let it snow, let it snow, let it snow

Well it appears that winter is finally upon us...ahhh, winter in Indiana. The season everyone looks least forward to driving in. Monday was the first real snow of the year, which caused my commute to go from 10 minutes to 50 minutes, and Chris's from 20 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes! Of course, being the first snow, it melted by noon. Today, however, it started out fine and escalated into a wintery mix, which is the worst. Because of that, I'm already hoping for a delay or something for tomorrow :)

Being the Christmas season, we have been very busy (not that this is anything new for us). Then again, we love to be busy for the most part. Last Friday night we had our friends Kasey and Dustin over for dinner. Kasey and Chris were on Steering Committee together and we haven't had a chance to get together since we saw them at the wedding! Chris made an amazing dinner: chicken broccoli fetaccini alfredo. It was so good! Luckily we had leftovers for the weekend :)

On Saturday we did some Christmas shopping...for ourselves. We have been wanting bikes for a long time and decided to cash in the points from our debit/credit cards and use it to get bikes for Christmas! We went to Bike Garage of Indy where they were having a sale and got--get ready to laugh--matching bikes haha! That wasn't exactly in the plans, but it's a neutral grey and black. They're Trek 7000 hybrids, and let me just say that for more than this reason, we are looking forward to spring to be able to ride them!

Saturday night was Chris's company Christmas party at the Ritz Charles in Carmel. They always put on a really nice event, and this year was no different. They are such a wonderful company and the partner gift is always a Make a Wish for a local child. They also have a raffle for a bunch of nice gifts, and there's always an opportunity to purchase more tickets and up your chances of winning. Chris and I always participate in the extra tickets because of the obvious reason, and because the proceeds always go to a good cause. This year, instead of buying more tickets, they gave one ticket in exchange of a nonperishable food item. We cleaned out our pantry, only to find out that there was a limit of 5 haha. At least it was for a good cause...

Sunday we had an old roommate and good friend of mine over for brunch. Kondrath has been in Peru serving for the Peace Corps since September of 2007 and we haven't seen him since he left! He's home for a month and told us that over Thanksgiving he gained 10 pounds! We decided to make him my dad's famous pancakes to fatten him up a little more :) It was so nice to see him, and we're hoping to get together a few more times before we leave for vacation and he heads back to serve another year as a director. Chris and I would really like to find a way to visit him in the next year...Chris thinks it's hilarious that in Peru white people are viewed as celebrities. Kondrath says he gets asked to take his picture with people all the time! We will see if it works out to visit...it would definitely be fun!

Aside from all those happenings, we have some exciting news about Rudy dog...we have started leaving him out of his crate during the day! I am able to come home over my lunch break every day, so that's what I've been doing. We shut all the doors upstairs so he is only able to get into the loft and hallway. We also put up baby gates in the front room where the Christmas tree is since we have a lot of fragile ornaments. Other than that, the house is his, and EVERY time we come home he is sleeping on the couch haha! Eventually it would be nice to be able to stay out all day and have things be fine, but we're going to do this until after the holidays and then we'll see how things go.

Goal for the end of the week: get all Christmas cards addressed (aka labels printed and stuck on) and sent out. I designed our Christmas cards this year and I'm really excited to be send out our first ones :)

Until next time...let it snow!