Over the holidays, I took lots of pictures of food.  And I'm hungry right now while waiting for dinner to be finished (spaghetti squash! yum!) so I am obviously thinking about delicious food and wanting to look at pictures of it. You can too! Isn't that lucky?

Christmas dinner.  My plate would have been more full if I hadn't already eaten a million snacks.

My brother made cake for dessert and it was not very good, but my aunt made my favorite cupcakes and they were spectacular.

This is a sandwich from Zingerman's (local restaurant in Ann Arbor).  It had green chile on it, but the spiciest part was the dang mustard.  I seriously could feel it burning in my nose.  Ahh, the pain!

My brother and I went to a restaurant in East Lansing and he said I needed to get this soup because it was the best soup ever.  It's white chicken chili, I think.

I have traveled to many different restaurants in search of the best Philly.  (It's not in Philadelphia)

My mom made these for breakfast one day.....mmmmmmmmmmmmmm

My mom also made these, from some kit she bought on sale.  She kept calling them whoopie cushions.  (we also drank a lot of tea while I was there)

While I was back in Michigan, I went to my dad's temple for a latke dinner.  My dad is Jewish, if you didn't know that, so we also celebrate Jewish holidays (such as Hanukkah).  My dad's men's group was hosting the dinner, so I was already familiar with the side dishes -- cole slaw and homemade applesauce -- before the dinner even happened.

Also included in the dinner were latkes, of course, and hot dogs.  It was actually pretty good.

And a pickle.  Jewish people loooove their pickles.

After the dinner was over, the rabbi tried to convince us to stay for the service and menorah lighting.  He said they lit about 50 menorahs at once.  But my mom and I had plans to go out for dessert instead. 

Anyone who says they do not like dessert is in denial

At home, we celebrated Hanukkah by lighting our own menorah.



We also have a sticky window menorah, which I had the duty of "lighting."

I wanted to get the reflection of the Christmas tree lights in for the double holiday effect

I'm not gonna lie, part of the fun of Hanukkah is seeing what kind of presents we get.  It's usually some cheap thing my mom found on sale the year before, but it's amusing to see what she comes up with.  I'm not going to post everything I got for each of the 8 days, because my mom enjoys giving us underwear in hopes that we'll throw our old ones away.  Haha.  But here's a few things.

Matt actually used this oven mitt today

Adventure Time! (if you don't know what I'm talking about, look it up)

wool socks are the best field socks

In the spirit of catching up with things, I will now post about my trip to Phoenix.  Did I mention I went to Phoenix?  Well, I did. 

I went for some soil meeting thingy-majobber.  Basically, we went to tell another agency(ies) how our methods are way more awesome than theirs.  Okay, not really (well, not totally, anyway).  I went because I wanted to know how the other agencies worked.  Because things vary from one place to another, whether it is in a different region or a different agency, and I generally get a very biased version of how things are "supposed" to be done.  I won't get into the details of Ecological Site Descriptions, because that would be boring, but that's pretty much the gist of why I was there.

But if we really want to be honest, then I went because I wanted to stay at my favorite hotel in Phoenix, The Embassy Suites.  I attempted to make a video blog, all travel channel style, the last time I was there.  Unfortunately, my camera and I are not that awesome, so this time you are just getting pictures.

Since the last time I was in Phoenix, some hotel policies have changed.  The first one, although it didn't directly affect me, was somewhat unpleasant.  They now charge $5 to park in their lot.  Lame. 

The second change, however, was much better.  The last time I was there, we were given tickets that allowed us to have 3 free (alcoholic) drinks per night.  This time, happy hour lasted several hours each evening, during which time you could have as many free drinks, and snacks, as you wanted.  That was pretty darn cool.  Except for that for my first drink, I wanted Jack and Coke, but all they had was... bourbon?  It was not delicious.  I decided to stick with the old standby, vodka and cranberry, for the rest of the night.

But you want to look at pictures, I'm sure... so, here are some pictures.

Dining Room

Living Room

Kitchen.  The water from the sink tasted weird.  Like mold.

Bedroom

Cool fountain outside the lobby

The best hot tub ever

Old Smoky lives in the apartment downstairs and kiddie corner from mine.  He is old, and he smokes cigarettes.  Hence, Old Smoky.  He likes to sit in his gray computer desk chair, which is outside on his patio, and smoke his Camels or Marlboro Reds, or whatever the heck it is he smokes.  During these times, he enjoys "trapping" innocent passerby into long, drawn out conversations about a set variety of topics he enjoys.  I will get into more about those topics in later posts.  There are some large shrubs in front of his apartment, so we don't always see him right away, and sometimes he surprises us.  We'll be heading towards the stairs up to my apartment, and will hear:

Old Smoky has a deep voice.  It sort of sounds like the guy who does the voice-overs for Dodge Ram commercials.  So, picture that voice in your mind as you read the above greeting.  When you hear it, you know what is going to happen next. Well, YOU don't.  Not yet, anyway.  But I do, and over the course of this series of posts, I will introduce you to the man that is Old Smoky.

As usual, I'm ridiculously behind on posting.  So I'm catching up.  Last month, we went sledding.  It was an interesting adventure.  Let's have a look into the past, shall we?

We decided to use inner tubes to sled with.  So we went to the store and looked for some.  But all they had were ones for water.  But we thought, 'what the heck!' and got them anyway.  This will be important later in the story.

After we finished blowing up the inner tubes and getting all our snow gear, we (finally) headed off to the mountains.  It had snowed a crap-ton up there and it was cold, really really cold.  Like 15 degrees (F not C -- which are both bogus units of measure by the way, but that is neither here nor there). 

We found a good parking spot and hiked a little way in to find a good little section of an awesome hill for sledding.  Matt went down first, and he went down FAST.  I started to get a little bit nervous.  Especially since some jerkface was sitting at the bottom of the hill with his dogs, and would not move.  But I decided to face my fear, and started down the hill.

That's one of us at the top of the hill (probably Matt)

Everything was going decently well... that is, until I got to the bottom and my inner tube scraped over a rock we hadn't noticed before.  And immediately deflated.  True story.  This is the problem with floaty inner tubes.  Not exactly the best ever for sledding down rocky mountain slopes.

At least I got a good workout walking back up the hill

We had to take turns after that.  The idiot was still there with his dogs.  So when I went down I screamed the whole way to get the dumbass to move, but he never did. That F-er.  My third attempt was the best one, and amazingly enough, that's the one when we got video.


After that, I was like "oh yeah, I am totally awesome at this!"  and went down again.  Only to freak out right at the end and plant my feet, resulting in me flipping over, flying in the air, and face planting right in the snow.  It hurt.  And it was cold.

And since 2011 was the year of technical difficulties, I should mention that my camera didn't like the cold either.  Ever since, the digital screen has decided to stop working.  I can still take pictures through the little view finder window thingy, but it may be time to consider a newer model.  I mean, my phone camera takes better pictures than my actual camera.  But it can still take some pretty good ones.