The Art of Doing Nothing

It is officially winter break and we are really enjoying doing nothing. Paul and I have perfected the art of doing nothing in particular. We generally get really good at it during summer vacation, but we have taken the past 2 days to unwind from a really busy almost first half of the year.
Part of doing nothing for me involves a lot of pictures of...nothing in particular. Everyday things I guess you could say. So here are some everyday pictures from the last couple of days.
This is a picture of Maddy taking Rudolph off of the tree. Paul decided it would be a good idea to let her play with the stuffed Rudolph and then put him back on the Christmas tree. Luckily she succeeded without taking the tree down too.

These are the Christmas cookies I made for the cookie exchange tomorrow. I've tried to tell my friends at work that I don't NEED 5 dozen Christmas cookies, but I'm going to get them anyway.

Maddy enjoys sleeping on our bed and we will find her curled up on the fluffiest part. I'm washing our duvet cover and found Maddy curled up on the down comforter. So much for getting all the hair off the bed.

Winter

Yesterday morning we had a dense layer of fog the covered a majority of town. The fog left frost on all of the trees and grass. It was beautiful. The tree in our front yard has berries this time of year. We have no idea what kind of tree it is but it looked great covered with frost. I decided since I already had the camera in my car to take to work that I couldn't miss this opportunity to take a picture of our tree. I think I would have taken more time to take more pictures around the neighborhood, but I had to go to work. Here is one of the pictures I took:

The picture on the title of my blog is my latest attempt to use Adobe Photoshop. I'm slowly starting to learn how it works.

Snow

We have finally started getting some snow lately. This morning we woke up to about 3 inches of new snow. Maddy loves the snow and one of her favorite activities is trying to "catch" the snow that Paul shovels off of the deck. Here is what she looks like when she's done.

Christmas Parties

On Saturday we went to my staff Christmas party at Carinos. The food was pretty good but the room wasn't quite big enough.

After that Paul and I went to an ugly sweater party held by a friend of his. I guess we missed the competition and most of the people. Paul "found" his sweater in my give away pile a year or two ago. My sweatshirt was made by my mom in the early 90s. I'm not sure why it still fits but it does. It was very in at the time and it still isn't quite ugly enough for an "ugly sweater" party.


Here are some really great sweaters: http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/latest/ugly-christmas-sweaters-461208?src=syn&dom=yah_buzz&mag=tdg&ha=1

The rest of the story

The next day was suppose to be filled with trips to Walmart, Sams Club and Costco. Paul and I decided we could skip out of the shopping excitement so we planned a hike. We headed to Catalina State Park. We found a trail that was a large loop but we decided we should hike to the Romero pools and then turn around. The beginning of the trail was sandy and really had to walk on. Once we got up higher the view because better. The weather couldn't have been more perfect, about 70 and overcast. We reached the pools and decided to test out the water, which was freezing.

It was a neat little spot and I bet that it gets crowded during the summer. We grabbed Paul's Arizona favorite, EEGEEs on the way home and got ready to head out again.





I had read about places to go on a couple of travel books and they mentioned 4th Avenue. I assumed it would be something like Pearl Street and I was partly right. It was Pearl Street minus all of the nice stores. It was pretty hippie-ish and run down. I'm pretty surprised it was in the travel guide. We walked over to campus and found a better street to be on. We ended up have a drink at Gentle Ben's Brewery. They had beer named NCAAle and Beer Down. I tried a raspberry beer that was pretty sweet.
On our Thanksgiving we went to a movie. Paul's cousin is in the theatre business so we were able to go for free. Paul, his cousin, his brother-in-law and I went to Quantum of Solace and his brother, sister and the neices went to Madagascar. Once we got home it was pretty much time to eat. The food was great.