A Rainy Rainy Christmas

2 seconds after this picture Marshall fell over sideways and landed in the tree. There was some crying involved.

I headed out to Portland, OR for Christmas and the week before. I got out of Colorado JUST IN TIME! The day after I left, it snowed 2.5 feet and shut down the airport for a couple of days. All the while I was none the wiser galavanting around rainy Portland with my wonderful friend Molly. We had a ton of fun drinking beer, seeing the Nutcracker ballet, going hiking, and having Molly kick my butt in her spin class! She's a fitness instructor (in her spare time, haha) at a super nice gym in Portland, and I went to her spin class while I was there. I'll just say it ranks right up there with one of the hardest I've ever been to! It was good, though, afterwards I didn't feel quite as guilty about all of the wonderful dark ales that we drank!

On Friday I was off to Sweet Home (not Alabama), population not very many! My sister, her husband, son, cat, chinchilla, and 3 horses live on a 5 acre property outside of this small town in OR. They are crazy! She drives 45 minutes each way to vet school every day, and her husband drives 45 minutes to his job in the other direction each day just so they can have a house with enough room for the horses! It's a cute house, and it was actually kind of nice to be out in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone reception and what not.

We traveled to the Oregon coast and spent the day one of the days I was there. It was amazing, they sun was out and it was 55º the whole day. Sometimes the people on the OR coast don't see the sun for 3 months at a time in the winter. I'm pretty sure the sun had followed me from CO, since it was dumping snow here and not sunny! We had a fun day and saw a lot of sea lions. They are really load and smell pretty bad! My nephew is 16 months going on 3 years old. He's really tall and runs like he's known how to walk for longer than 2 months! He has the best smile I've ever seen a kid have, and he wears it most of the time!

Marshall was enamored with the sea lions

Fat, Smelly Sea Lions

Me and Dad in Newport

Tori, Dad, Marshall and Shane

Marshall on the $4000 rocking horse

The shop owner wouldn't stop bugging me to ride the horse and take a picture...Marshall fits much better!

Christmas was a nice relaxing day (in my pj's all day!!!). We cooked a bunch of food, way too much actually, and had a lot of fun opening all of Marshall's gifts because he thought my dad's tool box and tools were the coolest thing ever, not all of his MANY MANY toys, much to my sister's dismay!

Marshall had fun doing everything EXCEPT open all of his gifts!

I made it back to CO with my new bike (didn't have to pay to get it on the plane, either), and now I'm back in the swing of things trying to find a roommate since the one we were planning on bailed at the last minute today. Oh well, flaky people suck!

I hope that everyone had a very Merry Christmas and are enjoying the holidays! (I'll be enjoying them when they're done.) haha