Long Awaited Update

After finally emerging from the onslaught of midterms I thought it was high time to give our poor blog a little attention.

Although its already been a few months, I'll start with a quick recap of our first holidays together. Thanksgiving was a bit of a personal triumph as we were able to pull off a full spread (minus the delicious sweet potatoes grandma brought) in our tiny apartment. Thank you Alton Brown for imparting your turkey knowledge onto we first-timers! Ironically, the only thing that didn't work out was the boxed pumpkin pie- that'll teach us to attempt to take short cuts!

 

{Joseph hones his carving skills on Mr Turkey}

Christmas was (of course) a ton of fun including running around to visit various family members and friends. We had a skinny little Christmas tree (which I somehow managed to miss on all of our pictures) and a few strings of lights on our second story railing. We established a new Christmas Eve- Eve tradition of watching Muppets Christmas Carol (which I had never seen) with friends, and then moved on to Christmas Eve with my family. This year was slightly different because they chose to keep it a 'dry' Christmas, meaning no alcohol- needless to say Joseph was thrilled to 'get off easy'. Our favorite part was by far Christmas morning. Joseph was especially excited to finally rip the wrapping off the big box that had been taunting him for the past few weeks.

 {Have you ever seen a smile so big?}

Joseph got me a lovely new iPod nano with double the space of my old so I now don't have to delete half my iTunes library whenever I want to add new songs. Plus a book on the art of Tangled (which if you haven't seen- go forth!). Speaking of Tangled, we enjoyed several family outings during the vacation- including a trip to the Midway aircraft carrier on Black Friday, and then down to Hollywood to ride the train and see Tangled for our niece Hannah's birthday. 

 {Jaron @ Grauman's Chinese}

  

{Disney Ice Cream Parlor. Yes- we consumed that monstrosity and yes- it was delish}

And of course, no vacation would be complete without a trip to the good ole land of Disney with our good ole married buddies Stemanda.

 {Snow-capped castle}

And so now we're pressing forward through school (half way through the quarter!) with the hope of spring break glimmering in the distance. Not to mention an anniversary in there somewhere. However, I promise to update earlier than that. 

Cross my heart! 

Oh Amazon

Ok, I just realized today how genius the people at Amazon are. This realization has been coming to fruition for a while, and, now that think about it, I am going to start from the beginning.

Kristin and I own two video game systems Ps2 and Gamecube (old, i know, but what can you do?) Now on PS2 we don't have the greatest multilayer games, which leaves us playing gamecube when we feel like playing together. On game cube we have 2 games (yes thats it): super smash brother mellee and mario kart double dash. Our normal game of choice is mario kart, and the problem with this is I owned the game before we were married. Therefore, i have logged the most hours played on it. You might ask why does that matter? Well it matters because 9 out of 10 times I will win the race. Now, I must say I am impressed with how much Kristin has improved; the games are getting closer.  She leads most of the game a lot of the time, but i will usually manage to sneak in at the end and steal the victory away from her. Now here in lies the problem with us playing the game: No game is fun when you keep losing. On the flip side when Kristin beats me i feel robbed and that the game is rigged against me. To sum it up, this game frustrates us to no end. Now you might ask what does this have to do with amazon- i will tell you. Because of this frustration I have wanted to get a new game for us to play. Then I remembered mario party 7- a game neither of us has many hours on and we will be evenly matched. If it was at the store i would have to get in my car, drive to the store, find it, stand in line, buy it and drive home resulting in an hour of my life gone. So instead, I just logged onto amazon and had an order placed all within 1 minute. 1 MINUTE!! Sure I have to wait for shipping, but oh well I have other things to do for that week and a half. Now, on top of that I ordered it while sitting in econ class which I feel is appropriate. I am putting what i learn in micro econ into action. To finish up I have to say "Sorry honey for spending $20 dollars it all just happened so fast i didn't know what i was doing." :). Thank you amazon. (sorry for spelling errors i don't care enough to proof read this before i publish it.)