It was a Christmas Miracle!

You've now read about the brutal northwest storms and all the havoc they caused. However, you did not hear about brighter side of the power outage.

The following story needs a little bit of background first. We had absolutely ZERO cell phone reception in our apartment when we first moved in. We knew it when we signed the lease but it's a whole other story why we signed anyway. To talk on the phone we had to go outside in the parking lot, and with Seattle being what it is, it was usually raining and pretty miserable. I called people as little as possible and tried to do everything while traveling. It was a pain to say the least. Anyway, the day after the power outage, we suddenly had cell phone service!!!! It was a Christmas Miracle! I said a big tree must have fallen that was blocking our path or something and Chris completely negated this as a possible cause but couldn't come up with anything better. Whatever the reason, we were thrilled. Except every day we would come home and expect it to go away. We didn't want to get our hopes up too much. But one month later it's still around and we're getting pretty used to being able to answer our phone without running outside first.

You may have seen that my blog name is eringee. This has a story too. Chris' sister said her daughter, Avery (2), couldn't get that there are two Erin's in the family. So finally she told her (pointing to the picture) that this is Erin S. and this is Erin G. Apparently Avery latched onto my name very quickly and if you hear her say it, it's all one word. Kind of like Orangey or something like that. Hence the name Eringee. It's very cute when she yells it out.

We went to Utah for Christmas and New Years. We drove down so that we would have a car and could leave and come back when we wanted. We ended up leaving Friday at 4pm and getting to Utah at 7am. We were going to stop if we got tired, but we never got tired. I drove from 1-7am and about 3:30 our gas light came on and we were in the middle of NO-WHERE. The next sign we saw said "Tremonton 90 Miles." I was so nervous. I've never run out of gas before in my life and to do it in the middle of the night, on a strange highway, during the holidays was not going to be fun. We were lucky though and something else came up about 60 miles away. My gas tank filled up to 15 gallons and it's a 17 gallon tank. Eeeks.

My whole family caught the flu bug over the holidays so it made for an interesting holiday season but it was nice to see everyone, sick or not. My parents rented a house with 6 bedrooms which was very nice and had a pool table and pinball machine. It was also VERY nice to have laundry, which was used constantly with the state of health as it was. Bryce got married and went to San Diego on his honeymoon. It was a beautiful wedding and I think we're all not in least bit sad that it's the last.

It snowed again yesterday in Seattle. I hate the snow.