2009-01-21

Christmas Cards - better late than never

I suppose we could claim we're just really early for next year.  Oh, except that the date is on the pictures.  Oh well.

Yes, we got cards out about a month too late.  We were so on the ball at first.  We went to Sears Portrait Studio, let them talk us into getting their cards instead of making our own... and then it started to slowly and subtly fall apart.

First, it took us at least a week after the date we could have picked up the cards before we actually picked up the cards.  Sadly, we were at the mall at least twice before that... we just forgot.

The "the snow" happened.  I'm sure everyone knows what I mean by that, but just to make the point again, we had snow on the ground for something like 2 and a half weeks.  That delayed packages, it rescheduled a play that we were going to see (Wizard of Oz at the Children's Theater, very good, by the way) and it screwed with our sense of time.  (Our kids were out of school for three weeks instead of two and, for that first week were bouncing off the walls... we realized a week too late that the day care center was, in fact, open.  We just assumed they would be closed when the school district was closed.  Oops.)  Dawn and I both worked a bit more over the holidays than we might have otherwise, because of the weather and needing to have someone in the office.  I worked overnight twice, which really messes with your internal clock.

We actually got the cards home a few days before Christmas, if I remember correctly.  Then they got lost in the paper trap that we call a desk.  They remained there, forgotten, until the first week of January.  When we decided to take a look at the list of people to send to, it only took an extra hour of looking before I found the cards again and less than two hours after that we had them all addressed, stuffed and stamped.  Whew!

Then they sat in the car for two weeks...

2009-01-02

Christmas 2008

Christmas in 2008 was weird.  The snow here in Portland was so out of the ordinary that we didn't have things happen quite the way we expected them to.  A few presents that we intended to get were left out (I never got back to the store after I decided what I was going to get Dawn... and it's not like I left it until the last minute!).  Also, we ended up getting packages out to family late, and things sent to us arrived late as well.

Here are some pictures of Christmas Day.

In fact, we ended up having a "second" Christmas this year, on New Year's Eve.  It was good timing, actually, as we had gotten the package from my mom a couple days previously and, about a half hour after we opened those things, the package from my brother arrived.

Oh, and one more note: One of Bryana's presents came with a promotional DVD of space came.  Between that and the space helmut, Bryana has now decided that she wants to go to space camp earlier than she had wanted to before... so that may be only a year or two out as an adventure for her.