7/52 - Christmas Tree for Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone! Anders wanted to put a boat on his homemade Valentine's cards this year, and it's always a fun challenge to come up with a design. Here is one of this year's results:

Of course, each card is unique and hand-crafted. Anders did the majority of the cutting, drawing and gluing for his cards, though it was broken up into shorter sessions over the span of about two weeks.

By the end of the task, he grew tired of all of the cutting and gluing, so he switched media for some of the latter ones. Here's one that was inspired by his model truck videos: it's a toy boat being lowered into a bathtub by Anders's giant hand.

It is pretty interesting to see the variety, creativity, and different themes of the cards that he received from his friends.

As for Corinne and I, we had the evening to ourselves with Anders at Grandma's house. We watched a movie, ate popcorn, and were in bed by 10:00pm. In other words, a perfect evening.

Valentine's Day is the traditional end of the Christmas season in our household, so it was time to take down the Christmas tree. Yes, that's right, our Christmas tree was still standing and fully decorated! The tree takes so much effort to put up and adds so much warmth to our space that we want to enjoy it for as long as we can.

With the late arrival of snow this year, keeping our tree up this long allowed us to pretend that we had a white Christmas.

One last look... hey, snow!

Our tree stays fresh for quite a long time, but it did stop taking up water several weeks ago. As a result, the branches aren't nearly as pliable as they were when we brought it in. Removing the tree requires disassembling more than just the lights and ornaments.

As expected, heavy rains melted the majority of the snow fairly quickly. The rains also triggered quite a few rock slides in the area and closed several major roads. I-84, which is the main interstate from Portland through the Gorge, was CLOSED for 5 days! With all traffic redirected to the much smaller road on the other side of the river - which was also closed for a while due to slides - there were long lines of cars and snarled traffic throughout the Hood River/White Salmon area. Days like this make us appreciate our short commute even more; there is rarely any traffic in the 10 feet between our bed and our desks. Unless you count LEGO vehicles, of course.

- Mike, Corinne, and Anders