Happy New Year!

I'll try to recap what we've been up to, in a somewhat abbreviated form. I'm sure I'll miss stuff, so I'll probably be catching up on things throughout the week. Needless to say, I am back at work today, after a week-long break (and a few days of vacation before that).

First things first - THE TANK IS DONE! I mean that in the sense that there is water in it, sand in it, rocks in it, and fish in it. All the plumbing has been completed, the light rack is done, and most of the big things have been set up. I finished the aquascaping (the placement of all the rocks) and transferred the fish yesterday. I'm pretty happy with how it all looks. There's a lot of clean up and little things to do, but for the most part we have a running system. I'll post pictures and make a dedicated post to the whole long process.

So Marc and I decided to have Christmas at our house. The whole week leading up to Christmas we were busy trying to get all our house projects done. This, on top of having to do Christmas shopping. We managed to get the family room floor mostly done (there were a couple of trim pieces and baseboards that I didn't quite finish, mostly because I hadn't decided how I wanted to do them).

Putting the Pergo planks down wasn't terribly difficult, and we had my dad's help, so it really sped up the process. In all, it probably took us a day and a half to get the whole floor laid down. The trim pieces were a PAIN. Those required drilling into the concrete subfloor, and that has to be my least favorite task ever.

Marc and I also installed track lighting in the family room. With the new floor and the new lighting, it looks pretty nice! The one thing we forgot was to take a picture of it before all the changes to compare.

The kitchen cabinets were another project we needed to complete by Christmas. All the paint was done, and we managed to get all the hinges and knobs on the doors. The problem was that hanging them back on their frames was a lot of work. We ended up running out of time, and only had half the doors up for Christmas. My cousin said it actually worked out nicely though, because no one had to ask where any of the cooking stuff was, because you could see everything in plain sight!

I spent Christmas Eve morning alternatively wrapping presents and working on house projects, and in the evening we went over to Steve and Erin's house to celebrate with them and Erin's family. We had a great time, especially watching the kids open their gifts. Afterwards, when we got home, our plan had been to try to work on the kitchen cabinets some more, but we were both pretty tired. We started to watch the DaVinci Code, but pretty much fell asleep early on.

Christmas morning we got up early, and I spent the whole morning wrapping presents again, this time for my family. We did manage to get more of the kitchen cabinet doors hung up, and got the house all cleaned up. We had hoped to have the tank all done, but managed to only get it filled with water.

One funny thing about Christmas dinner - Marc went to Safeway to pick up a prime rib (my mom was bringing the turkey and ham). He got a pretty big cut that was originally $114, but was on sale for $79. When the checker rang it up, she noticed that the total was a bit low, and realized that she had only charged Marc $50 for the prime rib. After getting some help and haggling with voiding the transaction and this and that, Marc ended up only paying $29 for the prime rib! Somehow, the girl had noticed that the first total was too low, but never noticed that the final total was even lower!

Dinner was crazy - we had so much food that we never even got to the ham! After dinner we opened presents, and I think that took like 2 hours to do. For dessert we had two cakes, two cheesecakes, and two pies, in addition to some gingerbread that Kenny made. Way too much food!

My cousins stayed after all the parents had gone home, and we played games until 2 am. Marc and I tried to clean a bit afterwards before finally going to bed exhausted. We finished cleaning the next day.

The rest of the week we kind of spent doing not much of anything. I think we both kind of shut down after the holidays! Any work we did was pretty much on the fish tank, and getting that going. Otherwise, we just lay around and watched a lot of TV. Thursday night we had my brothers and a few friends over to watch the Holiday Bowl. Cal put a good whooping on Texas A&M, it was awesome. I don't know where this team was during the Arizona and USC games, when the Rose Bowl was on the line.

We spent New Year's eve at my aunt and uncle's house. It was a low-key, family affair, which is usually how I like it. I prefer to spend New Year's at home with family or friends, rather than go out.

So that about sums up our week! I'll try to post a bunch of pictures tomorrow. :)