Christmas day

Christmas day dawned bright, sunny and early... at 9:30am! We were excited to get into opening our presents.

I went first and got a cute, cat ring stand from Welly.


Welly then tried to guess...

Just what he always wanted!

Welly also got my bracelet fixed that had been broken for months and I had forgotten about. So special, but he hid it in a bottle of shells.

Welly's next one.

An ipod remote! Yay.

Welly got a shirt and business card holder from his parents. I got pants, a shirt and jumper, but opened it a little while ago to use. He he he.

The rubbish - all gone!

The presents.

We went to David and Vicki's for lunch. Roast pork, potato bake, sweet potatoes, green beans with bacon bits, apple and cranberry sauce and gravy. Yummy. So yummy in fact that we ate way too much and decided to go for a walk. After all, it was a great day outside.

We went down to the lake by their place and guess what, it was frozen. Made skimming stones interesting... and very easy.

More interesting was that it was only 1cm thick and easy to break. Skimming ice was much more fun and with absolute quiet around, it made really great noises when it broke and when the bits musically skimmed over the bumpy ice. Llew did go a bit overboard though!

There were quite a few tennis balls around too and Llew tried to throw them right across.

We finally walked enough to be able to fit in some of Llew's plum pudding. If you look closely at the top left of the pudding you can just see the blue flame.

Along with home made custard, even I had a little bit!

A few days earlier, Llew had also made a fruitcake and various bits and pieces.

As usual for Christmas, we ate too much, drank a fair bit and had a great time. It is still too cold though! MERRY MERRY JUL!

A Few Funny Things for a Christmas Laugh

Well we thought that we would post a few funny things to get you in a festive mood for christmas. Firstly is a take on the Twelve Days of Christmas by Robin and Lugh.

http://robinandlugh.blogspot.com/2007/12/happy-holidaze.html

Secondly is a great picture of my brother Matthew in Egypt for a holiday. Dad needed to send the picks through to me (and I therefore needed to post it) so we could feel sorry for the donkey!



Gemma and I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

It started to snow yesterday afternoon and it was predicted to be a fair bit.
This was early in the evening after just a little bit, but it was coming down pretty hard.



This was late at night (~11pm) and it was still coming down nicely.



Then this morning (~10am) it had stopped snowing, but the winds are high. We are having what is known as a "winter storm" and it is quite amazing.

Ice

After all the absolutely freezing weather and snow, it actually spent a few days between about -5C and 2C and it was very, very rainy. This resulted in an absolutely fantastic icing of absolutely everything. It rained, the snow melted a bit, but it was never above freezing for long, so it all froze. Even when it was not raining, it was really foggy, so ice still accumulated on everything. These are the photos of the result and there are some other photos on Alice's blog (The Normals).

(The ghost is plastic but the snow is real and the stalectite from its head is ice!)

This photo was actually from Saturday night before the ice but is of 2 snow angels made by Llew and Holli.

Christmas Tree

We didn't make it to December to get the tree. On the Sunday after Thanksgiving we thought about getting some presents so went to Walmart. There we had to look in the Christmas area and we found pine trees, real and alive in pots for only $15. Then we got lights, tinsel and a star. Yay!

Plug it in and on it goes!

Wrap it up.

Yippee!!!!

Freezing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I wake up today and go out to the loungeroom and pull back the drapes and look out on our lovely leftover snow from yesterday and see the sun shining and it all looks wonderful and sparkly... then I turn on the Weather Channel.

It gives up to date forecasts every 10 minutes and it delighted in telling me, "The current temperature in your area is 7 degrees (F which
= -13.8C) with a windchill of 0 degrees (F which = -17.8C)".

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

When I went outside an hour later, it was supposed to be 8 and 8. There was actually hardly any breeze and I could actally feel the warmth of the sun. So as long as I stood still and did not breathe, it was fine. Of course breathing makes your nose freeze even under a few layers of scarf, and moving you legs such that your pants change position is chilly even with long underwear on, but it was quite bearable and luckily the bus at that time always has the same driver and he is good and always on time.

Waking up to SNOW!!!

Well for the first time ever, I went to sleep last night and woke up to SNOW! It was soooo cool (both literally and figuratively). The snow plow had come past at this stage, but there was still lots of untouched snow. We ended up getting just over two inches outside our unit.

The view from out our window.

Our grill, with a nice dusting of powder.

Gemma's flip-flops (thongs for your Aussies)

My first snowball of the season... Aren't I happy!

Finally, after we came home this afternoon, our first attempt at a snowman. We tried however using our bare hands, and didn't get very far...