It's all just a blur now

We spent the better part of last week making merry. Trips to visit various family members, the opening of many presents and eating of much food... Christmas at its best. I posted several photos to Flickr (link on the right sidebar) but I have been shutter-happy this month and hit my upload quota, and though I'm thinking of upgrading to a pro account, I am not going to pay to do so when there are only three days left in the year. So the photos abruptly stop midway through Christmas day, but yes, I think you get the point.

I also have reams of video to go through, etc. All this memory-keeping sure is keeping me busy. I actually started making a little book of some of our holiday activities, the same way I did last year, but I just plain ran out of steam. The single photo per event and limited amount of space to say anything about it was cramping my style this year. And then a couple days ago, I decided to whip up a little Blurb book to summarize our holidays, and it was done in a night - all 48 pages of it. We made a few Blurb books as Christmas gifts, and they turned out well, and are so easy to make. Just waiting for a coupon code to come along now before I upload it and print it. I'll link it here when it goes live.

After Christmas wound down, we spent a kid-free afternoon in Windsor, picking up a few needed items during Boxing Week sales, finding a rug we could both agree on for the dining room during a lucky trip to Homesense, having a yummy lunch at Cora's and then seeing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which I figured would probably not be to Chad's taste, but I thought the allure of Brad Pitt would make him agreeable to the idea). I bawled during the entire last hour of the movie, but the two hours before that were pretty slow at times. Chad found all three hours to be slow.

Yesterday we were supposed to head out of town to our last family get-together for Christmas 2008, but we had that wicked wind storm pass through here. We woke up sometime after 4 a.m. to what sounded like a freight train running past the house. Nope, just the wind - which they clocked over 100 km/hr at the airport. It was strong enough that it collapsed half of the house that is going up next to us right now (at the framing stage right now), and the construction debris was whipping around our yard like missiles. The portajohn landed a few feet away from our north wall. Our neighbour came out to rig up a stake for his 20-foot evergreen tree, which had started to uproot, and several people in our neighbourhood lost chunks of their roofs. Mallory was up too, and since we all lost several hours of sleep and there was a travel advisory on the weather channel, and we already had one crazy drive this holiday season that lasted much longer than expected - I didn't want what was already going to be a six-hour round-trip to be any longer - we decided to stay home for the day. So here we sit, with a full tank of gas and a pan full of uneaten dessert and some gifts that never got opened. But at least we are in one piece.

The tree has been packed up, the stockings and garland and lights cleared off the mantle, and we are still working at getting the last of the holiday sugar cookies out of the house (a tough job, but I have volunteered to look after it). Looking forward to some new beginnings on January 1st.