Holiday, part 2: Christmas Fun

And now, our summary of the holidays continues...

We started off our holiday vacation in Portland. Andrea and Shane drove down from Seattle on Saturday, and we met up with them in the city (along with Leif and Linda) to spend a few hours exploring. Our first stop was dinner at Noble Rot, a wonderful and comfortable restaurant and wine bar. We then sought out a nice place to listen to some live jazz, and after a few false starts ended up in the lobby of the Benson Hotel. For a few hours we sat in front of the fire with warm drinks and live jazz, all under the lighting of their Christmas tree. Lovely. Later that evening Loren arrived from Tulsa, and we all crashed at Linda's place for the night (after a quick stop for some midnight Mexican food).

The following day we all packed up and headed to our place. Once we arrived and made our guests comfortable, the first task was to light, erect, and decorate our 20' tree. The tree was a bit taller than last year's tree, but it was also more narrow and with wider branch spacing, so we had enough lights to cover. We learned quite a few lessons from last years tree, so this years went up a lot faster. We took turns holding the tree at an angle while several other people wrapped lights around the top. We weren't going to repeat last years mistake! Everyone participated, and a good time was had by all.

Once the tree was up and decorated, we had no more scheduled events for the next 10 days! That's not to say we didn't do anything; we would simply get up in the morning and just relax until we thought of something in particular that we wanted to do. We spent quite a bit of time outside in the snow and prepared some fabulous food, both of which will be covered in their own posts.

Over the break we had a bit of a revolving guest door. Leif, Linda, Loren, Donna, Shane, Andrea, and Reidar all shared the holidays with us for all or a portion of the 11 days. We played quite a few games and assembled a puzzle or two, but Cribbage was definitely the game of the holidays this year. Part card game and part math problem, there was almost always a game in progress. Leif and Linda were obsessed with the game; Leif dominated, but Linda resolved to beat him before the New Year arrived - and made it by only 3 hours.

Loren may have physically been here, but unfortunately he had to spend a large percentage of his time working. He runs his own graphic and multimedia design business (in fact, he is the business), and unfortunately had a major project to complete over the holidays. (Apparently he spent a good portion of the ski trip that followed working on that same project!). You can see the results on his website, CleverMill.com. I guess he'll just have to come back sometime soon to make up for it. ;)

Corinne and I have managed to eliminate most gifts from Christmas, since we'd rather spend our time with people than shopping for them. There were still some gifts to unwrap, though, so we had several different Santa's pop in to Trout Lake to help us out. (The one pictured here seemed to be a bit mentally unstable...)

There were also several "competitive events" that occurred rather spontaneously. One started out as a game of Triominoes, but turned into a 20 minute Computer Programming competition between myself and Leif to see who could write a timer application for the game (since Leif thought the game moved too slowly.) The competition was actually lots of fun, with Loren doing color commentary, and frequent commercial breaks containing ads for knitting shops (Donna), bait & tackle (Reidar), and pillows (Linda). Leif gets points for creativity; his solution was a 15 second audio file ending in a recording of him saying "beep". I, however, wrote programs in two different programming languages (Python and C#) but couldn't figure out why they weren't working. Here's a hint: beeps don't make any sounds when Mute is on. Oops.

This Christmas also involved LaserTag. Corinne and I had frequently talked about how fun it would be to play in our forest, so when I saw a deal I bought enough equipment for 6 people. We played both indoors and outdoors, which brings me to our next post... SNOW. And lots of it.

- Mike (& Corinne)