What I've been doing while not blogging, Part III

Thanksgiving down in Monticello was by far one of the best yet! We all got as sick as dogs with a mysterious illness that spread like peanut butter throughout the entire clan. The initial symptom was nauseating burps that tasted like yeast, and it went downhill from there. (Since of course, you were curious.) But, we didn't let that stop us from eating ourselves silly, playing lots of board games, watching many movies, and taking a wild excursion into the tundra for a Christmas tree. It rained all weekend, and so there was plenty of mud. Ben was excited to have some off-roady Subaru commercial moments, but it turns out that the AWD on the side of our vehicle is just decoration, because our sporty car was the only one that completely stuck. The mud was so heavily encrusted on our wheel axels, that we had to remove the tires and clean them out in order to get our wheels to turn at all. A slightly lesser drama was the fact that at first I hated our tree. I tried to suffer in silence as all of my male relations, (and a few of the cheerful and stalwart females) pushed against my car, up to their knees in mud. But, as it turns out, I love the tree, and so all their labor was not in vain! Here are some highlights from the trip, my favorite of which is the shot of my dad demonstrating to my nephew Rawl what fun it is to sit on a mattress, and that any big boy who goes potty in the toilet can also enjoy the privilege of doing so. Josie somehow was able to bypass all of those stipulations. Hmmm...