From Away

After spending this morning watching various news channel’s coverage of the devastation of the tsunami in Asia, I have a new found consideration of how lucky I am for everything that I have. My thoughts go out to those that have lost family members, their homes, as well as those that cannot contact family members in the area. If any of you have a little extra money left over from the holidays, please consider making a donation to a charity that will help those in need.

That being said, I thought I’d give a little bit of a wrap up of our Christmas holiday, since it is pretty much over. Krista is back to work today, and I’ll be heading to the new job a week from today. Christmas this year was quite different. It was the first year, for both Krista and I, that we didn’t spend the holiday with our families. It has been tough at times being a country away from everyone, but lots of telephone calls, well wishes, and good new friends here in St. Albert have made for a great Christmas.
Our Christmas eve was spent here at home, we did a little celebrating of my new found employment, and turned in pretty early. We spent the majority of Christmas morning on the telephone with both of our families and opening a ton of gifts that were sent to us from the east coast. We honestly didn’t expect many, if any, gifts form our families because they have all helped us out so much with our move to Alberta in the past few months. Later on in the afternoon we went over to our friend’s (Bill and Annie) home and spent the evening with Annie and their children. Bill is a firefighter/paramedic, so he ended up have to work the night shift. They also gave us some lovely gifts, among them was some delicious Jack Daniel’s flavored coffee. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge Jack Daniel’s fan.

Boxing day was even busier than Christmas day. Krista decided that she wanted to get up super early and go shopping, so at 5:50 AM we arose from our slumber so that we could be at The Brick when they opened their doors at 7 AM. We ended up only getting a set of lamps from there, but being up that early allowed us to be at Ikea when they opened at 9 AM on the other side of the city. Because of our families’ generosity, we were able to purchase a ton of furniture to make our apartment feel a little more like home, finally. We picked up a coffee table, 2 end tables, and a dining room set. We then went to Kingsway Garden so that I could pick up some new clothes for work. Needless to say, the mall was absolutely crazy. I needed a new pair of sneakers, so we headed to West 49, and found out that they had a huge shoe sale on. After waiting for 20 minutes to get into the store, I was able to get a $130 pair of Vans XL2’s for $58 which was pretty sweet. The rest of my day was spent putting together our mass of Ikea furniture.

Then to wrap up the holiday, I cooked a turkey dinner last evening. It turned out really well, and my stuffing ended up being a bit hit. So the next week, a lot of meals will be consisting of left over turkey. Time to get creative with my recipes. I wonder if turkey tastes good in an omelet?

So that was our holiday. I took a few pictures, one of which you can see above this post, but being that my digital camera is about 3 years old, the pictures are not very good quality. I may post some more later if I get a chance to run them through Photoshop to touch them up a bit. I’d be interested to hear what everyone else did for their holidays?