Home again.

Well, we're back from Montana, where we've been for the past couple days, celebrating Christmas with the fam. In attendance were myself, Diana, Mom, Dad, Dave, Elaine, and Jocelyn. It was great to see the all the extended fam, but especially Dave. What a guy.

The house is not only complete but actually pretty liveable. We flew on Christmas night, which was pretty nice, as the airports were all pretty quiet. The next morning, we gathered together and opened pressies and so forth.

One of the first days we were there, it snowed about 6 inches or so. The rest of the trip, there was snow off and on, which made everything very beautiful. It was a lot of fun to play in, and we made a couple snowmen (who jumped off the balcony on their own accord), and attempted to make the Biggest Snowball Ever, but didn't realize how heavy it would be.

Much of the time was spent inside by the fire, playing games, reading, and just generally hanging out. I finished "The Man in the High Castle", which was pretty good. I burned through a book about a card-counting group from MIT who made millions of dollars from casinos. More intriguing was the fact that card-counting (without the aid of counting devices) is legal. However, casinos can kick you out for whatever reason they please, and trespassing IS illegal. But learning some basics of card-counting could hurt anyone, could it? :) I started reading "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson, and am enjoying that a lot, too.

We saw The Two Towers again, and I enjoyed it quite a bit my second time around. Now that I knew what to expect in terms of differences from the book, I could just sort of relax and and take it all in and enjoy it.

One day we went snowboarding. Dave and Elaine and Diana were going to take a lesson, but we didn't get there in time. So we decided to rent stuff, and I'd give some pointers as I could. I felt like I was in a little bit of a precarious situation, as the teacher of three very new snowboarders, but everything went really well. Dave picked the broad strokes really well, and was able to put together some turns by the end of the day. Diana was much more comfortable than her first documented attempt at boarding, and was able to make it down the hill without falling, but was still a little shaky of the whole "turning" thing. Elaine did very well for her first time, once she was one her feet, able to go quite a ways without falling and with some basic control over her direction. The fact that everyone was smiling by the end of the day, I think, makes it a success.

The whole trip was a lot of fun. And now we're home. And we move in like 2 weeks. We've got a lot of work ahead of us. :P