Vacuum and Tree Party

Hooray! We just added a new member to our home....a brand new vacuum cleaner! You may not be as excited about it as we are, but it's a great vacuum. Manburger and I had been scanning sale ads for the last few months looking for good bargains and finally came across a special at the local hardware store. So the weekend after Thanksgiving we drove over there and picked it up. And imagine our luck, it was the last one on the shelf. Here's a picture of Manburger assembling it. Don't you just love the bright yellow color? And here's a picture of me using it to suck up the 1 year accumulation of dirt that our old vacuum couldn't get. I never thought I'd get so excited about household appliances.

Can you believe that it's already December? Since last Monday was the first one after Thanksgiving, we set up our tree, listened to Christmas music, and drank homemade eggnog. Fortunately our tree is super easy to set up. All we have to do is plop it in the stand, fluff the branches, and plug it in. You'll notice the star on top is proof of my handiwork with some poster-board and foil.
Oh, I just have to share one of my huge accomplishments for this week. I have finished all of my Christmas shopping!! Well, except for stocking stuffers. I never thought I'd be one of those people, but I was starting to have nightmares about how much scarier the area around the mall will get as Christmas gets closer.

Also, this Friday, it rained all day. I was so excited and also extremely grateful at the end of the day that I didn't die in a car wreck b/c Southern Californians have no idea how to drive in the rain. There were people flying past me on the highway, and I just kept thinking, "Hey, at least I'm the one who's going to make it home without getting in a wreck."

Manburger and I also attended a Tamale Festival out in Indio yesterday. We don't have pictures yet, but it was a lot of fun. We took one of my "co-workers" from where I volunteer along. We tried pork, chicken, beef, strawberry, caramel apple, chocolate-raspberry, sweet corn, and chile-cheese tamales. I doubt we will ever see so many tamales in one place. Oh and Manburger learned his lesson about Mexican corn on the cob. He bought one (just think of the ones Steven eats in Nacho Libre), and it was totally disgusting. Something about mayonnaise and that weird cheese stuff on corn makes for one gross combo. So if you were curious about how it tastes, take our word and don't bother. However, everything else we tried was delicious and I got to have a mango on a stick (they peel it for you and then cut it so it looks sort of like a flower). I hadn't had one of those since the Latino Festival in Provo that I attended with the siblings in 2005.

That's all for this week. We love you all.