Christmas 2009 and oddities

Merry Christmas!! To help pass my time on Christmas while Scott is at work, I thought it would be good for me to update my blog again. I'm really trying to be more consistent.

Well, last Sunday we finally got around to purchasing a Christmas tree. It's a very cute tree... Just took these pictures today, so there are no more presents under the tree. Speaking of presents, thank you to my family, and to Scott's family for so many nice, nice gifts. They were all very thoughtful, which made for a very nice Christmas morning. Thank you! :)











I'm missing being with my family during the holidays for the second straight year. Kind of a bummah. I'll be chatting with them in a little bit, to see how their day is going.

This is Scott's Christmas gift to me:




It is a map of the village of Whitman in 1903. When we were visiting Massachusetts in October, we went to Plymouth and were in an antique store looking at all of the wares. We came across all of these old, old maps of towns on the South Shore. Unfortunately, there was no Whitman. However, Scott (unbeknown to me) took the business card of the woman who sells the maps. So for my Christmas gift, Scott contacted the woman for a map of Whitman, who shipped it here and then Scott had it professionally framed. It is an AMAZING map - SO COOL!! Suzy's house is on the map, and the Schofield's house is on the map, and Spivak's, but not my parents...because their house wasn't built until 1912. The houses on the map are all labeled by their street number, and the lots of land are labeled the owner name of that time. It also has an index. It is such a fascinating map!! We are going to hang it tonight.

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Here are a couple of pictures of our new home. We are still missing pieces of furniture, and our artwork isn't hanging yet, as a result.

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And now back to our roadtrip. We took just a small number of pictures, having the video camera and all, but here are a couple that I just came across.

I believe those pictures were from our second full day of the trip(??). Somewhere in the northern part of Canada's Yukon Territory.

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More videos: I'm behind on getting these up - it's pretty time consuming to get them uploaded. Nothing too special in this batch, but the last one is pretty interesting.

The Northern Lights. Not visible with this camera (I believe you must have a film camera in order to capture them), but you can hear Scott and I talking about them. This was shot around 4am-ish on the second full day of our trip.

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A Yukon Territory morning, on our way to Whitehorse.



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Elk, I believe, in the Yukon Territory



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The scenery after leaving Whitehorse, YT.

(I shot a little bit of footage while we were in Whitehorse, but it appears that the files are corrupt and not viewable.)

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The beautiful scenery on our way to Watson Lake.



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The Sign Post Forest in Watson Lake

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Scott heads North tomorrow to see his daughter. He is really excited to be with her again, and I'm very happy for him :) Not too much new here outside of our acclimation to the new environment. I'll write more about life in Seattle once I catch up with all of the videos from the roadtrip. Maybe by then I'll have something thoughtful to write down that will better reflect and fairly represent life here. My current stream of consciousness won't do, I don't think.

Hope everyone is having a very Merry Christmas and soon to have a safe and happy New Year!!