A Christmas Miracle!

This past weekend was all about Christmas party prep since we're hosting the extended family this year. We finished gift wrapping, planned the menu, bought all the groceries we needed, and the last chore was shoveling the snow off the sidewalk in front of our house. We had done it once but then it snowed again, covering over all our work and we hadn't touched it since. Can't have that when there are 24 people showing up tomorrow (more on that later). But then two miracles simultaneously happened: (1) the weather warmed up to low 50s or so, encouraging the ice-hardened snow to melt and (2) a little Cat snow plow showed up and dug out the entire length of sidewalk in front of our house and 3 others!

We suspect that one of our neighbors had a friend that came over and did the plowing. At first I was wondering why there was a truck making all that racket on a Sunday morning, beep beep beeping as it backed up. When I got up to check it out my jaw dropped and I was so excited--seriously, that saved me probably 40 minutes of work, at least. Woo hoo!

As for the number of guests, originally it would have been the usual 18 family members (immediate family plus aunts, uncles, cousins, and their kids). But then we invited the H family over because they don't have family in town, except that MH's mom ended up coming to visit and will be here for a few weeks. Then my godmother apparently doesn't have anywhere to go this year so she and her boyfriend are coming over. That's +6 = 24 people total. I sure hope there's enough food to go around!

I'm breaking a holiday food rule and trying out three brand new recipes tomorrow, all in the CrockPot. I'll have to report back on how it all goes. At the very least I finished most of dessert-type baking this afternoon (cookies, brownies, Rice Krispy treats) so at least there will be sugary sweets to tide people over ;) Wish us luck tomorrow! And Merry early Christmas!

Stop snowing!

Damnit, it's snowing again! The novelty's wearing off now, mostly because this is the third time in a week that the white stuff's fallen out of the sky. And I'm bitter because I didn't get to work early enough to snag one of the covered parking spots so I'll have to clean off my car before I can drive home tonight...grrr. I'm spoiled by the garage we have at home; it's so nice to be able to just leave in the morning and not have to deal with scraping the car first. But, I have to admit, it does look pretty on the trees and it's pretty peaceful to watch the flakes drop from the warm coziness of being indoors. It's the remembering that you have to drive in it later part that sucks :P

Tomorrow is my mom's 60th birthday and my sisters and I are throwing her a big birthday party at a function hall near their house. There are about 50 people coming and it should be fun, but I'm a little stressed about making sure everything looks nice and having it go off well. Then right after that I'll have to really start dealing with details for hosting Christmas at our house this year. I have no idea what I'm cooking, but I admitted to my weaknesses early and asked every family to bring one dish each so I'm not flying solo on providing eats. Besides cooking I still need to finish wrapping gifts (and maybe doing a bit more buying of gifts), clean the house, make sure our walkways are clear so someone doesn't slip and fall on Christmas day...ack, I don't want to think about it anymore. Let me get through the birthday party tomorrow first before I tackle the next one!

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

...especially if some of it falls on the slopes in Colorado since we're headed to Vail in February :)

We got our first real snow of the winter on Sunday night into Monday day. We got probably 2" or so where we live, nothing too bad. Temps have dropped considerably in the last week or two, regularly registering in the 30s and below. That part kind of sucks, but it's getting us ready for Vail, that's for sure!

Happy belated Thanksgiving, by the way. We spent the holiday in Arizona with WC's mom. My mom came with us too so I wanted to keep her entertained while we were there. Usually WC and I end up just doing chores for his mom while we're visiting since she lives by herself and always ends up with a list of miscellaneous upkeep items she needs help with. Unfortunately for WC this time he had to take care of everything himself while I drove my mom all around Arizona to fill up our days.

WC's aunt and uncle (from his dad's side) recently moved to AZ as well, and only 10 minutes away from his mom. She's still friends with that whole side of the family so she's enjoying having some "family" around. Two more of WC's aunts and one of their husbands also flew in from out of town (Philly and Toronto) for the holiday and all nine of us sat down for dinner last Thursday at the aunt and uncle's house. WC, my mom, and I actually flew in Thursday evening so we went straight from the airport to dinner, starved by the time we finally got dropped off by SuperShuttle. Good thing, since they'd cooked up about 10-12 different dishes, mostly Chinese-style. Yum....

While WC and his mom stayed home with the chores, my mom and I went off with the rest of the family to explore Scottsdale and Sedona in the following days. Old Town Scottsdale is basically one tacky tourist shop after another--nothing to write home about. I wish we'd driven around the town instead and done a tour of the nice homes. Sedona, on the other hand, is gorgeous. All those red rocks. WC and I did a Pink Jeep Tour the last time we were there and got to walk around on the formations a bit. This time we strictly did a car tour and stopped at a couple of places to check out the view. It was nice.

After a nice visit, we finally boarded our red eye home on Monday night. Three hours later, we were still on the ground. Stupid mechanical problems. We finally had to de-board and get on another plane, only to miss our connection in Detroit by 2.5 hours. What was supposed to be an 8:15am Tuesday arrival time turned into more like a 3:00pm arrival time--one whole day lost of work. I did drag myself into the office around 5:00pm (in jeans because no way could I handle getting dressed in office wear after 18 hours of travel) . I don't think my partners appreciated me missing another day, but they didn't say much about it. Oh well, will just have to not take too many days off around Christmas. But, seriously, in all my traveling days this was probably the worst return trip ever. Thank goodness WC found direct R/T flights for Vail in February. The Thanksgiving trip exemplified exactly why I hate layovers.

It's snowing! And Miss SC goes to Boston.

And since I'm snug indoors it looks so pretty :) First snow of the season. I don't think it's supposed to stick so for now it just looks pretty drifting down.

Our friend SC was here from S.F. to visit last Thursday to Sunday. She had a conference to attend at the new Boston Convention Center but mostly used it as an excuse to come see us (at least that's what we like to think). She was a sport about navigating Boston's spaghetti street system, but thank goodness she got out of here before it started snowing or she really wouldn't come visit us again! We didn't get to do much tourist-wise with her besides taking her to Fanueil Hall and Harvard, but we had fun walking around and got some cool stuff at the FunUsual store.

Thanks for visiting, SC! We hope you, hubby, and Rocky will come visit us again soon!

Done!...

...with weddings for the year. Congrats again to PY and CC; it was fun being involved in your wedding and I'm so glad the two of you had a great time.

Now that the '07 events are over, planning for the '08 ones are already underway. Got home on yet another lovely red eye flight this morning and found in my inbox an e-mail about EC and TC's August '08 wedding which I'm also coordinating. They're getting married at Kohl Mansion, which I've heard lots about but have never actually been to so I'm looking forward to seeing that.

For now though I'm just looking forward to getting some sleep tonight. I knew it was a bad sign when a half dozen people answered the call to pre-board our flight with children. Sure enough, one of the kids was a devil child that had the most ear-piercing screech I have ever heard. Luckily she got her two major screaming fits out of her system relatively early in the flight, but she actaully made our ears hurt.

Going back to Cali one more time

We're off tonight for our last trip to S.F. for the year. It's going to be a quick one too--get in at 11pm PST tonight and crash with EL, PY & CC's wedding all day tomorrow, then we have just Sunday to hang out before leaving on an 11:50pm flight that night--ugh! Why is it that all of the flights we've booked this year have had schedule changes after we buy the tickets? Originally we were supposed to leave OAK around 10:30pm but that got pushed to nearly midnight. Which means we don't get home to BOS until 8:15am on Monday morning and I'll barely have time to shower before needing to run into the office for Monday meetings. Blech.

Oh well, at least we'll get to see everyone again. This wedding has the potential to be the drunkest one we've been to yet, so should be fun ;)

Happy Halloween!

We only got a couple dozen trick-or-treaters this year, which actually isn't too bad considering the kinda busy street (traffic-wise) we live on. I don't like getting the older kids--c'mon, should you really be trick-or-treating when you're over 15?--so we turned the light off a little after 8pm to avoid that. Thank goodness I only bought one medium-sized bag of candy though cuz we still have a bunch left.

Check out the pumpkins we carved last week. So fun :) We didn't really put them out until tonight because my sisters had me so paranoid that someone would come through and smash them if we put them out earlier. Nice thought, huh? Carving was fun, I think we'll have to make a tradition of it.

Happy Birthday to Me :)

I love birthdays...mine or anyone else's, I just love celebrating them! WC did an amazing job surprising me tonight. The plan was that he was taking me out for a nice, simple dinner to commemorate the event. We got to the restaurant and the hostess pointed us to a table--where three of our friends were waiting! We haven't met many new people out here yet, at least not people we'd celebrate our birthdays with so I wasn't expecting a party involving others. But these were old college friends who still live in Boston and it was such a nice surprise! I hadn't seen IT in particular for about a year now; he's been too busy with work as a consultant and it was so good to finally catch up with him. I guess a few more people were supposed to show up, but they had to bail at the last minute unfortunately. Yay for my amazing (and sneaky) husband! It was a wonderful dinner at Tuscan Grill, made much more special by the addition of old friends.

My family celebrated with me last weekend because they have to go to a wedding in upstate NY this weekend. We started the afternoon off with some pumpkin carving, which was a ton of fun. Then it was present time. I got a waffle maker from my mom, which I've been wanting because we love hosting brunch and Belgian waffles are so yummmmmmy. And my sisters got me DDR (aka Dance Dance Revolution), also by request :) Heehee...I'm so bad at it right now, but I plan to practice lots and get better! I even got my mom to try it out, haha! My present to myself is sleeping in as late as I want tomorrow. With the Red Sox in the World Series I've been going to bed really late and it's definitely wearing me down. Not setting the alarm is such a luxurious indulgence....

Happy Birthday to Me! Thanks, WC and the rest of my family, for making it special!

Autumn has arrived

In the last week or two, the transition from summer to fall has been pretty obvious. It's now about 50-something degrees in the house when I wake up in the morning (40s outside), but we're holding out on turning on the heat as long as we can. It does warm up during the day to mid-60s or so, which is almost a relief from the high-80s we were having for a while. I forgot about how it's kind of fun to switch wardrobes season to season--from tanks and shorts to jeans and warm sweaters.

The leaves are just starting to change colors, though I bet it's been beautiful up north in New Hampshire and Maine for a couple of weeks now.

I can't believe it's almost time to fly out to S.F. again for the final wedding of the year. Once the November wedding is done, I think we're off the hook until next July. So far the lineup is:
1) July 2008: EH & GH - S.F.
2) August 2008: EC & TC - S.F.
3) September 2008: MH & BW - S.D.

Maybe one of these days we'll actually start traveling to places other than California again :P

Happy Anniversaries

I've been super lazy about blogging lately. Couple of big things:

(1) Happy 1-month Anniversary to S&R! I had the pleasure of being a bridesmaid in their wedding last month and WC and I spent a week and a half hanging out with the happy couple as well as other friends. I had been waiting for the hubby to upload pics to our shared drive before posting a congrats on the wedding to S&R, but seeing as that still hasn't happened I'll just wish 'em a happy anniversary, sans pic.

(2) Happy 1-Year House Anniversary to Us! September 14, 2007 marked our first year of being in this house. Still loving it....

I managed to overcome the mom guilt trip and decided not to go to a distant relative's wedding later this month. I'm not close to my cousin's dad's kid (told you it was a distant relative), I'm a little wedding'd out (still have one more to go in S.F. in November), plus the wedding is on my birthday weekend. Who wants to be in upstate New York on her birthday?!

How many weddings is that this year that we were invited to?
(1) LB & RC - S.F.
(2) SC & RL - S.F.
(3) RS & LG - S.F.
(4) PY & CC - S.F.
(5) MY & MK - Victoria, Canada
(6) HT & IK - Bali (wish we could've gone to that one!)
(7) LL & LB - NY

We only attended three of the seven above (well, two so far plus the one in Nov.), but it still feels like a lot because of all the travel required. And we've already got 3 lined up in California next year--it's fun, but let's hope it slows down soon!