Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you’ve all had a wonderful holiday, filled with good times with family, gifts being given and received, delicious meals and tasty sweets. I definitely had a good Christmas, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
Back on Friday night the 23rd my younger brother Jake came by and we went into Cumberland to meet up with my friend Pete at the Corner Bar, whom I hadn’t seen in over two years. After awhile a bunch of other people came out too, lots of old friends from high school, many of whom I hadn’t seen since graduation four and a half years ago. My how time flies! But it was absolutely wonderful to see so many familiar faces and to catch up with all sorts of people again! Now let’s see if I can keep in touch with at least some of them.
Overnight and for much of Christmas Eve I didn’t feel well at all, I think I caught some sort of bug, or had something the night before that I shouldn’t have. Yeah, something like that. Anyway, by mid-afternoon I was finally starting to feel a little bit better, or at least well enough to get my presents wrapped and help with cleaning the house. Once those duties were done I went over to Nathan & Laura’s place in Rice Lake to hang out and play a game of “Settlers of Catan: Cities and Knights.” The game was fun, if short-lived. Laura just got every single roll imaginable, and had the game won in an hour and a half, perhaps the quickest game ever of that. I’ll be going back over there tonight for a rematch, hopefully this one won’t end so quickly. 🙂
Christmas was just a small family affair this year, with my brothers and their families all coming over here to my parents house, as has been the tradition the last several years. The Christmas dinner was fabulous, with grilled pork chops (who says you can’t grill outside in mid-winter way up north?!), baked potatoes, fruit salad, broccoli salad, plus all sorts of bars, cookies and a wonderful cheesecake. Mmmmm, so good… All the kids went out sledding after lunch and had a good time, even though the abnormally warm temps (mid-upper 30s) we’ve had the last several days have really eaten away at our snowpack, so that now there’s grass poking through in many places. At least it was still a white Christmas though, you’ve gotta have that. After everyone came back from playing in the snow we all sat down in the living room and sang a few Christmas hymns as a family before opening presents. I think that’ll probably turn into a new Christmas tradition in our family, we hadn’t done it before but it was cool.
For Christmas this year I gave small desk calendars from PSUBAMS (the weather club at Penn State) to my parents, Nathan & Laura and Aaron & Eve, since one of my photos was picked as a winner in the weather photo contest this November at PSU, and made it into the calendar for July. Of course I had bought all those before being notified that this year our family was having all the adults just draw one name of someone to get a gift for, to make it all a bit simpler and whatnot. I guess that’s what I get for trying to shop early, I’ve definitely learned my lesson! I had drawn Aaron’s name, and got him a nice Penn State polo shirt which he seemed to like (even if he isn’t necessarily a PSU fan, hehe). My one gift came from Nathan, he got me a cool cookbook for all sorts of recipes that can be made in a crock pot. When I was flipping through it I was noticing all sorts of tasty-looking recipes that I’ll definitely have to try out at some point after I get back to Penn State. And after I get myself a crock pot too. This is the first cookbook I’ve gotten, and it’ll definitely be fun to expand my culinary horizons a bit, beyond the usual sandwiches, spaghetti and hamburger helper that I had a steady diet of last semester. Thanks Nathan!
Christmas didn’t end so well though, as Aaron & I stayed up to watch the Vikings lose to the Ravens, eliminating them from playoff contention. It’s probably just as well, since they probably would’ve been killed in the first round of the playoffs anyway. But on the bright side, even with the “love boat” scandal and all the other off-the-field issues the Vikes had this year, at least they were better than the Packers!
Aaron & Eve stayed yesterday until after lunch, and then in the evening I went over to Greg’s place for a bit. It’d been three years since I’d seen him since he lives way down in Dallas, Texas, so it was fun to catch up and everything again. He taught me how to play “Go,” and the first game of course didn’t go well, even though he gave me a handicap of six pieces already placed on the board. But afterward he was able to point out some of the pros and cons of my various moves, and what I perhaps should’ve done, so that by the second game I managed to beat him. But since it was still with a handicap of six, that’s no giant accomplishment. But it was definitely a fun game, one I hope to play again sometime. I also showed him some of my pictures from my trip to Australia and New Zealand last year, that was fun.
I just saw on the local news that down on Prior Lake in the Twin Cities, six cars fell through the ice yesterday. So today all those people, instead of fishing for walleye, were fishing for their trucks and cars with a tow truck. Fools. I don’t know what those people were thinking, it’s been warm enough for long enough lately that it’s clearly not the smartest idea to drive a vehicle out on the ice. Our lake up here definitely has some large dark spots, and even a couple small holes in the ice have appeared in the last couple days. I’d be nervous about even walking on the ice right now, much less driving on it. And it looks like this mid-winter melt will continue for the next few days, by the weekend we might not have any snow left. It seems like just about every day for the last week has been in the 30s and cloudy/foggy/misty, it’s getting a bit old.
Well, the next few evenings I’ll be busy hanging out with a bunch of friends, both up here and down in the Cities. I’m really looking forward to being “busy” with all that, it should be fun!