Karl and Angela Rees

Tuesday night Angela went to Enrichment, where they had pizza and fun.  Angela participated in a Christmas tree ornament swap—she came back a little disappointed because she had bought a nice one, and ended up with one that she didn’t like very much.  But she didn’t want to trade it away because she didn’t want to make the person who brought it feel bad (nobody else was trading either—guess most people either liked their ornaments or didn’t want to make people feel bad either).  Karl meanwhile watched Thomas and put him to bed.  When Angela came back, he went to play in his team’s late game of Frisbee for the night.

Karl worked from home again on Wednesday to help Angela out some.  It’s nice to be able to work from home.  He doesn’t usually get close to an 8 hour day when he does that, but at this point in the year, he should be able to get all of his hours in and still have time for vacation.  The only question is if he’s going to be able to complete everything that’s due before the end of the year.  That night Wayne and Becky and Paela came over with cookies, and to finish up Return of the King.

Thursday Angela had an adventure trying to get Thomas’s Social Security card.  She got very lost on the way to the office.  She eventually found the place, only to learn that we should have received the card back in Utah.  We can only hope no one stole it in the mail and is currently pretending to be Thomas.  But now we have his number, at least.

Friday Karl did an invention disclosure with a computer game company.  It’s been a long time since he’s done computer graphics and it made his head spin.  That night we went to our ward Christmas party.  It was a fairy typical—kids singing musical numbers, a billion dishes of funeral potatoes (many of which were surprisingly good), lots of food, Santa Claus (we’re so glad that we’re in a ward that actually lets Santa Claus participate in Christmas).

Saturday we drove up to spend the day with Angela’s grandparents.  Thomas did very well during both drives—we were a little surprised.  On the way there we stopped at the chocolate factory as usual.  We had pizza for lunch and lots of M&Ms, as usual.  We went out for the Ione Christmas parade, which was fun because it was very small-townish.  Thomas liked the horses and trains, but got very upset with how loud the sirens were.  After that, we went to church with them for another Christmas party.  It was almost the exact same meal, but you can’t go too wrong with ham and potatoes.  The ham was better than the night before, but we liked the salad and potato casseroles from the night before better.  On the way back, we stopped at the outlet malls in Tracy and managed to find a black dress for Angela along with a nice shawl, all in less than 20 minutes.  Of course, it may have been because we lowered our standards for what we wanted this black dress to look like, but it was still pretty nice and much less expensive.

Today we taught about Paul in Primary.  We had the kids act out various moments of his life.  It actually went pretty well, though Karl felt the kids didn’t have nearly as much fun as they should have pretending to stone Stephen.