Christmas Day

And now on to Christmas Day. This year Christmas was with the Hines family, although we did sneak over to my dad's house for an hour in the morning to open presents with my brothers and sister. It's convenient that my dad is only a stone's throw away from Brandt's parent's house, so it didn't take us long to get there and back. We got my dad a Sport's Illustrated football book and Lori got an ice cream bowl and topping set. After some yummy cinnamon rolls, it was time to head back to the Hines' where we got to open more presents! My favorite gift: my Dan Brown book (this was the only thing I asked for, and since I was the one who bought it, it wasn't too much of a surprise ;) Brandt's favorite gift: his fly-tying supplies (which was NOT the only thing he asked for, but nonetheless the majority of his Christmas this year; and since he also bought most of it, he wasn't too surprised either. We figure it's better to get what you want rather than be surprised with a bunch of stuff you don't want - makes sense right?)

After presents, we had Christmas lunch. This is still something I'm getting used to. Christmas lunch? With my side of the family, holiday meals are in the late afternoon, usually around 4 pm. This was hard for Brandt to adjust to because his family always eats at 12 pm sharp on holidays. But regardless of the time, it was super yummy and of course we all ate too much. Brandt's sister Sheena and her family came by so we were able to spend the rest of the day hanging out with them and I kicked butt at the electronic version of Monopoly. Later that night we stopped in to see Grandma and Grandpa Manning.

Brandt's other sister Allison came the week after Christmas for a couple of days, and luckily Brandt had those days off work, so we came down to Burley again so we could see her and her family. It's always fun to see family and spend time together.

So now we are back home, the decorations are all put away, and the house looks blah. One of the more stressful things about the holidays is figuring out where to put all of the gifts we've gotten. Don't get me wrong, we LOVE our presents, but every year it's very tricky trying to rearrange things in our tiny apartment to make room for the bigger presents we get. Yet once again, I was victorious in cleaning out our pantry and finding just enough room for our huge George Foreman grill - I get a little thrill from making it work - don't judge me for that - I know I'm strange.

And now it's on to a new year. Here's to a great 2009 and an even better 2010!!

Christmas Eve

This year Christmas Eve was with my family. We had planned to go sledding during the day, but it was too dang cold outside, so we opted to just hang out in the warm house instead. I taught my brother Zac how to wrap his presents, tried my hand at Halo (I'm still terrible), watched a little "Monk", etc. Nothing too exciting, but it was a good day! My mom always has the prettiest tree; she spends days and days decorating and getting everything ready and her house always looks great. This year she got her tree flocked with a blue-tinted flock to go with her blue decorations. It looked pretty cool.


My mom and Bryan made a yummy Christmas Eve dinner: salad, ham, potatoes, pie...YUM! Afterwards we got to open presents!


This year for gifts, we got my mom a couple of Richard Paul Evan's books for her collection and My Redeemer Lives, a really good book about the Savior's last days paired with pictures from various artists. I read it before I wrapped it up and now I want a copy for myself (birthday coming up, hint hint ;) We got Bryan a box of goodies from Hickory Farms.


Brandt and I were definitely spoiled this year. Everyone got a pair of PJ's and then all the married kids got portable DVD players. Every year we draw names amongst the kids and this year Brandt and I had Fran and Liz. We got them Have a little Faith and "Miss Congeniality" on DVD (that movie never gets old!). Sydney had Brandt this year and she got him "Remember the Titans" which he's been wanting for awhile now. Kim had me and I got Bath and Body Works lotion and shower gel.


The big family gift from Mom and Bryan this year was a new flat screen for the living room, which considering that the other TV was as old as the hills and couldn't pick up any stations anymore, it was a great gift! Bryan got the "Planet Earth" DVD set so we watched part of that after we got done with presents and Brandt had a great time imitating the British narrator and making everyone laugh.


All in all it was a great day. We enjoyed being with the fam, eating lots of good food, and opening presents!!! Can't wait for next year :)

Book Review: The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel Series

The Alchemyst, The Magician, and The Sorceress
By Michael Scott

I decided to do a review of all three books at once, because my feelings about each of them was about the same. I love getting recommendations from others on what books I should read - thanks Jill for suggesting this series to me!

A little background for those of you who haven't heard about these books. These three books are the first in a 6-book series about twins Sophie and Josh Newman and there adventures with the immortal Nicholas Flamel. If you click on the picture of the books above, it will take you to Shelfari's summary of the first book, which explains it a lot better than I can.

I have mixed feelings on this series. I liked that Scott uses all real people (with the exception of Sophie and Josh), places, events, etc. to build his fictitious story (similar to Dan Brown with The da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons). You can look up all of Scott's characters on Wikipedia and learn more about them, and the same is true for the locations that they travel. I thought it was fun reading about things I had never heard of before or at least had never studied (i.e.The Catacombs of Paris, Stonehenge, Nicholas Flamel, Alcatraz Island, Billy the Kid). Scott uses these real people and places and twists them a bit to fit into his story which was really cool how he made it all fit together. However, towards the middle of the third book, it started to get a little rediculous to me. I'm not a huge fan of fantasy, so consider that when I say that it all was a little much for me - a little too far-fetched (yes, granted Harry Potter is completely out there and I love that series - I'm not sure what makes that series special).

All in all, the storyline is great, but I was never drawn in completely - they were a bit predictable and it wasn't a series that I just couldn't put down - like Harry Potter, Twilight, and Dan Brown's books. The suspense just wasn't there for me I guess. However, they are good enough that I plan to read the other three books when they come out (The Necromancer comes out in May) so I can see what happens to everyone. That is, if Jill will let me borrow her books again ;)

Next Projects:
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (one of my Christmas presents!!)
AND
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (audiobook on my new iPod! - another suggestion from Jill - thanks Jill!)

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!

Book Review: Have a Little Faith

Have a Little Faith

By Mitch Albom

I've never read a Mitch Albom book before, though he has some pretty popular ones out there (i.e. Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven). But I saw this at Wal-Mart a couple of weeks ago and thought it looked like a fun, easy read so I picked it up.

It's a true story about the author and two very different, but also very similar, men: one is an elderly rabbi (Jewish) that has asked Albom to deliver his eulogy when he dies and the other is an inner-city drug-dealer-turned-pastor (Christian) with a broken-down church with a hole in the roof to preach in. This book is about Albom's interactions with these two "men of the cloth" and the life lessons that he learns from them.

At first I was skeptical. I didn't like the fact that Albom was profiting from these life stories, like he was taking advantage of their friendships, and I didn't like the light in which he painted them sometimes. But the more I read, the more I enjoyed it, and the more I came to understand Albom's writing style - yes, sometimes he writes things that aren't the nicest way you could word something about an individual - but he is being honest about the way he personally felt at that time, and I think you need to be honest in your writing if you want it to be believable.

I would recommend this book to anyone. It's not that long - if you have three hours or so to just sit and read you could probably read the whole thing in one sitting. I like books that inadvertently make me think about my own life, my values, etc. This was one of those books. It is interesting to me that though I belong to a different church than the two discussed in the book and the specifics of our religions are very different, our belief in how to treat others, the importance of service, and the worth of souls, is the same.

Because of this book and The Hole in the Roof foundation that Albom started, donations from around the world came in and they have finally been able to repair the roof. Construction began on November 23 of this year and a celebration of its completion took place just a few days ago on December 9th. There is a short video on the church's website of the occasion that you can view by clicking on the picture of the famous church at the right.

Next Project: The Sorceress (third book in the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series)