Novcember 2022

We went to Stone City for our anniversary, which is a town made of castles and medieval-looking buildings built near some of the rarest limestone quarries in the world. The type of limestone found here is only found in a couple locations and most of it has been used up, having been used in architecture throughout the country including Disney buildings. It's an unusual area with a really good restaurant and some unique sightseeing spots. And it was a really nice day for it. November 13th is usually cloudy/rainy/snowy, so we lucked out.

My Mom's birthday is on Halloween, but we weren't able to see her on her birthday, so we visited just before Thanksgiving. Celebrating my Mom's birthday and Thanksgiving at my parent's church:

Then after Thanksgiving we put up the tree and decorations. It's a group effort:

I think Alice approves, although it's her first Christmas so what does she know:

Done!

Before our first big snowfall I put up the outside lights. The LEDs look pretty cool in the snow:

These two are pretty sure that we put up the Christmas decorations just for them:

Fix your ear, weirdo:

Emily had her winter concert at school. She has become a very talented musician and her teachers have told us that she practices her music until she knows it by heart and doesn't even need the sheet music during performances. Also, she's usually stoked to get her picture taken at school, especially if anyone sees us taking her picture. Please stop:

For the past several years I've done the design work for our church, creating the slides for Sunday mornings, the bulletins and some of the inserts, Sunday school promotional stuff, small groups, etc. I also create the slides and inserts for the kid's Christmas program each year and Maggie made my design for this year into ornaments, which I thought was pretty cool:

On Christmas Eve, we had our family Christmas just the four of us. Christmas with our families was delayed due to unusually bad weather and my brother's flight was cancelled, but we made the most of it and still had fun. It ended up being a really fun celebration this year. Merry Christmas!

After the snow storm went through there was a lot of shoveling:

Fortunately, the roads to Independence were quickly cleared after the storm and we were able to make the drive up to see Cynthia's family:

The annual sibling picture:

Once the rural roads were cleared, we visited my parents for Christmas:

And we had dinner and hung out at their church:

It was a good Christmas and a snowy, cold December, but we spent a lot of time together and had fun. It was a good month for playing board games, too.

And on New Years' Eve Cynthia and I read the Bible for half an hour during our church's The Last Word scripture reading. I think it's really cool that our church does that and I look forward to it each time:

On to 2023!

We've Wandered Many a Weary Foot...

Aaaaand now January is almost over. That'll happen every now and again. December went by so fast that I never finished writing about it, but it was a busy month and we went lots of places and did lots of stuff. There, that should cover it.

A photographer took pictures at our Christmas Eve service, but never posted anything (so what was the point of that??), but someone did post an iPhone pic of us as we finished practice beforehand:

We spent some of our Saturday and Sunday afternoons sledding. There's one particular slope that works best and we can get some serious speed going down it. We've tried a few different types of sleds and we keep coming back to the classics: the solid molded plastic bright orange sleds that we bought in January 2002 when we were sledding at the Saylorville Dam. Nothing beats 'em. The crap sleds at Target are worthless (too flimsy and bendable and too sloooooow) and unfortunately they don't seem to carry the longer solid sleds at Wally World, either. Luckily, the two that we bought 13 years ago are still rockin' despite their mileage. Those things refuse to even crack.

Emily's eyes froze shut again.

Emily had to have a tooth pulled because it was crowding her other teeth. She did not dig the experience, although getting to stay home from school for a day seemed to make it sorta better.

Rose turned a decade old this month! Her birthday was 3 days long; a celebration on the 17th with her friends over to our house for cake and ice cream, then we all went to the theater and watched Big Hero 6 (good movie!) and then we all had pizza afterwards. On the 18th, the Conrads and Sue came over to help celebrate and we had yet another cake with ice cream and we grilled out in an unseasonably warm day for January: 44º! Then this coming weekend my folks will come over to celebrate Rose's birthday and we will have... yup, more ice cream and cake.

Buying stuff off of craigslist is always an interesting experience. A little over a year ago we set up a workout room in the basement complete with treadmill, weight bench/bar/plates, leg station, squats station, pull-up bar, exercise bike and a set of dumbbells. To give us some motivation to keep using it regularly, we decided to set up a TV and DVD player down there, so I found a decent TV on craigslist. I went to pick it up and wow... not sure if all those people actually live in one house or if it was just an ICP party, but man, that was crazy. Not sure why people dig ICP so much, but whatever makes your world go round. Got a good TV outta the deal!