Postcards

Yay Christmas! The last few days have been insanely busy. I finished most of my Christmas shopping ahead of time and got presents mailed off early enough, but I had to get something for Jenny's dad for a gift exchange with her family, and we hadn't decided what I should get him until this past weekend. So I went out to buy his present over the weekend and got to deal with the holiday crowds. I got him a digital picture frame, which involved driving to four different stores because the first three were either completely sold out of everything or just had very ugly looking frames.

We had Jenny's entire family over yesterday, so we had to unpack some of her stuff and do a lot of cleaning. Jenny's been out of commission with pneumonia for the last week or two, though. I managed to get the house in pretty good shape, though. I also chopped off the bottom of our Christmas tree and got it set up in the living room over the weekend. We'd bought the tree a couple of weeks ago while I was still sick, so it's been sitting on the patio in a bucket of water since then. I got it trimmed to the perfect height for the living room, and Jenny helped put lights and ornaments on it.

Some of Jenny's family showed up on Monday and spent the night, the rest came over yesterday just for Christmas. Things are finally settling down today. Last night during dinner, I would clean off the counters in the kitchen and load up the dishwasher, and by the time the dishwasher was finished, there'd be another pile of dishes needing to be washed. It was a good time, though. Jenny got me Rock Band for the XBox, and her sister got me Guitar Hero 3 as part of the gift exchange. Those should keep me busy for a while.

A couple of weekends ago, Ice Oasis had a little Winter Wonderland thing going, where they put up some Christmas trees on the ice, surrounded by piles of snow and benches. That was a lot of fun, and gave me a chance to practice some skating without the pressure of a game. Our regular games for that night were actually canceled because of it and rescheduled for this past Saturday morning. We still had our regular games in the evening, too, for the possibility of four games in one day.

I skipped the first game, because it was just too early, but got there early enough for my team's game. We lost the game, but I scored my third goal. I came home and got some rest, then went back up for the two evening games. I subbed for one of the other teams in the first game. We lost that one, in large part because our goalie didn't seem to care too much about keeping the puck out of the net. Fortunately, that goalie was playing for the other team during the second game, which made it pretty easy for me to score two goals during the first period and an assist later in the game. We won that one 4-2.

The other interesting thing about that game was that our entire team was there, and we didn't play with any subs. That left us without two full shifts, and with one fewer man on the bench than the other team (which had four or five subs), but at the same time we were all much more invested in winning the game. All too often, we have subs that end up playing defense, taking long shifts, and not really putting much effort into the game, which results in the other team getting to the net more often than they really should. Playing with just my teammates was a lot more fun.