Happi Kansha no Hi!

is what I would be saying were I still in Nippon. But we're in the USA now, so Happy Thanksgiving! (Did you know that Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving in October?! wierdos...) Vanessa and I have been greatly enjoying our time off of work and are already looking forward to our Christmas break.
We spent our time with relatives and doing house projects. Usually it takes us months to complete even the simplest house project, but we were on a roll and replaced one of the bathroom doors with a much nicer one (including casing, fitting the frame to the tiles on the floor, etc) and we totally redecorated the second bedroom. We're getting rid of the bed that was in there because we get too few guests up here. The room pictures aren't blog-worthy, but you can see them here.
For Thanksgiving we went up to Redmond for a feast with my cousin Esther, her husband Jeff and kids Annika and Chandler, my uncle Glen, aunt Carol, aunt Carole (remember the 'e'), uncle Keith, cousin Kurtis and cousin Brian (all my Dad's side of the family). Since we oftimes feel isolated from family in this corner of the globe, it was really nice to get together with everyone and have a bounteous feast. The food was all wonderful. Afterwards we talked for a long time and played Rock Band on Jeff's PS3. Here's a picture of our game faces:

Esther and Annika hitting the high notes, Kurtis strumming like there's no tomorrow, and me displaying my masculine jawline in profile while keeping the beat on the drums. I'm typically not a fan of any video game consoles, but that game was quite fun and it turns out I'm rather decent at it because I can keep a beat (due to piano practice probably) :)
After the gaming was done, everybody rolled into the parlor for some old fashioned chatting and singing along with the piano. And pie.

I played what I could but then Uncle Glen came along and blew everybody away with some jazzed up Christmas songs. We had such a pleasant time and hope to do more things with our relatives around here :)

Eating at the OG

That's Olive Garden, by the way. We were given some gift cards for OG a few weeks ago, and decided that we'd go this weekend. Even though this meant taking a trip outside of our radius, we decided it was worth it. We got there on Friday night around 5:45, and the wait was 45 minutes. We were about to walk out, having previously decided that 25min wait would be our max, when the hostess told us that we could go sit in the bar if there was room. Since it was a no smoking bar, we figured we'd give it a shot. We got a spot at the bar bar, not just a table on the floor near the bar. This spot was actually perfect for us, in the corner where no one would ram their chair into our backs when they got up and we wouldn't have to watch out for waiters hustling around with precariously perched plates all over their arms. I'm sure we must have seemed like quite the oddity, sitting at the bar drinking ice water, while every one around us was throwing around names like "E. Diamond" and "Daqueri." (Not to mention that I was wearing my BYU shirt, but that's beside the point) But like I said, we got this spot right away and weren't bugged by anyone around us. We got our food, had tons of room to spread it out and had cozy Barstools to sit on. All in all, I wouldn't mind eating at the bar more often, provided that it is non-smoking. I'd say it is second best to getting your own private booth, which we are glad we didn't wait 45min for!

At long last!

Well, we've been pretty boring this week, but our highlight is that we finished the ceiling, and I must say that we are very pleased with the result. (You may recall our first post about starting this project back in July.) Like the other projects that we have done already, the steps took longer than we anticipated, and of course we lost our steam. Three months later, motivated by wanting to put the lights back up in the entry way and get the tarps off of the floor (I had forgotten what our floor really looked like), we busted out the paint for one final coal yesterday. Here are pictures of the during and after stages.