It is very hard to believe that it is already December.  Part of the reason it's difficult it is a lot different to be so close to Christmas and still have temperatures in the 70's.  Don't get me wrong, I like not freezing during the day, but the temperatures still get down to the 30's at night.  It is crazy to me that there can be such a difference in such short amounts of time. And while I'm not the biggest fan of snow, I admit that something other than constant sunshine might make it seem a little more festive :-p.  This is why I hung garland from our stairs and keep getting on Adam about buying a tree.  We may just get a real one this year and try our luck at discounted artificial trees after Christmas.  It is true that we won't even be here for Christmas...we'll be heading to Illinois on the 23rd...but having a tree would just add so much to to stark white cold house we live in...and give me somewhere to put the presents once they're wrapped.  


In other Holiday news, we had a good first California Thanksgiving.  We spent most of the day after we finished our homemade croissants (a two day process, I might add) at Heidi's with her family.  Heidi's mom and dad, sister and brother-in-law, two nieces, grandma, aunt, and aunt's grandson all came in from out of town for the festivities.  It was really nice to meet all of her family and to spend the holiday somewhere where, although we weren't related by blood, we felt at home, too.  There was TONS of delicious food, plenty of mischief, and good times had by all.


We also celebrated Colton's birthday at his "friend" party last Tuesday.  When I say we, I mean all of Colton's family and his friends from school, his neighborhood, and church.  Adam was actually at work, that day...but we'll be having Colton's "family" party this weekend.  It was a lot of fun, though.  We went bowling and then had cake at the nearest park.  A friend of our's from church and I decided we needed to bowl since we were at a bowling alley and ended up started our game during the 4th frame of the game the kids were bowling.  In the end, we finished 3 games (one of which I bowled a 150...and no, we didn't have bumpers...and yes, it was REAL bowling and not on the Wii :)) in the time it took them to finish their last 6 frames of the only game they played.  I guess you should never underestimate how slowly a ball can roll down a lane and how many times young children can manage to get a ball stick halfway down it.  


Since then, we got all our Christmas shopping done (thank you internet) which is awesome.  The silly part is that, although we only had ONE order from Target.com, it will be arriving in SEVEN different packages.  Oh well, I guess we got our shipping charges worth :-p.  I've also started an oil painting, though I'm waiting on the smaller brushes to get here to finish it.  Detail work is hard with big brushes on small canvases.  I've gotten a lot of cleaning done (I finished ALL the laundry, cleaned a bunch of bathrooms, have tried to keep the kitchen clean, etc.), but our vacuum finally stopped working.  We did, however, get a new one from Macy's for not much money out of pocket thanks to a giftcard we got from them from our Registry.  It's on it's way and will hopefully be a lot more reliable than this last one.  I also broke the Wii Fit back out.  I jumped right into things when I accidentally selected the 10 minute hula hoop game.  We'll see how the abs feel about that tomorrow.


Advent has been good to us, so far.  My mom sent us chocolate advent calendars, which made my day since we passed up on purchasing them ourselves only days beforehand.  Our church also has mid-week gatherings during advent where we have a potluck dinner and then a short worship service every Wednesday.  We had our first one last night.  It was really nice to see the people we generally see only on Sundays again during the week...and it was great to have so much yummy food.  It definitely won't help me in my effort not to eat so much, but that's the price of fellowship, right :-p?


Anyway, I'm gonna wrap this up for now.  I was killing time doing this while Adam was trying to get AT&T to fix the server problem that they claim is responsible for our unreliable, often interrupted internet signal.  I hope you've all enjoyed your Advent, so far.  Happy December.