "It's for my 43-year-old brother," I explained.
Another stop was the Sears shopping center in Lincoln Park, which is soon to be largely torn down. We visited Gamestop - chaoticone knows this one as "A Gamestop already?" - and decided to use some of our store credit to get a couple games for Jeff - Picross and Platinum Sudoku+Kakuro. After this, we hit the Dollar Tree in the same shopping center, as we checked out, a voice came over the PA:
Disembodied voice: "Everyone, Tina has left the building."
Muffled voices throughout the store: "Yaaay."
The Christmas party was to be in the evening, around 8:30 or 9, waiting for my sister to arrive from a work-related event (an organization was giving money to the health clinic she runs for the uninsured, so she kinda had to be there). Around 10:30, she still hadn't arrived (she'd called to let us know the event was running late), so we started opening presents, starting with the oldest, my mom. Beth eventually did arrive around 11, and after all the unwrapping and socializing was done, I think everyone left around, like, 2 a.m. Zzzz.
We emerged from this event with the following phat lewt.
For me:
- compartmentalized loaf pan (from Mom and Dad)
- Hallmark bookstore ornament (from Mom and Dad)
- Read or Dream manga, volumes 2-4 (from Mom and Dad)
- Jar opener (from Mom and Dad - this prompted me to look at Aaron and say, "I don't need you anymore.")
- two sets of 12x12 Sterilite drawers for scrapbook paper (from Mom and Dad)
- Moonlighting season 5 on DVD (from Mom and Dad)
- awesome pair of Sony earbuds (from Mom and Dad)
- Best Buy gift card (from Gary and Steve)
- a couple of books (from Beth and Jeff)
- "Mom likes me best" t-shirt (from Jeff, who gave the same thing to Beth)
- Saber Marionette J artbook (from Aaron, since we had brought a couple of our presents for each other)
- baseball cards and the promise of a signed Curtis Granderson baseball (from Aaron, who commissioned my brother to pick it up from the Tigers' shop for him since we are not local to Detroit)
For Aaron:
- gallon of Frank's hot sauce (from Mom and Dad)
- cordless drill, spare battery, extra drill bits (from Mom and Dad)
- Hallmark video game controller ornament (from Mom and Dad)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail 3-disc special edition (from Mom and Dad)
- chili pepper ornament (from Mom and Dad)
- Best Buy gift card (from Gary and Steve)
- a Chicago Cubs book (from Beth and Jeff)
- a set of DS stylus extenders (from Beth and Jeff)
- garlic cookbook (from me)
- Super Bowl 41 t-shirt (from me)
For both of us:
- Sam's Club membership (from Mom and Dad)
- Meijer gift card (from Beth and Jeff)
We slept pretty late (9-ish) that Sunday since we were all up so late. We had planned to come home that day, but it had snowed heavily overnight, so we chose to stay an extra day and come home on Monday.
Anyway, Mom and Dad had a couple more presents for us that day, along with our Christmas stockings.
We got:
- a slow-cooker, which we have already used to great effect for the making of chili
- a pair of salt and pepper grinders.
My stocking was largely scrapbooking materials, including three pairs of edged scissors; his included tasty cheese, raisins, other foods, a sudoku book, a pack of foam paintbrushes, and a pack of elastic cords for the back of the truck.
I baked my awesome bread in my new loaf pan to go with dinner that night. We came home Monday to a frozen box of ribs waiting on our front porch, and the week that followed was largely uneventful.
I don't think anything terribly significant happened during the actual weekend, actually, aside from wrapping a couple of gifts, and Aaron starting to play Hotel Dusk on his DS. On Sunday, we baked more cookies to take to his parents. I believe Sunday was also the day we went to Value City Furniture and ordered some stuff for the living room - two video chairs (one red, one black) and four square storage cubes (two red, two black, to be arranged in a square in the living room that will be coffeetable-esque and still be functional and easily portable). We will be picking these up tonight.
On Christmas Eve, we drove down to Columbus for Christmas with his family. We had a tasty lunch of pasta and the usual accoutrements, and then we opened presents.
For Aaron:
- a bunch of shirts
- a chili-pepper-shaped container
- uh, seriously, I'm having a hard time remembering.
For me:
- paper trimmer for scrapbooking
- circle cutter for scrapbooking
- Hallmark "Ringing in Christmas" ornament, with the Peanuts characters ringing handbells eeeeeee :D
- a lavender fleece top with snowflakes stitched on it
For both of us:
- a cookbook
- super awesome jelly
At the end of the visit, or rather, what we thought was the end of the visit, the four of us drove over to the still-in-progress house his parents are having built. As we left, Aaron mentioned that we needed to hurry so we would get to Aldi before it closed. His mother suggested stopping at the Aldi in Columbus. We assumed that meant that the two of us would stop at the Aldi in Columbus. Apparently that meant that they would drive us there and then proceed to make three more random stops before finally returning to their home and giving us some frozen pumpkin.
We spent the entire first fifteen minutes of the trip home on various iterations of "what the HELL," pausing only to lament the fact that we forgot to bring the camera so we could take a picture of the Pisces zodiac stone a couple miles away from their house.
When we got home, we busted out the slow-cooker from my parents and started making chili for Christmas Day. We took a couple tiny bites before putting it in the fridge and MMMMM. Before going to bed, we ate cookies and chocolate milk together. ^_^
Christmas morning, we first woke up at 6 a.m. We laid around and tried to go back to sleep, and eventually I did, around 7 a.m., but I don't think he did. I woke around 7:30, I guess, and told him about the highly amoosing dream I'd been having. Then we went downstairs for Christmas, pausing only for him to check the eBays and for me to change into my new snowflake sweater and bring his stocking downstairs.
We drank cocoa as we opened our stockings. I emerged with some scrapbooking stuff (lots of brads), a PSP screen protector, a headphone splitter, some portobella mushrooms, and some British candy - Jaffa cakes and a Nestle Yorkie bar - "It's NOT for girls!" (This turns out not to be true. I ate it a few days ago and I am still a girl.)
His stocking:
- assorted chocolate bars (including chili pepper and lemon/black pepper
- assorted flavored and unflavored cashews
- tasty cheese
- salsa
- fish in hot sauce
- spatulas
- hot sauces
- summer sausage
- Starburst jelly beans
- a Colts ornament for the tree
Then we opened our other presents.
For me:
- Travel/vacation-themed scrapbooking kit
- Scrapbooking organizer
- Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for DS
- Trace Memory for DS
- Blue chenille sweater
- Gold and cream sweater
- Shower radio/CD player
For him:
- Pizza baking set (with baking stone, rack, and cutter)
- Jar of cashew butter
- Glass arcade machine Christmas ornament
- Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for DS
- A batch of tiny cookbooks for garlic, cheese, chili peppers, and bread
- Weird Al Yankovic In 3-D CD
- Mille Bornes card game
- The Encyclopedia of Sauces for Your Pasta (hey, the guy asked for a book of pasta sauces, and I deliver)
- Four Valkyrie Profile figures (Lenneth, Lezard, Freya, and Lucian)
And our Game Fund purchased for us - unbeknownst to me - a pair of crimson-and-black DS Lites in preparation for the time when our DS Fats keel over and die. ^_^ (We don't even use our GBAs anymore, pretty much the only reason we bought a GBA SP a few month back was so we could play Gameboy games with a backlight anyway.)
Yay Christmas. ^_^
After playing with our new stuff for a while (mmm Puzzle Quest ^_^ ), we got out the chili we had made and heated it up for lunch. In the middle of this, my siblings called.
Late in the day, feeling kind of bored, we drove around town to get batteries for my shower radio. Walgreen's was open and pretty much nothing else was.
There's not been much to the week since then, except that we ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with chocolate milk last night for dinner, and we've both been playing Hotel Dusk and Puzzle Quest.
This weekend I hope to post an unranked list-and-review of videogames played this year. Some of them were actually new releases! Wow!
Oh, and maybe I'll write up the DVD sets we've watched this year too.
Secondly: Aww, today we've been married six months. How cute.
Now, the meat of this post.
So, two weeks ago Aaron and I drove up to Michigan for an early Christmas with my family. On the way we stopped at a gas station and were consumed with nerd when we saw this in the gas station's insubstantial grocery department.
We arrived at my parents' on that Friday, ate dinner and hung out with my parents and two of my siblings, and began to eat some of the several dozen cookies I took along. Also we had to reacclimate to the presence of many stuffed cows - as much as cows are a running joke in our own household, there's nothing like visiting my mother's cow room. I looked solemnly at Aaron and informed him that "The cow have started to moo."
Also we let my brother play Picross on my DS after a Nintendo commercial on the TV prompted my father to ask if we had "that Brain Age game."
On Saturday, it was snowy but we made a couple of field trips just to get out of the house. One stop was a nearby Blockbuster, where we used some store credit to buy a DS for my brother Jeff. While debating which color to get, an employee asked, "Is it for a boy or a girl?" "It's for my 43-year-old brother," I explained.
Another stop was the Sears shopping center in Lincoln Park, which is soon to be largely torn down. We visited Gamestop - chaoticone knows this one as "A Gamestop already?" - and decided to use some of our store credit to get a couple games for Jeff - Picross and Platinum Sudoku+Kakuro. After this, we hit the Dollar Tree in the same shopping center, as we checked out, a voice came over the PA:
Disembodied voice: "Everyone, Tina has left the building."
Muffled voices throughout the store: "Yaaay."
The Christmas party was to be in the evening, around 8:30 or 9, waiting for my sister to arrive from a work-related event (an organization was giving money to the health clinic she runs for the uninsured, so she kinda had to be there). Around 10:30, she still hadn't arrived (she'd called to let us know the event was running late), so we started opening presents, starting with the oldest, my mom. Beth eventually did arrive around 11, and after all the unwrapping and socializing was done, I think everyone left around, like, 2 a.m. Zzzz.
We emerged from this event with the following phat lewt.
For me:
- compartmentalized loaf pan (from Mom and Dad)
- Hallmark bookstore ornament (from Mom and Dad)
- Read or Dream manga, volumes 2-4 (from Mom and Dad)
- Jar opener (from Mom and Dad - this prompted me to look at Aaron and say, "I don't need you anymore.")
- two sets of 12x12 Sterilite drawers for scrapbook paper (from Mom and Dad)
- Moonlighting season 5 on DVD (from Mom and Dad)
- awesome pair of Sony earbuds (from Mom and Dad)
- Best Buy gift card (from Gary and Steve)
- a couple of books (from Beth and Jeff)
- "Mom likes me best" t-shirt (from Jeff, who gave the same thing to Beth)
- Saber Marionette J artbook (from Aaron, since we had brought a couple of our presents for each other)
- baseball cards and the promise of a signed Curtis Granderson baseball (from Aaron, who commissioned my brother to pick it up from the Tigers' shop for him since we are not local to Detroit)
For Aaron:
- gallon of Frank's hot sauce (from Mom and Dad)
- cordless drill, spare battery, extra drill bits (from Mom and Dad)
- Hallmark video game controller ornament (from Mom and Dad)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail 3-disc special edition (from Mom and Dad)
- chili pepper ornament (from Mom and Dad)
- Best Buy gift card (from Gary and Steve)
- a Chicago Cubs book (from Beth and Jeff)
- a set of DS stylus extenders (from Beth and Jeff)
- garlic cookbook (from me)
- Super Bowl 41 t-shirt (from me)
For both of us:
- Sam's Club membership (from Mom and Dad)
- Meijer gift card (from Beth and Jeff)
We slept pretty late (9-ish) that Sunday since we were all up so late. We had planned to come home that day, but it had snowed heavily overnight, so we chose to stay an extra day and come home on Monday.
Anyway, Mom and Dad had a couple more presents for us that day, along with our Christmas stockings.
We got:
- a slow-cooker, which we have already used to great effect for the making of chili
- a pair of salt and pepper grinders.
My stocking was largely scrapbooking materials, including three pairs of edged scissors; his included tasty cheese, raisins, other foods, a sudoku book, a pack of foam paintbrushes, and a pack of elastic cords for the back of the truck.
I baked my awesome bread in my new loaf pan to go with dinner that night. We came home Monday to a frozen box of ribs waiting on our front porch, and the week that followed was largely uneventful.
I don't think anything terribly significant happened during the actual weekend, actually, aside from wrapping a couple of gifts, and Aaron starting to play Hotel Dusk on his DS. On Sunday, we baked more cookies to take to his parents. I believe Sunday was also the day we went to Value City Furniture and ordered some stuff for the living room - two video chairs (one red, one black) and four square storage cubes (two red, two black, to be arranged in a square in the living room that will be coffeetable-esque and still be functional and easily portable). We will be picking these up tonight.
On Christmas Eve, we drove down to Columbus for Christmas with his family. We had a tasty lunch of pasta and the usual accoutrements, and then we opened presents.
For Aaron:
- a bunch of shirts
- a chili-pepper-shaped container
- uh, seriously, I'm having a hard time remembering.
For me:
- paper trimmer for scrapbooking
- circle cutter for scrapbooking
- Hallmark "Ringing in Christmas" ornament, with the Peanuts characters ringing handbells eeeeeee :D
- a lavender fleece top with snowflakes stitched on it
For both of us:
- a cookbook
- super awesome jelly
At the end of the visit, or rather, what we thought was the end of the visit, the four of us drove over to the still-in-progress house his parents are having built. As we left, Aaron mentioned that we needed to hurry so we would get to Aldi before it closed. His mother suggested stopping at the Aldi in Columbus. We assumed that meant that the two of us would stop at the Aldi in Columbus. Apparently that meant that they would drive us there and then proceed to make three more random stops before finally returning to their home and giving us some frozen pumpkin.
We spent the entire first fifteen minutes of the trip home on various iterations of "what the HELL," pausing only to lament the fact that we forgot to bring the camera so we could take a picture of the Pisces zodiac stone a couple miles away from their house.
When we got home, we busted out the slow-cooker from my parents and started making chili for Christmas Day. We took a couple tiny bites before putting it in the fridge and MMMMM. Before going to bed, we ate cookies and chocolate milk together. ^_^
Christmas morning, we first woke up at 6 a.m. We laid around and tried to go back to sleep, and eventually I did, around 7 a.m., but I don't think he did. I woke around 7:30, I guess, and told him about the highly amoosing dream I'd been having. Then we went downstairs for Christmas, pausing only for him to check the eBays and for me to change into my new snowflake sweater and bring his stocking downstairs.
We drank cocoa as we opened our stockings. I emerged with some scrapbooking stuff (lots of brads), a PSP screen protector, a headphone splitter, some portobella mushrooms, and some British candy - Jaffa cakes and a Nestle Yorkie bar - "It's NOT for girls!" (This turns out not to be true. I ate it a few days ago and I am still a girl.)
His stocking:
- assorted chocolate bars (including chili pepper and lemon/black pepper
- assorted flavored and unflavored cashews
- tasty cheese
- salsa
- fish in hot sauce
- spatulas
- hot sauces
- summer sausage
- Starburst jelly beans
- a Colts ornament for the tree
Then we opened our other presents.
For me:
- Travel/vacation-themed scrapbooking kit
- Scrapbooking organizer
- Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for DS
- Trace Memory for DS
- Blue chenille sweater
- Gold and cream sweater
- Shower radio/CD player
For him:
- Pizza baking set (with baking stone, rack, and cutter)
- Jar of cashew butter
- Glass arcade machine Christmas ornament
- Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for DS
- A batch of tiny cookbooks for garlic, cheese, chili peppers, and bread
- Weird Al Yankovic In 3-D CD
- Mille Bornes card game
- The Encyclopedia of Sauces for Your Pasta (hey, the guy asked for a book of pasta sauces, and I deliver)
- Four Valkyrie Profile figures (Lenneth, Lezard, Freya, and Lucian)
And our Game Fund purchased for us - unbeknownst to me - a pair of crimson-and-black DS Lites in preparation for the time when our DS Fats keel over and die. ^_^ (We don't even use our GBAs anymore, pretty much the only reason we bought a GBA SP a few month back was so we could play Gameboy games with a backlight anyway.)
Yay Christmas. ^_^
After playing with our new stuff for a while (mmm Puzzle Quest ^_^ ), we got out the chili we had made and heated it up for lunch. In the middle of this, my siblings called.
Late in the day, feeling kind of bored, we drove around town to get batteries for my shower radio. Walgreen's was open and pretty much nothing else was.
There's not been much to the week since then, except that we ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with chocolate milk last night for dinner, and we've both been playing Hotel Dusk and Puzzle Quest.
This weekend I hope to post an unranked list-and-review of videogames played this year. Some of them were actually new releases! Wow!
Oh, and maybe I'll write up the DVD sets we've watched this year too.