Today I spent Christmas with my family, for the first time in 7 years.

Two of Emma’s presents were larger than she was!

One was a My Size Barbie, the other was a 3-story Barbie house.

Peanut could smell out her own present…

And this was seconds before my sister started crying over her present:

Geoff surprised her with tickets [...]

My father’s kind of big into putting lights on Christmas trees. Tonight he did Louise and Geoff’s tree:

Took him 4.5 hours but he managed to get 1100 lights on it.

Went out for lunch with the mother today. She misses me and wants to a. see me more often and b. touch base more often to know what I’m up to but I i. can’t motivate myself to drive to Penticton for Sunday dinner and ii. don’t have much of anything positive to report to [...]

T’was Geoff’s birthday today and Louise made an excellent 4-layer cake:

Chocolate with chocolate chips throughout and chocolate icing. It’s quite possibly the most chocolatey thing I’ve ever eaten. It’s so sugary, you can only have a tiny slice at a time but it’s delicious!

Emma got her dad, grandpa and dog to all dress up to take her out Trick or Treating tonight.

After they went out, Laura and I caught a ride with Kris and Karen out to JJ and Jenn’s place for a Halloween… thing.

JJ dressed as the guy from My Chemical Romance and I dressed as JJ. [...]

Today was the annual pumpkin mutilation…

Laura and I had a plan…

…which turned out pretty well, actually:

Geoff went the route of the power tools:

But they all turned out pretty well.

[Complete pictures can be found here]

Brunch to start the day off…

I did say on Friday that this would be a weekend of food, right?

More eating, drinking, Wii and then a big Thanksgiving dinner.
Later in the evening we had a rematch of Settlers of Catan in which Laura and I dominated, our victory thanks, in part, to Scott for making a [...]

Today was spent just generally hanging out here, eating food, drinking etc. The usual holiday family events (says the guy who hasn’t been around his own family for a holiday in many years).

Geoff and Scott did a little Wii-boxing before dinner.

Later on, after the parents and kids had gone to bed, we played Settlers of [...]

I started off today with two interviews for different call centres. I nailed both and while one offered me the job on the spot, the other one just wanted to run a background check. Considering that second one is a third-party company that has been taking Rogers wireless calls for less time than I worked [...]

This afternoon I went out golfing with Geoff and dad. They tied while I… doubled their score. Interestingly, the owners of the course have their own helicopter:

Meanwhile, Laura went with my sister, mother, niece and aunt to some winery.