Christmas Miscellany

Here are just a few bits and pieces of our little Christmas thus far. 

Our (very obnoxious) Christmas puppy:

Bubs was feeling particularly mopey over the fact that Santa forgot to get him a gift this year...

 (He was naughty.)

In his excitement for the upcoming holidays, Ken took it upon himself to buy all of his own Christmas presents this year. He still pretended to be ecstatic and surprised with each one when he opened them. 

 Until he opened a gift he had not gotten for himself....

(He wasn't impressed with my ingenuity.)

I have to admit, Santa (or, as he refers to himself, Kenta Claus) was especially good to me this year.

Among my gifts was an iPhone 4s. I was so surprised I couldn't speak for a full ten minutes after I opened it. Fortunately, with this new iPhone, I no longer have to speak. It can probably do that for me.

 (That's how I've spent most of my day.)

All of the Christmas presents and hullabaloo aside, I'm most thankful to be spending the holiday with these two guys:

And I'm looking forward to seeing family over the next few days!

Up Went The Tree

We put up the Christmas tree really early this year. As in, beginning-of-November kind of early. This is Bubba's first Christmas with us, so we were curious how he would respond to having a big tree in the middle of the living room (and we couldn't wait to find out). 

Since Bubba loathes change of any kind (e.g. he refused to go anywhere near the bathroom for days after we put up a new shower curtain, unless it was to bark incessantly at it), we were worried it would be a little traumatic for him. We were especially worried, however, that he might try to christen the tree with a lift of the ol' leg (he tried to pee on a plant in Ken's mom's house a few months ago, so we figured a full-on tree indoors might be tempting fate). 

The outcome? Bubba didn't give two hoots about the tree. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't a teensy bit disappointed in the lack of Bubba-dramatics. 

He did, however, prove to be a bit of a thief during the whole decorating-of-the-tree. 

And, as it turns out, garland can keep a dog entertained for hours. (I'm thinking of keeping it as a year-round fixture.)

Who knew, right?

Every once in a while Bubba will march past the tree and take a swipe at it with his paw, or just try to steel a hunk of garland from it with his teeth, nearly tipping the whole tree over (this has happened twice). Otherwise, he's proving to be a very well-behaved Christmas puppy. (With the tree. Wrapping paper, on the other hand, is another story for another time.)
Oh! And one more thing:

Merry Christmas from (a very disgruntled) Bubba!

2011

Happy New Year!

We've just wrapped up a lovely, long holiday week of visiting both sides of our fam: Ken's side on Christmas and Boxing Day and my side for the remainder of the week, with a couple of travel days squeezed in there. It was a really great time but it was also pretty busy and we were eager to get back home yesterday to chill out for a bit before heading back to work next week (if cool kids are still allowed to say "chill out"). When we got home last night we realized it was New Year's Eve and we felt like we should do something to mark the occasion, but we were feeling pretty pooped and the idea of attending a party seemed out of the question after seven hours of being cooped up in a car. We nearly jumped at the opportunity when our friends, Jared and Alisha, invited us over to their house for a quiet-ish night of board games and Wheel of Fortune on Nintendo Wii. It was purrrrrfect.

And it presented the perfect opportunity for me to bring my early birthday present out for its first event! Which leads me to my New Year's resolution(s):

1. Take more pictures

...the only resolution worth mentioning for now because (a) I'm using it as an excuse to brag shamelessly and (b) I got a Pentax K-x camera for my birthday! <--Bragging.

So we're obviously not used to using it yet (and we're clearly putting it's shake-resistance to the test), but I'm sure having fun playing around with this new Stormtrooper camera of mine.

 

(The camera was shipped to my parents' house, so I found some willing/not-so-willing models to practice on while we were there.)

Anyhoo, all that to say, we had a nice little New Year's (and a fantastic Christmas) and I'm optimistically looking forward to the year ahead. Now I need to add a few more resolutions to my list-of-one before the day is over (I've got approximately five minutes). Happy New Year to you all! I hope to see more of your lovely faces in 2011. 

Merry Christmas!

Every Christmas we spent in (or around) Korea, we took cheesy Christmas pictures of ourselves to send home to our families. Last night we decided to do a 2010 Christmas photo-shoot for the sake of tradition (even though our families will be seeing our lovely faces in the flesh this year). 

It didn't go well. 

Things were a little out of focus...

A little too dark...

A little off-kilter...

Or a little awkward...

We gave up before throwing our darn camera out the window...

(The tradition has died in Korea.) 

Regardless, merry merry Christmas from the McMundays!

Two Things

One:
You must see the new Disney movie Tangled. It's really good. (I think Disney has gotten their groove back.)

Two:
I wish I had discovered these items on Etsy sooner than a week before Christmas, because they surely would have made it onto my Christmas list:

These soap whips.

This huge bag for my ever-growing pile of purse junk. 

(Actually, I went ahead and ordered the bag today as a birthday present for myself.... I mean, really, it's important for a 21-year-old to have a good, sturdy bag.)

And if I had the nerve to wear such a thing, I would totally ask for this reinvention of the fanny-pack.

It is pretty ingenious, isn't it? But I don't have the guts to pull it off... yet. 

This anti-aging goop. 

(Because, let's face it.... I'm not really twenty-one. *sniff*)

This necklace, because it's purdy.

And this one, too.

OR I would happily forgo all of the above to receive a round-trip ticket to Indonesia and a full week at this place.

Please and thank you. 

Some Christmasy Things....

Waking up to this the other morning:

(Clearly not my picture, due to its obvious quality.)

Hosting a little Christmas baking party:

Listening to Bing Crosby nonstop: 

Rearranging our living room (which has nothing to do with Christmas, but there is a Christmas tree involved):

And getting an early Christmas surprise from sweet ol' Ken:

It's a nativity scene that matches our marshmallow ornament! (Decidedly sacrilegious, but super cute nevertheless.)

(I think we might have a new yearly tradition on our hands.)

Update(s)

My childhood-friend/college-roommate/fellow-understander-of-life-lived-in-Korea, Jessie (two blog shout-outs in one weekend!)  has mentioned a number of times in recent months that my blog is boring and extraordinarily uninformative. (Well!) Although my instinctual reaction has been to deny such nonsense, I suppose she does have a point (I realized in mid-argument that my last real post was written a month and a half ago).  So here I am, rectifying the sad little fact that my blog is half-dead, even though my life has been extraordinarily uneventful of late and I don't have a whole lot to babble on about. Nevertheless, here I go....

The only real update I have is on the job front: I have one! It's of the temporary variety, but it has kept me pretty busy for the past three months and will continue to do so indefinitely. (No, you didn't read that wrong: I'm working temporarily indefinitely.) The job is in insurance (in the claims department, no less) which is an entirely new venture for me and I'm continually confused by the complexity of it (my walks home at the end of the day are usually accompanied by a headache). It's the perfect little job for me right now, but I'm still looking for more permanent work, although probably not as thoroughly as I should be (a little scroll through Monster.com every other evening probably doesn't count as actual "job searching").

Moving on to not-so-informative but much-more-fun news, I'm excited for Christmas! So much so that I dragged Ken to Canadian Tire today to buy a Christmas tree. We were contemplating purchasing a real tree because they smell so nice and they look so... well... real. There were, however, a few obstacles standing in the way of our getting a real tree (namely the prospect of hauling the big ol' thing onto public transit) so we opted for the fake variety. I have to admit I was pretty appalled at the prices of fake trees these days when we finally got to the store. The one we originally wanted was $400! (Seriously? It probably cost the company a buck to make the darn thing.) We opted for the cheapest tree after a whole lot of hemming and hawing (I won't say how much it cost because I'm pretty sure we were ripped off and I would really rather remain unsure) and then we hauled it all the way home on foot--about 15 city blocks--(and by we I mean Ken), then started setting it up pretty much the second we walked in the door. And would you believe we actually documented the whole process in pictures? Who are we?

There we are, attaching the middle part to the bottom part. (Totally posed and oh so interesting.)

I have no idea how the above picture happened but, regardless, couldn't I have cleaned the floor a bit before taking pictures? (We're pigs.)

Now I'm going to tell a little side-story: Ken has always said that the profile of my face reminds him of Whistler's Mother, which I've always found slightly insulting. Even when he had me stand next to her at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris to prove his point, I vehemently disagreed with his opinion and with good reason.

Nothing against Whistler's Mother, of course, but I'm not sure many women my age would take such a comparison as a compliment.... Which is why I died a thousand deaths when I saw this picture of myself taken from tonight's photo-shoot: 

ME

WHISTLER'S MOTHER.

I don't know why the above picture confirmed it for me, but it did. *sigh, sigh, SIGH*

Moving on.... We got these cute little stockings to wrap around the tree and I've decided they're my favorite part about the whole kit and caboodle: 

We don't actually have a lot of decorations on the tree yet, as we only own a few and couldn't be bothered to buy any tonight, so it's looking a tad naked. We do, however, have the sweet little ornament my parents sent to us last year hanging from one of the top branches:

It's cute in and of itself, but it's especially cute because it resembles the wedding cake topper our friends Meaghan and Andrea made for us out of marshmallows right after we got married:

And here's a blurry picture of our finished tree:

Yay for cheap, fake Christmas trees!

Now I'm going to end on a scary little note: We thought we had bed bugs! Ken discovered these icky things on his belly the other night, much to my horror:

Yipes! In case you haven't heard, Toronto seems to be swarming with bed bugs these days... for real. We panicked as soon as he noticed them (naturally) and decided maybe we should fumigate our apartment. True to form, however, apathy eventually replaced our panic and (thankfully) the little boogers decided not to attack again before vacating our apartment of their own accord. (Or maybe the "bites" were actually hives... but that doesn't sound nearly as exciting.) 

Whew! That does it for now.  Hopefully I'll find more things to blog about within the near(er) future but until then, good night!