It's Beginning to Look A Lot Like Christmas

Yes, we know Christmas was a few weeks ago, but we never got a chance to post our pictures, so . . . better late than never! After Thanksgiving I couldn't wait to search for Christmas decorations to hang up in our room (bear in mind that we didn't know we were coming home for Christmas, so we wanted to make it as festive as possible!). You may recall that two years ago in Korea we couldn't find any decorations so we had to make our own (who could forget Jeff's green shirt stretched over a lampshade as our"tree"). I feared the same thing would happen here, but boy was I wrong! Our local grocery store had a ton of tinsel and lights, and after stops at three large department stores we were even able to find a tree! Below are a few pictures . . .

We were told our lamp looked like a festivus pole :)

Our tree!

It's hard to tell in the picture, but the tinsel is green and gold, so we called this our Packer mirror (too bad it didn't help us win!)

Everything we watched was a Christmas movie!

Since we were able to come home for Christmas, we had to take the decorations down on the 21st. But they didn't go to waste, we passed them off to one of Jeff's co-workers who is on a different assignment about an hour from here. He travels with his wife and two young sons, so we thought they'd enjoy the decorations!

Quick Update

Happy 2009! We know it's been a while since we've posted, so we thought we'd give you all a quick update. We are currently still in Thailand, and it looks like we will be here through mid-March or so. The weather is still fantastic, but we can tell that high season is upon us, as there are WAY more tourists here than in the last six months.

December was very busy for us. Two members of Jeff's crew had to leave for various reasons, and so Jeff was working 8 pm to 8 am every single day. Luckily that ended on December 19th! On December 20th we got an early Christmas present: two tickets home for Christmas!!!! The unit Jeff was working on needed to be shut down for 2 weeks, so we were able to fly back home and spend the holidays with our families. It was a busy 10 days and we split our time between Milwaukee, Lake Zurich, and Columbia, SC. We arrived back here on New Years Day.

I know this is a short post, but we promise more stories and pictures from our trip back home soon!