Happy Holidays!

I thought I'd do a post to catch up with what Brandt and I have been up to before the holidays come and I get behind again. We haven't been up to a whole lot so far this month, at least nothing too exciting. Just hanging out and getting ready for Christmas, which is a lot of work in itself!

My temporary job in Idaho Falls ended a few weeks ago. The girl I was filling in for decided to come back a couple of weeks early, which was a little disappointing for me, but what do ya do? It has been an awesome experience and I have learned so much. I was sad to leave all of the great people I worked with; they were so sweet to me - my last week there they surprised me with a HUGE bouquet of flowers to say goodbye. I'll miss them, but maybe in the future if they are in need of another hygienist I'll get to work with them again.

Lucky for me though, another office in Burley needed a fill-in so I've been able to pick up a few extra days that I wasn't expecting, so that's been nice. Maybe I'll just be a permanent fill-in girl?! Whatever - I won't complain and just take what I can get. I've decided that I need to work, because without it I am quite lazy. I can't even remember what I've been doing the last couple of weeks to stay busy. I need to find myself a hobby.

As for Brandt, he is working hard at Lowe's and keeping up with his millions of different hobbies. He's been considering going back to school to get his master's degree in natural resources - that way he could work for the BLM or National Park Service or something along those lines. I can't believe he didn't think of this sooner - it's right up his alley and sounds perfect for him. So we'll see how it goes.

Other than that, we've just been getting ready for Christmas: decorating, baking, shopping, wrapping, and avoiding Wal Mart at all costs. It's been great fun. Usually sometime Thanksgiving weekend we go up in the mountains with Brandt's family and cut down a Christmas tree. They are always really scrawny, Charlie Brown trees, but we lovingly decorate them - being careful not to decorate them too much for fear the weight will knock the tree over. But they have always been tough little guys - and every year, they have grown while sitting in our warm apartment and sprout new, bright green needles on the ends of the branches. It's pretty cool to see.

Well this year was quite a different experience. We didn't have time to go up and get a tree, so we used Brandt's excellent employee discount and purchased a beautiful, full, thick, luscious Douglas Fir from Almighty Lowe's. So we lovingly wrapped it up and placed it in the Blazer to take home and decorate. Brandt, of course, thought the occasion warranted the use of his Dremel tool that he got for Christmas last year. So he pulled that baby out (along with his nifty safety glasses) and started going to town - as you can see from the sparks in the picture on the left. He thought our star needed some tweeking, and then he thought he would just drill a little hole in the top of the tree so the star would sit better. Needless to say, he had a great time!

And it was a beautiful tree, and other than all of the spiders that came out of it, I was happy with our purchase (see, I guess we'd never experienced spiders in our tree before, because when you get your tree from the mountains, they're all hibernating? Or frozen and dead - who knows?) However, a couple of weeks later, the tree just shriveled up and died. Just like that - no warning that it was sick or dehydrated. One minute it was fine, and the next it was gone. I should have taken a picture of it before I had Brandt return it, but believe me it was a crispy critter! You could just snap the branches off they were so dry. Anyway, come to find out, they shipped the wrong "breed" of trees and this particular type of tree does not do well in our climate (weird, cuz I thought Idaho was the fir capitol of the world - obviously not). It was fun while it lasted, although next year I think we will revert back to our Charlie Brown tree - either that or go fake and get a pine -scented candle and trick ourselves into believing it's real...

Nonetheless, we are not completely treeless - thanks to Brandt's "I can build that - we don't need to buy it" attitude, we still have this little guy in our kitchen:
He's a humble little tree, and every year we have to glue different parts of him back together, but it's fun. That's it for now...tomorrow we will head to Bur-town for all the festivities. We hope all of our readers have a Merry Christmas and a great New Year!