Thanksgiving

I know it's a little late for a Thanksgiving post, but we just got home last night. We met my parents in Las Vegas for Thanksgiving. We stayed at my Aunt Rose's house where I've spent many, many Thanksgivings. Of course, it's a little different now since she passed away a couple of years ago.

It was the first time we've been back since we moved and I'm not so sure it was good for me. I still REALLY miss Vegas! I did a lot of comparing of pros and cons while we were there. It wasn't as warm as I'd hoped it would be, but definitely warmer than here. I miss the shopping, the palm trees, the restaurants, my friends (although several of them have also moved away), having our own house -- and a fairly nice one at that, I definitely miss the kids' school and the huge variety of things to do. I don't miss the traffic, the noise, the smog, not being able to let my kids play outside by themselves, the emergency sirens that I ALWAYS hear right after Tim leaves to go somewhere, the scary people (there are scary people here too, just not as many of them...or as scary).

Tim insists that the only thing he misses is the good food. You can get a decent (not great) steak at a couple of restaurants here, but that's about it. We definitely took advantage of it while we were there. We ate at In-N-Out the first night. My mom made breakfast every day. We had a HUGE Thanksgiving dinner, two of my brothers and their girlfriends, my aunt and uncle, and my cousins came over. Friday my mom and I had chicken strips from Raising Cane's for lunch and we went to T.G.I. Friday's for dinner, and of course we couldn't pass up a chance to go to Luv It's for frozen custard, especially when they had my favorite -- coconut! Saturday we had El Pollo Loco for lunch and went to our favorite Italian café Strings for dinner. Then we topped it all off with a stop at Starbucks for a cream based Mint Mocha Chip Frappuccino and lunch at Kan Kun in Beaver on our way home yesterday. UGH! Now I need to lose the weight I gained so I can gain it back at Christmas time ;)

Tristen got together with his friends on Saturday to see a movie. I can't believe how tall they've all grown over the past year! I'm glad they got to see each other and hope they continue to keep in touch.

While he was at the movie we went to check on our house and renters. It wasn't near as clean as I kept it, but I expected that. For the most part they seem to be taking care of it and we're grateful to have them in there. They just signed another one year lease.

Our new home building nightmare continues -- we were very hopeful that we had jumped through the last of their hoops and were finally going to sign on our loan before we left town and be able to actually get started excavating this week. Didn't happen!