Just as we did last year, for Christmas this year we put up the Christmas lights in our front yard and hosted a Christmas potluck party at our house. Everyone was asked to bring a plate for the party and a gift costing less than $10 for the white elephant gift exchange. Since many of our friends were out of town it was a smaller party than usual but it also allowed us more time to talk with the people who came.

We also attended Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day dinner over some other friends place. It's nice and all to spend Christmas with friends...but we are really missing our families a lot, particularly around this time of year.

It seems as though friends go as quickly as they come for us. Our good friends, Tim and Doan, made the decision to move down to California to try out new things. We met Tim when he did a short contract at the company Cristina and I worked at. Since then we've done quite a few things with them and made more friends through them. To see them off, we decided to host a farewell party for them at our house in the only way we knew how: with games and karaoke.

This Christmas the rest of the US experienced extreme weather with blizzards and heavy snow fall while Seattle, and much of the west coast, got fairly mild and sunny weather - unlike last year's snow-pocalypse. Even with the dry sunny weather, we had a week just before Christmas where temperatures hovered around the 20°F mark, that's almost -7°C! It stayed there long enough to freeze small bodies of water including water still left in garden hoses, puddles along the side of the roads and...
our little pond in the backyard (which I am standing on)

One day driving home from work I heard on the radio that an Air Supply concert was coming to the area. We attended a Foreigner concert in the Summer and really enjoyed it so I thought it would be nice to take Cristina to another one. Cristina and I are really into the sappy old love ballads and Air Supply is stable diet, particularly during karaoke. Being an Australian band, they got a lot of air time back home so it shouldn't be a surprise. That didn't stop all our friends giving us weird looks when they heard about it. Suddenly my masculinity was in question. To make matters worse for me, I took Cristina to see New Moon on the opening midnight session. I would need to eat a lot of steak and watch a lot of Man vs Wild to make up for that. Or I could just go build another retaining wall ;)

Anyway, on the night of the concert we headed down to Emerald Queen Casino in Tacoma where the concert was being held. We treated ourselves to the buffet. I don't know how people feel about buffets but we love casino buffets. The concert was filled with people...mostly older than us. Unlike the New Moon session, which was full of screaming teenage girls, the Air Supply concert was full of screaming mums. Guess every generation is the same. The lead singer from the band actually went down into the aisle and shook hands with the fans. We were sitting in the aisle seats so we got to shake his hand. The guy has a lot of tattoos.

It was a great concert that was both enjoyed. I could see Cristina was excited and giddy like a school girl the entire night. Every time they played their iconic hits she'd be clapping and smiling. I definitely should have taken her to concerts earlier.

Since most of our family and friends are now on facebook, we've been a little lazy when it comes to updating the blog. It seems facebook is quickly driving the era of personal blogs to extinction. But as long as we're away from family, we'll have to keep updating. I actually got a call from my mum and she noted I hadn't updated the blog in a while. I call my parents occasionally to see how things are going but I think they get most of the information from our blog. Cristina talks her parents almost on a daily basis. Thank God for Skype.

So to get up to date, here's what has been happening in our neck of the woods:

Visting relatives

We finished the yard project just in time for the arrival of Cristina's relatives. Her parents from Australia and four aunties from the Philippines stayed with us for the 2 weeks of the final leg of their US tour. After riding around from site to site in a coach, they were happy to get some rest and relaxation in Seattle - with some shopping to boot. We rented a Ford Expedition, took a week off work, and showed the relatives around Seattle. The relatives really liked Seattle...particular all shopping it had to offer. When we sent them off, they had more than twice the luggage that arrived with. I'm sure the local economy was very grateful for their visit.

Swine Flu

Not long after the relatives left, Cristina and I got the flu. I got it first. My temperature hit 102, which is a big deal because the last time I remember having that high a fever was when I had chicken pox. I also had the most severe headach I had ever had in my life. I was told it was called an "ice pick headache". I'm pretty sure Leon Trotsky had one of those. The flu came suddenly and disappeared after 2 days. Then Cristina followed with a fever that reached 104 over night with bad body aches. We visited a doctor in the morning who told us we had H1N1. She was so confident of the diagnosis even without testing. Since it was so common they're no longer testing people for it. They're also withholding medication for all but the more severe cases. Fortunately, the flu lasted only a few days.