Monthly Archives: December 2010

Christmas day started with our normal gift exchange.  I didn’t give anyone any ideas for gifts this year and basically said “surprise me”.  I was definitely not disappointed.  Among the gifts – an original oil painting of the dramatic chipmunk (my favorite internet video), an Adventure Time T-shirt, a package of sodas from the Soda Pop Stop, and a mousepad made from a photo of my brother Trav in a hotdog costume.

What we woke up to out the guest bedroom window

Gifts, ready for opening

I'll bet you wish you had a mousepad like this

This now has a place of prominence on our wall (with a new frame)

Matching Adventure Time shirts

We went to Julie’s mom’s place for lunch and hung out with Julie’s mom, her stepdad, her aunt Jean, and her brother.  Notice the picture of Paul we got of him actually smiling!  We were testing out the smile detection feature of our new point and shoot camera.

Rare, very rare

The family, minus Julie's two stepsisters

Our Christmas weekend was a flurry of activity.  On December 23rd, we picked up my brother Travis and his fiance Emily from the airport.  Emily was impressed with our regional airport and its one baggage claim.  We swung by The Great Dane for dinner and went back to our place and vegged.  On Christmas Eve, we hung out at our place, watched some Adventure Time and then headed up to Wausau, after grabbing lunch at Burrachos.

Trav and Emily at Great Dane

Trav and Emily - being engaged

Julie and I dropped Trav and Emily off at my parent’s new house and then headed over to Julie’s Grandpa’s retirement home where all the Schneiders get together.  We hung out, ate all sorts of food and exchanged gifts.  Every year they pick a color for the gift exchange and you have to bring something of that color.  This year’s color was blue, and Julie’s cousin Jacob got the gift I brought – a Superman Snuggie.  It was pretty awesome.

Our table at the Schneider get together

Jacob, enjoying his gift

After the gift exchange, we made the trek back to my parent’s and played some Catch Phrase and went to bed.

My parent's new place

Christmas Eve night

A rare photo of my mom, playing Catch Phrase

We had a lot of snow about a week ago.  Over the summer, I added a vent fan to the makeshift “roof” over the backend of our building to help push the hot air from the air conditioner out.  When it snowed, we had a weird interaction with the vent fan where it seemed to pull snow down into a mini “snow tornado” of some sort on our back catwalk.  We ended up with a weird 4 foot tall “snow cone” right outside our back door.   I’m sure an engineer could tell us why this happened, but I’m going to stick with magic.  The snow also made for some interesting adventures when we went to visit my parents at their new house in the country.  I had never been stuck in a ditch before then, but the Civic just couldn’t cope with a certain country road.  Luckily a helpful neighbor pulled us out with his tractor.

Snow cone before I opened the door

Snow cone after

Driving up to Wausau on Sunday

Julie and I were up in Wausau a week or two ago at her Aunt Ruth’s house for a Schneider family gathering where “cherigates” were made.  Apparently this is a traditional family treat.  It’s essentially just fried bits of dough covered in powdered sugar; can’t go wrong with that.  We had a good time eating a bunch of food, including the cherigates and watching the Badgers play on TV.

Carol and Jean, hard at work on the cherigates

They were fried in Crisco. That's a huge lump of Crisco melting

The guys, providing support the best way we know how.

Finished cherigates