Yay for Christmas time!!

On Monday I had a fun surprise for Stan when he got home for work. I decided the week earlier that I wanted to get our Christmas stuff up ASAP so it could feel more like Christmas time. I went out and bought a tree, a few decorations, and pulled out the random ones I have gathered over the years. Here is a picture of just the tree but we have some other decorations like a red table cloth, lights and garland around our window, a snowman plaque, Santa kneeling by the Savior in a manger, and a delicious smelling apple cider candle :). Christmas is my favorite!!!

And today was so nice! It made it snow!! It snowed hard all morning, so much that they cancelled Stan's work and he got to come home early. We celebrated with a game of qwirkle and hot chocolate. (Let's be honest here though: our snow storm was nothing compared to what somewhere north of here gets, Albuquerque is just kinda a wimp when it comes to snow)

And a pic from last weekend! We got to see one of our favorite people, Sara! She was in Arizona visiting her brother and fam and was kind enough to meet up with us for dinner. We sure like her!! (And any excuse we can get to go to the Cheesecake Factory...yum!)

Thanksgiving 2013

A few weeks ago Mel made a delicious blackberry pie. Not bad for her first try!

Stan also made a lamb curry that turned out great.

Stan took Wednesday off and we drove down to Mesa for Thanksgiving. He has been working on a programming project and found a way to continue working on it while driving.

He put a pillow on his lap, then the cooler, then the laptop. He also had a wireless keyboard and mouse.

Mel drove. There was some snow on the way.

We made a delicious chocolate pie for Thanksgiving, as well as stuffing and yams and apples. About 18 people came, which is small for the Merrill family. Turkey and everything else was great.

We drove about an hour south to the Casa Grande ruins. It was neat. The largest building was supposedly four stories tall and built in the 1400s.

The walls of the ruins were made of adobe.

If you look close you can see Ben, Mel's brother on the other side.

These holes were for wooden floor beams.

Fall Fishing

Stan has been reading a book that gives some great tips on fishing in New Mexico. We really have struck out with finding a good spot so far. Though the book is a bit old, we decided to go this past Saturday to a spot about an hour away from Albuquerque. It turned out to be not very fruitful in terms of fishing but we had a great time.

On our way there we stopped real quick to look at Battleship Rock.

It really does look like a battleship from the front. The first time I saw this rock earlier this year I was amazed at the rugged cliffs. 

Here is our fishing spot, I know it's hard to see/believe, but if you look close you can see the river in the grass. Stan is quite talented in aiming his hook though he might have gotten caught a couple times on the brush :)

It was a narrow, deep, fast running little river. There were parts that had these trees that got in the way of fishing and the fish just happened to like those spots! Look close and you can see Stan in there fishing anyway, nothing stops this guy :)

Here is Stan with the sole catch of the day. 

And here is an example of the yellow, yellow trees we've been loving here!

     

Tinkertown

This museum can pretty much speak for itself. It was one of the most random eclectic places I have ever been. In the 1960's this man began carving as a hobby a western town. Eventually it became this place. We stopped by on our drive behind the Sandia and Manzano mountains this past Saturday. We enjoyed our drive so much we didn't take any pictures :( But it was beautiful all the same. We'll be heading back to a lot of those places for sure because there are some good trails we discovered. Anyway, back to the museum:

Hello random wagon wheels and walls made of bottles and cement...

This was the man's shop where he carved everything. He had a quote that said "I did all this while you were watching TV"...sad but probably true.

Here is an example of part of the western town. There was also a hotel, a bar, an Indian trading post, a restaurant, a toy shop, a drug store, and probably one or two other things that I can't remember.

He had a bunch of random collections throughout the museum. He carved almost all of the characters in the scenes you see in the pictures and there were a ton more that we didn’t take a picture of. The museum had a yacht that had taken ten years to travel all around the world. The display included the log of the travels and a world map with key events and where they took place pinned. There was display of wedding cake toppers. One of them were two fleas that were dressed...who thinks of stuff like that?? There was a huge display of a circus, lots of random carnival type things that you put a quarter in and it tells you your strength, a fortune teller woman, and a one man band. There was a collection of dolls that this brother and sister had collected on their way around the world. Random neat stuff. This was part of the sword collection.

Cool place. Fun day as always!

The Badlands

A week and a half ago we went to El Malpais national monument here in New Mexico. It was named that by the Spaniards because of the vast volcanic field. Supposedly the lava from a number of volcanic eruptions contributed to the area. We stopped by a natural arch there, nature is amazing.

We drove around the area for a while seeing what we could find. In one part we found this old rancher's settlement. There were some neat ruins there.

 This was a cellar of some sort:

A washboard? Mining tool?

and then headed to hike along a sandstone bluff that overlooked the lava fields. It was quite the hike and we were able to find some pottery and some evidence of ruins. The hike itself was kind of strenuous because there was cacti everywhere and some thick sand in parts of it. It was a beautiful day for a hike though and we are looking forward to going back to the area to visit the lava tubes they have there!

A trip to the east

Stan had a conference in Princeton, New Jersey the first week of October and so I tagged along. His conference started on Tuesday but we flew there Saturday and were tourists on Monday :)

This was our gourmet Sunday dinner in the hotel :) Nothing quite like canned soup!

We headed to Philadelphia to see what we could. It was quite inspiring to be where the founding fathers of our country have been

Of course we had to try some real Philly Cheesesteaks for lunch!

supposedly this alley (Elfreth's Alley) full of houses is one of the oldest residential streets in the United States.

We went to the church where some of the constitutional writers went. We happened to sit in the same bench as the Franklin's would sit...woowoo.

The rest of the week we just enjoyed hanging out in Princeton. On Thursday though we headed to Washington Crossing State Park in Delaware. It was really neat. We had spent some time listening to 1776 and so with the full story fresh in our minds, it was again inspiring to be where such sacrifice for freedom was given.