{"id":1064,"date":"2008-12-25T20:38:29","date_gmt":"2008-12-26T03:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valianthosting.ca\/clients\/daemon\/?p=1064"},"modified":"2008-12-27T14:19:20","modified_gmt":"2008-12-27T21:19:20","slug":"christmas-in-edmonton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/?p=1064","title":{"rendered":"Christmas in Edmonton"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Attended a fun-filled Christmas Eve party at the neighbours last night. A bit too much red wine to drink and lots of laughter. J spent the day cooking up a traditional Christmas meal and, from my perspective, spent her time well. Since it had been about 8 years since she&#8217;d cooked a turkey there was a bit of panic in the cooking stage. Luckily S (not me) was around to offer up her expertise. <\/p>\n<p>I brought our video camera and some blank disks over to L &#038; J&#8217;s and we recorded messages and snippets of the evening for Drew. C brought out his guitar and performed some impromptu songs. Hopefully Drew will be able to hear the words over our crazed giggling. <\/p>\n<p>We did a secret Santa stocking exchange and had fun opening and showing off our gifts. C was a good sport &#8211; having been the victim of our sense of humour in gift purchases &#8211; and modeled the silly tree hat we gave him while strumming his guitar and singing. <\/p>\n<p>I was loaded up with left over turkey and gifts before I left. I sucessfully avoided peeking at them until the morning.<\/p>\n<p>Drew stood in line for hours in order to make his phone call home and we had a great talk. I opened my gifts while Drew was on the phone and learned that Drew had conspired with J in the purchase of my present. I wanted a new fancy scmantzy blender. We&#8217;d loaned our old one to J over the summer and while it was gone I&#8217;d decided that we should let J keep our blender because I wanted one of the new ones that crushes ice and pours the drinks from a tap on the container.  Drew traditionally does his Christmas shopping Christmas eve. No shopping for Drew equaled no presents for me and thus no blender&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I actually whined about how disappointed I was that I wasn&#8217;t getting a blender from Drew because of his deployment while we were in the kitchen at J&#8217;s. <\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know how J kept a straight face while I whined.  <\/p>\n<p>Apparently J had picked up a blender for me when she was out shopping with Drew and I. Drew&#8217;s job was to keep me distracted while helping her pick it out. He did a fabulous job because I&#8217;d had no clue what J had bought &#8211; or that it was for me &#8211; when we spent the afternoon together. I bought her line about picking up a food processor for her kitchen hook, line and sinker.<\/p>\n<p>True to my word I ignored all incoming phone calls while waiting for Drew&#8217;s call. I did manage to talk to my sister before she headed to our adopted family in Winnipeg for her Christmas dinner. I missed a call from Drew&#8217;s grandma and my mom. By the time I could call it seemed too late in the evening. I&#8217;ll have to return their calls tomorrow. <\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Twas a good Christmas all things considered. Tomorrow I&#8217;m going to go back to working on collecting more items for Drew&#8217;s next care package. I&#8217;ll need to transfer the videos we took to CD or DVD and I need to write a letter to go with it.<\/p>\n<p>Hope you had a merry Christmas and were able to spend the day with your loved ones.     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Attended a fun-filled Christmas Eve party at the neighbours last night. A bit too much red wine to drink and lots of laughter. J spent the day cooking up a traditional Christmas meal and, from my perspective, spent her time well. Since it had been about 8 years since she&#8217;d cooked a turkey there was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-friends-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1067,"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions\/1067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/screamingpages.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}