Thanksgiving

Boy, I sure am out of order here. First xmas blog, then New Years, now Thanksgiving. Oh well.
Spent Turkey day in Slowdessa w/ my fam. Did xmas at the same time. As a retirement celebration for my step dad, they paid for all of us to stay at the Grande Hotel that has this cool Fun Dome, w/ a pool, miniature gold, ping pong and playground. And the breakfast buffett was awesome!!! ...even though my step brother got up and ate breakfast at 6am and then went back to bed so that he wouldn't have to wait in line for food. Talk about anti-social! Oh well, we love him anyway.
I thought this picture of my neice was too cool not to include:


Also, a rare photo of Austin & Aaron (my step bro) smiling:

And a not-so-rare photo of Austin attacking my other brother, Joe:

Good times!

New Year's Eve

Well, Austin decided to try his hand at grilling this new year and I thought he did pretty good! Especially for a guy who never sets food in the kitchen, except to microwave canned chili. We had a few people over and thankfully, Austin didn't burn the house down. I discovered the only beer I like is Smirnoff, only because it doesn't taste like beer. But then it made me really sleepy, so that was lame.
We played some Wii Sports and hope to have a tournament eventually.
Here's some action shots of Jose & Marissa boxing it out:
Marissa, God of Fashion, beat the bearded man!

Guess I'm not very good at this

Wow, I just noticed that it's been almost FOUR MONTHS since I wrote my first blog entry. I guess I'm not very good at this.
Oh well. So how did my holiday go? Well, we've had better, that's for sure. In-laws in the hopsital, parents had a car wreck and an old friend got diagnosed w/ schizophrenia. Not much to cheer about. But there were some good times and everything's turning out okay. Things seem to be going back to normal, at least as much as they can be. This will just make other xmases seem even better!
Austin (that's my awesome hubby) and I got spoiled by our parents w/ a crapload of presents.
Once of my favorites is this amazing bubble wrap calendar! You pop a bubble for each day of the year. How awesome is that??? The hard part is only popping one at a time. Maybe I should wait a week and then pop a week's worth all at once and enjoy the savory feeling of plastic bursting.
My dad made us this beautiful book shelf for our living room. We still haven't unpacked all our movies, books & CDs because we don't have enough places to put them. I can't wait to paint it! I was going to paint it black, but then I saw the wood and it was so pretty, I might just seal it. Hmm, will have to ponder on this...
I will post a pic when it's done.