Saturday, December 22, 2007

Thankgoodness for updates....

So... we're bad at keeping up with this sometimes- but things around here have just been really busy!!! To give a bit of an update....

-Right after Thanksgiving (I know that turkey looked funny... but it saved me time!) I had my company party. It was held at the Grand America hotel in Salt Lake. If you've never been there- even to just walk around... it was very fancy. Jon picked me up from work and we headed over for "social hour"... it would've been more of a social hour if the people that I usually work with weren't still working. It was fun though. We ran into a few people I knew when dinner was about to be served. We were pretty much stalked by some waitresses and they pulled our chairs out for us and put napkins on our laps... I just hope that we didn't have to tip ;-) The food was delicious and we sat with a lot of my friends from work. After the food they were giving out prizes. We didn't win anything.. but it was free! We left as the dancing started.. people were getting pretty drunk. That was our cue to go home.

-The week after the party Jon had INTEX for school. For those of you who don't know- it's a week long project that is given Monday morning and is due by Friday afternoon of that week and a big presentation is done on Saturday. Every day the group he works with got together and worked from about 8am-11pm or later. We would always get together for dinner- all the wives would come over and spend time together and cook and then we'd either stay or leave depending on the time. They got the job done and they did a very good job (considering they had no idea what they had to do until Monday morning). They ended up getting a 92 on it! Not to mention PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC) reps were there to watch all the presentations. They gave a lot of good remarks about the group's presentation.

-This week was Jon's finals and he did really well :-) Hurray!

For me, work has been.. well.. work. Nothing too exciting. I did win $250 from selling Showtime (a premium movie channel). That was pretty exciting. I just help people understand their billing and help them fix their equipment over the phone and I sell as much as I can. I can't tell you how much weight I've gained from working there. My eating habits haven't changed and I don't eat a lot of junk- I just sit all day and when I come home I'm just so exhausted. I don't walk to school anymore or walk around campus all day.. and my running habits have well.. let's just say I don't have a running habit anymore. :-S

For this reason, my sister and I are working on both losing weight to stay healthy. Wish us luck! She started a little earlier than me and she has done a great job thus far. Congrats, Shannon! Jon has set up a plan where when I hit "milestones" we get to celebrate in some way. Like for example, one of them is that I get a cookbook called "Deceptively Delicious". Not sure if you've looked at it- but it gives you tips on how to cook healthier. I know it sounds lame, but I have wanted to get it for a while.

Anyways, we hope that your holidays are safe and that you enjoy it. We miss you all and wish we could be celebrating with our families.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Thanksgiving Happenins

Crystal's big break from work was given to her for Thanksgiving, not Christmas, so we decided to make to most of it that we could. We were unable to travel anywhere so we planned on enjoying our first thanksgiving as a family here (married family that is).

Before Thanksgiving itself a fellow family here in the ward took pity on our loneliness and invited us over to their house for thanksgiving dinner. One big thing we noticed is that it finally made it feel like the holiday when we went over there. They had 5 extended family over and 3 babies so it was quite the full house (they also live here in Villa Rose). Before we went over it was just Crystal and I. We slept in. We watched the parades. We lounged like on any holiday. Unfortunately it kinda felt like any old Saturday until suddenly we were at a full house of people, babies screaming, people going everywhere, and great smells abounding. We brought a pumpkin pie to add to the mix.

It was fantastic and helped make the holiday absolutely great. The one downside to the whole thing was that Crystal and I already bought all our foods to make our own little 2-person Thanksgiving before we were invited anywhere. We offered to bring any other foods to the dinner but they said to only bring a pie. That left a lot of food still at our house. So the day after Thanksgiving we decided to have our own Thanksgiving dinner on the 23rd. That's right, two Thanksgiving Dinners in two days...and then 2 weeks of turkey sandwitches for lunch. That's a lot of turkey.

The cool part about our turkey is that when we were shopping, we looked and each other and thought "Call it a hunch, but we don't need a 20 pound turkey for us". So we found these mini-sized turkeys where they remove some stuff and cut the turkey in half so that it's not as intense. Anywho, here it is in all it's glory:




And after Crystal gave it a good cookin'


Add some more fixins


And put it all together with eggnog - YUM!



After Thanksgiving we were then able to put up and decorate our Christmas tree. First we went and bought a few really cheap ornaments and here's Crystal bending paperclips for hooks



While she was working on that I was putting up lights

And here's the final product: Criddle Family Tree 2007


And last but not least, Merry Christmas from the Criddles!