FA LA LA LA LA, LOO LEE LUH LIIIIHHHHH!!!

My presents this year were magical.  Pete got me a Snakes on a Plane quote book.  Favorite quotes thus far:

Flynn: "I'VE HAD IT WITH THESE &#%!* SNAKES ON THIS &#%!* PLANE!"

Flynn: Okay, we got one (snake) here that's black on top, green on bottom.

Dr. Price: Pure green? Or is there blue?

Flynn (confused): Mostly green, I guess--

Ken: TEAL! It's a deep shade of teal!

Ken splashes hot pots of coffee on the heads of attacking snakes.

Ken: TASTE THIS, YOU B*****S!

Flynn: We need weapons.  Where is the silverware?

Claire: There isn't any.  All we have are these.

Flynn: Sporks?

Then my sister got me a slide flute, but not just ANY slide flute.  A PROFESSIONAL MODEL slide flute.  I'm going to put it on a stand next to my saxophone and clarinet in my office.  And I'm going to include "professional slide flute player" on my resume.

But then Pete outdid himself again with 250 business cards.  Haiku?  Tree? Very Zen.

He's still kicking himself though for a small typo, but I won't point it out to you because no one else knows how to spell it either.

So I did some research on that classic Christmas song "Let It Snow" and found out that due to a clerical error, the last verse was lost sometime around 1936 which said

Make it stop!

Make it stop!

MAKE IT STOP!

upon which the singer was reportedly supposed to light a black cat on fire to summon the Fire Demon of Zargiliax to melt the snow.

I think we should reinstate that practice.

The snow piled up higher on the railing later, but eventually it fell over.  The snow drifts onto the steps so that there's just this huge blob and you can't really tell that there ever were steps.

This isn't a great picture, but I piled snow up to the railing on our steps.  We started sending Caleb down on a sled, but he'd stop in the middle of our front yard because the snow wasn't packed down yet, and then we had to trudge through two or more feet of snow to retrieve him (he would just sit on the sled and yell and wait to be rescued because there was no way he could walk in that).  I was wearing really tall rubber boots, but when the snow goes past your knee with every step, I was getting tons of it inside and my jeans and socks were soaking (I wasn't dressed to play in the snow because I was originally just supposed to help shovel the driveway).  Well I got sick of it, so I ambitiously decided to dig a trench alongside the hill all the way from the stairs to the road so that wherever you stopped, you could just take two steps to find ground.  It started out well enough with the lighter new snow, but halfway through I started getting into the real deep, heavy, compact stuff that the snow blowers have been tossing over for the past several days.  By the time I finished, I had been shoveling constantly for four hours and could hardly lift another shovelful.  But now it's AWESOME!!!  You can kind of see it on the right side of the picture.  I'll be really bummed if the snow drifts into the trench tonight and fills it up...

Oh and I have to add this one more picture because of Peter.  Initially I was standing in front of a bunch of colorful stuff and Christi said the the background needed to be less busy if I was going to stand out, so Pete said, "I'll be your background!" and ran into the picture and tried to look as much like a background as possible.  And succeeded.