Isn’t it funny how Christmas sneaks up on you? I remember as a kid waiting and waiting until Christmas finally came… and of course I couldn’t sleep at all the night before. Nowadays it seems to come up really fast… Well, I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas (we certainly did). We started off our celebration in Detroit on Christmas Eve. Awhile back, when the Lions looked like they might do pretty good this season, we picked up a couple of tickets for the Lions-Bears game… row 6, lower section, man those seats were awesome! The trip getting there was definetly an adventure. We set out with our Mapquest directions in hand and a printout of a map that had places marked as to where we could park. On the way I figured it’d be a good idea not to fill up in Detroit and decided to make a gas stop 45 minutes outside of Flint. We pull into a BP and I start filling up the car when I notice there’s a sign in the window, “Cigars, Cigerettes, Blunts”, not your typicaly gas station sign. I went in to get a couple pops and thought I picked a real winner of a gas station since there was bullet proof glass around the cashier’s counter. As I quickly got back in the car, I mentioned the sign to Susan, she glanced at it and we laughed about that for awhile. We finally get into Detroit (where people drive like they’re crazy), took our exit, and drove by Ford Field. It was time to find a place to park, there were a couple places with signs, “Parking $60” “Parking $50” that seemed kind of pricey. We drove around and somehow found ourselves north of Ford Field. We actually could have gotten back on I-75 going south to take the same exit we took 10 minutes earlier, but my navigator didn’t like that idea. So, we ended up going down a dead end street, I recognized this as a dead end, as there was a sign that said “No Outlet”. I also realized we wouldn’t be able to turn around once we got to the end (cars were parked on both sides of the road and there was just enough room to drive down the middle of the road), but my navigator insisted there might be parking at the end, so away we went. Sure enough it dead ended and there wasn’t much room to turn around. Well, there was a small dirt hump ahead of us and a street, so what did we do… a little bahaing. Luckily there wasn’t much of a curb where we drove up, over and back down again. We pulled up to an intersection (I think we might have actually been going the wrong way on a one way… oops!) Then this guy comes over, asking if we want to park for 20 bucks. Well considering the other parking areas less than $20 looked pretty sketchy we decided to park there. We paid the man, reversed in the middle of the road (because I passed the entrance) and were finally at Ford Field. It took awhile to get to our seats, they were so far down… but it was worth it. As we sat down, we noticed there was not a Lions fan around us (sweet… Bears section). I was disappointed, I mentioned to Susan, who am I going to high-five when the Lions do something great. She gave me a look and said high-fiving wasn’t cool (that’s what she thought…) Eventually a couple Lions fans came in and sure enough the high-fives were going around when the Lions did something amazing (Susan even got into it… she even complained at the end of the game that we weren’t really in the high-fiving group, sometimes the people in front of us didn’t turn around…) The game was awesome, the Lions were holding their own against a first place team. The last few seconds were really intense as the Lions were driving with a couple minutes on the clock. When they got to the 25 yard line (right in front of us), there was about eight seconds left on the clock (4th and 2, no time outs left). Kitna snaps the ball, he’s in trouble, he manages to break free, pressures coming, he’s scrambling, finally an oppurtunity presents itself, Kitna passes, it’s caught in the endzone, Lions wi… doh he landed out of bounds! So they lost by five points, oh well it was still a good game… It sounds like we’ll be going to a game next year (as long as Susan has a Mike Furrey jersey, #87… and yeah I got her to wear some Lions gear to the game 😉 ).

We got back into Midland around 7:00 PM, I know this becaues we wanted to pick up a few things from the grocery store for Christmas Day dinner. Well, all the grocery stores closed at or before seven (even Wal-mart…) We did managed to get into Meijer as they were closing, but they didn’t have any ground pork left (which is something we needed). We managed to find some food around the house to eat and decided to have our fancy Christmas dinner on Friday. We each opened a present before going to bed (it’s tradition), I opened one from my folks and it was a beef jerky maker. After I opened it, I told Susan, “I bet you any money that’s a dehydrator.” (pointing to the big box that had both our names on it, also from my parents). As you can see on the Picture of the Day page, we had quite a few presents. We didn’t get up super early (6:00 AM) to open them though (as kids we use to get up and wait until six before we woke our parents up to open presents…) Low and behold we did get a dehydrator (and I’ll be making some venison jerky with that this week). After opening all our gifts we were happy with what we got. I had to talk to the big man himself (Santa) to get a hat and glove set like the one Susan use to have (the hat had gone missing and we couldn’t find it anywhere, Susan was pretty bummed out… we couldn’t even find any on the internet). I think she was pretty excited when she opened that gift. Scout must have been a really good kitty as she got a ton of new toys. Since she has a tendency to lose her toys, we decided we’d put most of them in her cat carrier and leave a few out she could play with. We went back upstairs, to our presents, and after we were up there awhile, I noticed Scout wasn’t meowing at the door, like she usually does when we are in the computer room. I ended up going downstairs for something and wouldn’t you know she had every single toy out and was running all over the house just as happy as could be. We decided to shut the door to her carrier so she couldn’t get to all the toys in it. Every now and then she’ll sit in front of the carrier looking in at all those toys… We also got her a new laser pointer and boy she was excited for that too, she was literally running up the walls (trying to catch that little red dot…)

Figuring to save a buck or two, we thought we could stroll into Target and pick up an artificial tree (a little bigger than the one we had…) There were still quite a few left and we had saw one a couple weeks before that we both decided we wanted to get (too bad we couldn’t remember the display number or the type of tree, as they didn’t have the display up anymore.) I somehow ended up opening three different boxes (these things were taped shut) to find out if the needles looked real enough… they didn’t so we ended up not getting a tree (they were 50% off too!) That was pretty exciting, then we went over to Wal-mart to pick up groceries for the week. It was only slightly busy, luckily we didn’t run over any unsuspecting pedestrians or hit any cars that thought blocking the aisles was a good idea… it was close though… 😉