My thank you notes are already to go. I like the way they look in their little stack. I find it funny that when I was little I was always so loath to write my notes. It's not that I wasn't thankful for the gifts I'd received it's just that I'd rather play with them. Now it feels like something is incomplete if I don't send off all my little cards. I'm frequently late (or completely forgetful) about sending Christmas cards but thank-yous are the only task between Christmas and New Year and they don't take very long; I keep mine simple and short, just like my mum taught me.

We've been having a crazy amount of snow this year. This is our side deck. Two weeks ago today it had absolutely no snow on it. Now I'm not even sure where the steps are. We've had even more snow since I took this picture. Thank heavens they ploughed our street on Sunday or we would never have gotten out of our driveway yesterday (as it was we still got stuck a few times getting home after work - a crew of 7 or 8 people who were walking by helped push us out). I've never seen this much snow so quickly here; our climate is normally pretty dry and it would take us half the year to collect this much snow.

It's bad for walking through too. I feel like I'm wading in rough water or something. You wouldn't think so but it's slippery too since under all that snow in most places (i.e. roads, sidewalks) there are just sheets of ice so even if you get all the way through the snow there is nothing for your boots (or wheels) to grip. It will actually be a relief when the temperature drops a little further and the snow firms up. Until then we're getting lots of exercise (shovelling, trying not to fall over).

At least everything looks very pretty. Even the scraggly pine trees at the back of our lot have a romantic charm with this much snow on them.

We got home safely Sunday night. I spent Monday trying to think up a witty blog entry but failed completely and thought I'd just show you a bunch of pictures like last time. As a started to pick and choose I discovered that I had way more pictures than I could reasonably force you to load in a blog entry so I'm just going to show off my nifty gallery features and put up a bunch of pictures over there.

Here's a quick sum up of our vacation: we celebrated my grandmother's eightieth birthday; I helped her move the last of seven tonnes of bricks; we napped; I knit; we read; we went for walks; we ate good food; I got a bunch of beach pebbles for sewing weights and we finished the trip off with BlizzCon (Blizzard Games Convention) in California, probably the nerdiest thing I have ever experienced.

The picture above is a beetle we saw when were were walking back to my grandmother's house one afternoon. Isn't it cool?