John's New Love

John has taken up a new hobby this last year and it has reached a new point. He has become a little obsessed with remote control cars and these are not the ones you buy at Target. He decided to buy a new one, which involved building the car from scratch. After taking over my dining room table for the last month, it is done with. According to John, this one will be completely dedicated to racing.

Home Projects

Our vegetable garden.

We thought the flowers in the hanging basket above all died last year, so we were very happy to see flowers growing back.

All done in the bathroom.

Not finish yet, but looks a lot better than it did.

We took down our base about a year ago when we put in our hardwood floors and John finally put it back. The only thing he has left to do is put in the shoe molding - he did do it in the bathroom, so the picture shows what it will look like when it is all done. We also decided to do a vegetable garden this year. John built me a planter and then we planted some corn, green beans, and onions. We planted some strawberries and tomatoes in some pots out back. Because of the nice weather our bulbs are starting to bloom out front and we planted some flowers in the garden beds in the front yard.

Alki

We have been having great weather the last few weeks in Seattle. John and I went with his parents to the home show a couple of weeks ago and then afterwards we headed to Alki to have dinner. We got some great pictures with downtown in the backgrouns.

Christmas

Everyone at my parents

Brody with his Uncle John

John giving Cameron and Brody a ride, in the best toy ever, a cardboard box

Mocha and Pepper ready to open their gifts

John giving the dogs their new toys

The dogs enjoying their gifts

Mocha already tired out from all of the excitement

More treats for the dogs

On Christmas Eve, we went down to my parents house to open gifts and have dinner. My parents got us an HD camcorder so now we can record all of our favorite moments. On Christmas Day, my parents stopped by and John's parents came over for breakfast. We then went over to John's parents house to open more gifts and have dinner. The dogs were spoiled this year, with lots of treats and toys that they have mostly already destroyed trying to get the squekers out.

Christmas Tree

Christmas Cards

I just finished making our Christmas cards. This is one of my favorite things to do every year and I love just picking out the paper and putting it all together. I found this really cool product called Tape Swell. It basically is clear tape with a pattern on it. The one I picked had a black pattern on it and I used on the blue paper and it turned out great.

Christmas Tree Hunting

With Chris and Andrea and Pat and Mary

Cutting down our tree

Here is a video that my sister in law made of the day.

We headed up to Vladimer Farms in Silvana to get our Christmas Tree. This has become an annual Ellinger tradition. We always stop at the same restaurant in Marysville for breakfast then head up to get the Christmas trees. This year the choices were a little sparsel, but we did find a great tree. Now all that is left is to decorate it.