merry christmas

merry and blessed christmas to all my friends and family!

we have been eating and enjoying family and eating and watching movies and eating and playing the wii and eating. oh, and drinking tasty bevs. and did i mention eating? it's been a fabulous christmas so far!

we'll post pictures and share more stories at a later date.

happy birthday, hubby

i like this post that baldman's sister posted in honor of his birthday. so i'll just re-post it.

happy birthday, sweety. i love you.

christmas party

on saturday the hubby and i went to a costume christmas party. we had to dress up like our favorite christmas movie characters. baldman went as flick from a christmas story. he wore his coat and a scarf, gloves, and hat. and he constructed a big pole out of christmas wrapping paper empties*. and he pretended to get his tongue stuck on the pole. he was a hit of the party.

i got some amazing polyester pants, a yellow sweater and created a dickey out of a black turtleneck and went as cousin eddie from national lampoon's christmas vacation. i even went so far as to have a little "package" because of that hilarious scene when he and clark are grocery shopping and he's sticking out everywhere.

well, first of all, my costume didn't look exactly like what uncle eddie wore, and i didn't really know anyone at the party. so most people didn't know that i was in costume. so for, like, the first 1/2 hour - 45 minutes i was hanging out not only in costume, but also with a penis! and NO ONE said anything to me about it! not only that, but i could see people checking it out! i felt like such an ass, so i finally went to the bathroom and took it out.

after a while, people caught on to the fact that i was in costume. and eventually i brought up the subject of my "little christmas vacation package." turns out, most people noticed. but they didn't say anything about it! i made a lot of jokes about it and it ended up being a fun time.

there were also 2 other cousin eddies, one other flick, and someone dressed as the leg lamp from a christmas story. come to think of it, most of the people who were dressed up were either santa (sexy, lady santa of course) or from vacation or a christmas story. either we're unimaginative or people of our era all have the same favorite movies.

i stole these shots from someone's facebook page.





*wrapping paper empties are affectionately called "ha-ha's" in the reid family

gringo star plug

my talented cousins make up two of the four band members in gring star. they're amazing and you should check them out live if you've not done so previously. (or buy their album. whatever.)

gringo star was recently approached by tommy hilfiger asking them to put their song all y'all in an ad of theirs. the boys (as we in the family call them) were a little reluctant to "sell out" to advertisement, but when they realized that they could fund the recording of their next album with the profits, they went ahead with it.

check out the ad:


(thanks to my brother for making the copy of this video available.)

we're ready for christmas

i finished all my shopping and put the packages in the mail yesterday (100 bucks, thank you very much). our tree is up and most of the christmas cards have been mailed. soon we'll be setting sail to colder climates to celebrate with family. woot woot!

when we were home in nj for thanksgiving my (just turned) 8 year old niece made us a beautiful picture of a fireplace with stockings hung with care. so we added that to our cozy, christmas living room scene.



mmm, doesn't that just show the warmth of the holiday?

thanksgiving in nj

sorry for the delayed post on this. i finally uploaded pictures onto flickr from our thanksgiving trip to my mom's. we had a great time seeing everyone. we were fortunate to have my sister come down for thanksgiving and then my brother and his girls come down for the weekend. so we got a good visit in and enjoyed eating, running around downtown cape may, and resting.

you can see the pictures i took from our visit here.

week's end treat

this was a tough week in our household so last night the hubby and i decided to treat ourselves to dinner and a movie. unimaginably we'd lived in columbia for 6 1/2 years and had yet to have dinner together at gervais and vine.* i'd been bugging baldman for a while to go and last night was the night!

of course, it did not disappoint. we enjoyed garlic-parmesan fries with spicy aoioli, marinated manchego cheese with thyme and garlic, ensalada de la fresa balsamico (mixed greens with balsamic strawberries, candied almonds and gorgonzola), and the roman pizza (pesto, goat cheese, roasted red peppers and olives with marinara). my mouth is watering just typing this.

after dinner we retired to our couch to watch rudolph the red nosed reindeer online. i'd not seen that probably since i was in elementary school.

the only unfortunate part about the night was that sometime during the movie my throat started hurting and hasn't let up since. i've turned into a little sicky since last night. but at least we were able to enjoy our treat before this came along.

*in the interest of full disclosure, i had been there one time without the hubby for a slow food meeting. but that was still like 2 years ago!