I am sorry that I don’t post as often as Kip does, but I just don’t have that much exciting going on to write a blog post about.  So now I am going to tell you all about all the things Kippy and I did over the Holiday Season.

The Christmas season began with us visiting Kip’s family on Christmas Eve Eve.  This was our year to spend Christmas with my family, so we spent the eve before Christmas Eve with Kip’s family.  Well, his family always gets together with Kaylor Family Christmas get together.  Apparently, the average number in attendance is between 65 and 75 people.  I come from a large family, but that is only my immediate family, I don’t have a large extended family, so I was slightly overwhelmed by the number of people that were in attendance with only about 50 people there.  After dinner that night the family got together to participate in the traditional game of Dirty Santa game for those people that bring gifts to trade around.  This being my first time attending this party, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this version of the gift exchange.  Apparently this was the first year that they allowed young children the participate as well, and let’s just say, I don’t think they will be playing next year.  These kids I would guess were no more than seven or eight years old, and I don’t think that they were quite prepared for exactly how dirty the game could get with high school students and adults fighting to get the presents that they wanted.  The game took about an hour and a half at least.  The hot gift this year was Best Buy Gift Cards.  I ended up getting a Day Spa set that my mother-in-law brought to the exchange.  Kip was super wonderful and got me the cute snowflake blanket that I wanted.  After the party, we came back to Kip’s parents’ house to celebrate Christmas with his family.  Scott and Jake got me a really cute pair of shoes that I just loved, but they were one size two small.  Kippy got his DS as I’m sure you all already know.  I got my DS from Kippy during our Christmas that we celebrated together.

Christmas Eve was spent driving from Kip’s parents’ house to my parents’ house.  That night we played a small version of White Elephant where my mom re-gifted a bunch of things she needed to quit storing under her bed.  It was funny to play with my whole family.  There were like four or five different candles.  Sunday was Christmas, and we opened our stockings first thing in the morning, followed by a special Christmas church service.  After a huge lunch of ham and cranberry sauce and tons of pie.  After lunch we opened our presents and played for the rest of the day.  Monday was pretty uneventful, but Tuesday night we went to Dixie Stampede at Myrtle Beach to see the Christmas show.  Kippy had never gone to the Dixie Stampede so he got to have his first experience with the yummy yummy food and the pretty pretty horses.  We were on the South Pole side of the theater right up close to the stage on the front row so we could see everything.  It was totally awesome and hilarious.  One of the characters was a red-neck reindeer hunter.  He was really funny.

Now it is New Year’s Day, and we are hanging at Kip’s parents’ house.  Kip has tomorrow off, and we will be un-decorating from Christmas and returning out little apartment back to normal.  I hope that everyone had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and now we don’t have to hear any more about the Merry Christmas Happy Holiday’s controversy.  I always said Merry Christmas anyway.

I know I haven’t posted in a while, and I’m sorry to keep you all waiting. We have had a very busy Thanksgiving and Christmas season already. For those of you just starting to read this blog, Kip and I are newlyweds, and this was our first Thanksgiving married. It is sometimes said that new brides have the need to attempt making a big Thanksgiving dinner for their new husbands. I did not have this desire, I did however attack the area of dessert.  I made two pumpkin pies from scratch, including the crusts using my grandmother’s recipe, and a turkey army.  Both of my deserts were huge successes at the Robinson Family Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, so that makes me happy.

We came home from his parents house Sunday afternoon. Kip had planned on going for the Christmas tree on Monday night, but since we got back so early, we went ahead and went to two different tree lots and picked out what I think is the most perfect Christmas tree ever!!! You have to understand that I have never had a real tree due to my mother’s allergies. We carried the tree up two flights of stairs and placed it in our living room. That night we hung lights and the ornaments that I have been collecting my entire life.  We also hung two ornaments that we just purchased as our two first ornaments as a married couple.  That night I also decorated our mantle with figurines and candles. The tree lot guy gave me some of the branches from the trunk of our tree to use in decorating around the apartment as well, and I’ve been trying to find places for them to go. On Monday I went by Wal-Mart and picked up tinsel to add a little sparkle to the tree and it just makes it shine!!  Unfortunately we are still short one tree topper.  But we’ll hopefully get one soon!

Tonight, Kip and I finally had the right staples that fit into our staple gun, and we were able to decorate the porch of our apartment. There are blue twinkle icicle lights across the top, a strand of plain white Christmas lights wrapped around the corner pillar, and these new snowflake lights along that banister that twinkle and sparkle and look totally awesome. Kip took Punky for a walk afterward and got some pictures of the lights. I think that we are like the first ones in our apartment complex to get lights up outside, at least the first that I have noticed. I hope that everyone else is enjoying the holiday season as much as I am. Merry Christmas!!!!

Just wanted to update everyone on my current Solitaire rating.  I’m pretty sure you will all be impressed to learn that my top speed for beating the game is now 63 seconds with a top score of 11758.  That is just crazy in my book.  Hope you are all practicing.  Later!

I officially can’t stand teenagers who think they should still be allowed to trick-or-treat.   Kip and I live on the third floor of an apartment building and I understand that not all children will climb that many steps for candy, but a few did this year.  We had a total of two groups come by.  The first group was a bunch of cute kids dressed up with their mom, or some adult figure.  The second set came about forty-five minutes later, and they came in the form of two boys, not walking together but one leading tthe other.  The leader was a much older boy who was taller than myself, and looked like he was in high school.  I thought nothing of it at the time.  We recieved no other trick-or-treaters for the remainder of the night.

As a way of showing people that we were giving out candy, we made a little flier and taped it to the door saying that trick-or-treaters were welcome.  I also took my adorable little pie pumpkin that I bought to be festive for the fall season out on the banister so that people below might see it and think to come up.  Well, only moments ago I realized that I hadn’t brought my pumpkin back inside, and I didn’t want anything to happen to it (like it freeze over night) as I was planning on using it to make a pumpkin pie from scratch for Thanksgiving.  Well, when I openned out door and looked right there, I was surprised to find that my pumpkin is no longer sitting there on the ledge but missing.  I even took the time to look over the banister to see if it had been smashed.  However, there are no remains of my cute pumpkin, it is simply missing.  I’m sure that a lot of you are sitting there saying to yourselve, “it was just a pumpkin get over it.”  But it is the principle of the situation that iritates and upsets me.  I put that little pumpkin out there as a sign of politeness and welcomeness, and someone had the odacity to steal it.  Take it from right in front of my door and leave me with nothing.  To top it all off, tied to that little pumpkin was a very cute little ribbon that at one time was attached to Punky’s pony, and my mother had added it to the pumpkin to make it look even cuter.  They not only stole my pumpkin, but the decorations that had been added to it.  I spoke earlier about the teenage boys that felt that they were in need of candy so badly that they had to go around asking for it (not even in costume I might add) because I am relatively certain that they are the ones that felt it neccesary to steal my pumpkin.  I say I’m relatively certain because Punky made no more outbursts toward people outside the door after those boys left and we didn’t hear anybody upstairs after that.  I realize that those people who are responsible for the pumpkin disappearance will doubtlessly ever read this post, but I feel that there are people out there reading it that will sympothize with me in my loss.  Now I have to hope that Harris Teeter is still selling pie pumpkins so I can purchase another one before Thanksgiving and make my pie.

So Kip informed you of one of his pet peeves when it comes to driving.  I thought I would add one of my own.  I can’t stand it when people get over into the turn lane way too early.  If there are multiple right turns, and the right lane is only for right turns, you should use it as a passing lane to get to your right turn, which is two turns away, ahead of everyone else.  It is dangerous for those people trying to turn onto the road that you are traveling on becuase they don’t know if you are going to turn or not.  And for those of us traveling along side of you, you tend to make it impossible for us to get into the turn lane when we need to an appropriate distance from the turn that we need to make.  If someone gets over way to early and I can get the chance, I pull over in front of them and slow way down just to keep them away from their turn that much longer.  As you can tell, Kip and I can get some pretty entertaining road rage.

I realize that my last post was about our new puppy, but she does all these cute and/or annoying things that I feel I must share with the rest of you.

Punky, we believe, must have been a descendent of some cat-dog union.  She seems to love climbing up onto the back of our couch, and going to sleep on the skinny ledge that it creates.  She also loves to play with my yarn that I sometimes leave out after I’ve finished knitting for a moment.  I came into the living room the other day to find an entire skane of purple yarn strewn all over the floor.  I then had to rewind the entire thing (I had barely started using it on a project I have had to put on hold).  Last night I started another project with the very same yarn.  This morning when Kip came into the living room, he found punky with my project and the ball of yarn on the floor.  Her doggy tendencies resurfaced in that my wooden knitting needle had been chewed on the end so that I can no longer use it.  Kip had to rewind the yarn and I had to buy new needles today.  She also likes to claw at things, like cardboard boxes.

Despite all the annoying things she does to destruct all the nice things I have around the apartment, I still love her very much, and I’m so thankful to have her in my life.  She is so cute when she curls up in my lap or beside me on the couch to take a nap.  She is so much fun to play fetch with.  I love my puppy!!!

Tuesday evening, Kip and I drove back to Newton to pick up the newest addition to the Robinson Family.  We are happy to welcome Miss Punky “Pants” Robinson, a 6-month-old wire haired terrier mix, to our loving family.  I would like to tell those of you out there, that she and I are very good buddies right now, but it did not start out as such a good relationship.  The first night Punky spent with Kip and me, she didn’t want to go to bed when it was time.  We crated her for the night, and for those of you that don’t have dogs, that means that we put her in her crate and closed the gate on her so that she couldn’t get out.  Well she didn’t like that, and after about twenty minutes of whining and scratching from the crate, we decided to see if she would be ok with just being penned up in the kitchen.  We learned all too quickly that she could jump or climb over any kind of blockade we could create to keep her in the kitchen.  We had to put her back in her crate in hopes that she would eventually calm down and go to sleep.  By 12:30 am she had finally calmed down some, but I couldn’t sleep.  I stayed up playing solitaire and reading in the room.  I finally thought that I might be able to go to sleep around 1:30 am, but as soon as my head hit the pillow and I rolled over, she was whining again.  It didn’t last long, but it kept me from sleeping for the next two hours.  To top it off, Kip started talking loudly in his sleep, so loudly in fact that I was afraid he would wake Punky up and she would start barking and whining again.  Anyway, after that first night, we realized that Punky needs to be in a more closed off place to sleep at night.  Wednesday night we tried out keeping her crate in the pantry room, and we didn’t hear her at all.  Since then, everything has been going quite smoothly.

This weekend we are spending in Newton for a family reunion.  It was quite exciting when Punky first arrived at Kip’s parents’ house.  The last time we had a puppy here, August chased Ted and Grace around the house.  They were both terrified of her.  This time around, Punky is big enough to take on Grace.  But Ted keeps growling and barking at her.  Grace and Punky are still trying to get to know one another, and their playing scares me a little.  I’m always worried one of them is going to get hurt.  But I’m told that is how they get to know one another.

Pictures of Punky will be coming soon.  Keep an eye on Kip’s posts for when they are online.

I’ve been married and living with Kip in Charlotte for almost six months now.  Since I don’t have a job outside the home as of yet, I have to find other ways to pass the time during the day.  One of the more popular ways I have learned to spend my days is by playing computer solitaire.  When I first started playing, I set the game to only deal one card, to not keep score, and to not keep time.  Since then, I gradually improved to playing with the game keeping score and time while still only dealing one card at a time.  Then, I eventually graduated to playing true solitaire, dealing three cards, keeping score, and time.  Yesterday afternoon I surprised myself.  I finished an entire game in only 98 seconds.  I couldn’t believe it.  My score at the end of that game was 7822.  I can’t even fathom the idea of ever beating that score.  But I will keep trying.  I’m sure someone out there has done a great deal better than that, but for me, that was totally exciting and impressive.  I’ll keep you posted if I do beat that.

P.S. I just played solitaire some more and I actually scored a 7957 in a time of 96 seconds!!!

Kip finally finished working on his website tonight!!!  That means that I get to post all of my thoughts right alongside his!!  I’m sure after a few days of this he will realize what a BIG mistake that was.  Then again, you guys out there can always just sort so that you only have to see his posts and you can skip all of my nonsensical babbling.  Otherwise, we’re in for an entertaining ride!!!  Anyway, it is late and I need to get to bed, I just wanted to experience what it was like to put my thoughts out on the interweb for all the world to see.  I’m sure you can’t wait until my next post!!

Good night world...I’m looking forward to you getting to know me!!!