Christmas and New Years Eve

Hello blog readers! I know I have not been as good about blogging as I used to be, but maybe I will get better in a few months once work slows down. I'll tell you more about work in another post. The purpose of this post is to talk about our Christmas and New Years now that it is January 17!

Well, shortly before Christmas, my friend Kim from work had a gingerbread cookie decorating party and Scott and I went and had a good time. It was a lot of fun decorating cookies and hanging out.

On Christmas day, Scott and I went to his cousins' house (Molly and Glenn) who live in Monroe. This has become a Christmas day tradition in his family. We had the best steaks you can imagine and everyone brought sides and snacks and just hung out for a few hours. It was nice. I didn't take any pictures though. I put Scott in charge of that and well, you see what happened...

The Saturday after Christmas, we went to Scott's parents' house for our Christmas with his family. We exchanged gifts and then had a really good lunch. It's always nice to all get together at the same time. There are pictures in the slide show.

On New Years Eve, Scott and I had tickets to the Chick-fil-A bowl, since Georgia Tech was in it. They played LSU and lost in a really embarrassing way. I was disappointed and it takes a lot to get me disappointed about football or any sport for that matter. Oh well. I took some pictures there and they are in the slide show in this post. Notice that we did not take any pictures after the game had started. By the time half time rolled around, we were so far in the hole points-wise that there was no returning. I figured they would at least score a few more points to make us competitive, but no, sadly not. BB&T had provided everyone with a flyer about the bank. Bad idea. All the people on the Tech side started making paper airplanes with these flyers and seeing how far they can go. Remember, this is an engineering school, so some of them were going pretty far. We were on the far end of the field and there were planes from our section making it out to the 50 yard line. Some time during the 4th quarter they announced they would start arresting people for throwing anything from or in the stands. Most of them stopped. That was kind of the exciting part of the night. People were cheering when a plane would go especially far. Kind of sad. Oh well. We were driving home from the game when the clock hit 12. We did not do anything at all on New Years Day and that was quite nice.

On Jan 3, we had Christmas with my family. We had party-type foods and exchanged gifts. I have pictures in the slide show. We had a lot of fun visiting with each other.

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2008! I can't believe that another year has gone by. What did everyone do for New Years Eve? We didn't do much. We had leftover pizza and salads and watched several episodes of CSI Miami, then we shot off some fireworks. We invited our neighbors Bill and Jennifer to come down and shoot them off with us, but Bill wasn't feeling well. So, Jennifer came down without him and we had a good time. We only spent about an hour out there and came in probably around 9:30, because it was too stinking cold. Then, we layed in bed watching another episode of CSI Miami. We had planned to watch the New Year's Eve specials on TIVO, but we only have TIVO in the living room and didn't want to get out of bed, because it was too cold. So, we were going to just watch the rest of the show "live" and see the ball drop then go to bed. At some point in time, Scott flipped it over to football (for what he says was approximately 2 minutes or less) and I fell asleep (if you are surprised by this, you don't know me very well...everyone knows how much I LOVE football). So, he tried to stay awake so that he could wake me up just before midnight and he fell asleep. So, at 1:30, I woke up to the light and the tv on and woke Scott up just to tell him we missed the ball dropping! Then, we turned everything off and went back to sleep. Pretty lame, huh? I think that is the first time in my life I have slept through ringing in the New Year. The picture above is a picture that Scott and I took when Jennifer ran home to get her gloves. Hee hee.

Here is a picture of our "Grand Finale". It was called Main Squeeze. It went on for quite a while. It would stop and then start again. I was pretty impressed! Just an aside, if it had not been raining a good bit the last couple of weeks, we would NOT have done fireworks. We got almost an inch last week and then a little over 2 inches this Friday and this weekend.

This is our neighbor Jennifer. She is really sweet. Scott and I have also spent New Years Eve 2006 and 2005 with Bill and Jennifer at their house, playing games and eating food.

We have been fairly productive today, but not as productive as we probably would have been if there hadn't been a CSI Miami marathon on TV. What can we say, we like CSI Miami. We took down all of our inside Christmas decorations. I have cooked enough food for an army. Last week, we ate the last of some vegetable soup that I had cooked a while back and frozen and I realized that we had eaten all of our "reserves". That's what I call it when I cook stuff like chili, spaghetti, and vegetable soup that you can cook a ton of at once and then freeze what you don't eat in a couple of meals. Also, we are going to have a covered dish Sunday at church and I am taking a meal to Maggie on Saturday. I figured, hey, I will be home all day, I'll get some stuff cooked up. I had already planned for Scott's and my New Years Day meal to be a roast pork. Needless to say, I did a lot of cooking today. I cooked a huge pot of spaghetti, chili, two whole chickens minus the legs, which I froze for frying later (including shredding the meat off the bones to prepare it for inclusion in casseroles), and a pork roast with carrots, potatoes, and onions. Oh, and when Scott had gone to the store yesterday on his day off, he found a really good deal on some sirloins, so we prepared a marinade for those as well so that we can have them tomorrow night. I will say that I am a purist when it comes to steak and I usually will not put anything on them except for some seasoned meat tenderizer. However, we have found a few things that I will put on a steak: Scott's cousins who live in TN gave us a recipe for a really good rub made from seasoned salt (or maybe it's seasoned meat tendrizer), garlic salt, onion salt, and butter salt and his cousins who we visited on Christmas day cooked steaks with a marinade made from three parts soy sauce, one part jalapeno juice (from the jarred jalapenos), the juice from half a lemon, and a few chopped up jalapenos from the jar. Now, I will also tell you that I do not do super spicy stuff because of my stomach, but this was not really spicy. I really didn't think it was spicy at all. We tasted ours before putting our steaks in it and it was just right: flavorful but not a lot of heat.

Well, I guess that is enough rambling for now. Happy New Year to you all and we wish you the very best. May your blessings be overflowing and may you grow closer to the Lord every day!