The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Month

.... for blogging, that is! On the whole, it's been a good month, really, I just wasn't busy blogging about stuff and sharing photos. I think the proper blogging-etiquette would have been to inform my readers (all four of you) that I would be taking a little break, and to please check back in a few weeks. But it really wasn't planned, honest!

Here are a few snapshots of what we've been up to....

Vana, I mean Samantha, setting out milk & cookies for Santa

Christmas morning - Nathan quietly raided the stockings, hoping we were all too distracted by presents to notice...

Brett doesn't like to waste time - why not colour when it isn't your turn to open a gift?

Jesse's favourite gift was his new hockey stick, but I didn't snap a picture of it :(

Samantha got the movie, "Bridge to Terabithia". I have never read the book, nor did I know what the story was about. OH MY GOODNESS! Do not watch this unless you are prepared to cry your eyes out! (It's really good though - just be sure to stock up on Kleenex.)

Grandma Paton came down with Scott's parents for Christmas Day!

Wake me up when the turkey's ready!

Wing Ki came for a visit to show us her Hong Kong pictures. I would love to visit there someday!

We all LOVE having Aunt Mona visit. We had so much fun!!! Our kids all suffer from attention deficit when she leaves.

Now, after all that, I have to say that I don't have any pictures of the REAL reasons why I haven't been up to blogging a whole lot.

First of all, Scott and I were working on something we nicknamed the OM (short for Operations Manual), which is basically a 90+ page document of every detail you would need to know in order to run your own Play On! tournament. We finally completed it last weekend, and it is such a relief to have it done! It was quite a project, for Scott mostly, as my contribution was only a small portion of the whole. Even so, after a few late nights of typing until 1:00-ish in the morning, I had little energy left for more "chatter".

Secondly, my trusty laptop here is on it's last legs. It can't handle too much stress, gets over-heated and crashes - often multiple times per day. With the purchase of a 500 GB portable storage device to backup my files and photos, I finally had to admit that, sadly, I will soon have to say goodbye to good ol'CLEVO. I just hope it can hang on until the replacement gets here, although we're not exactly sure when that will be?? Until then, I'm just grateful every time I turn it on and see the green lights as evidence that it may indeed function for one more day.