Merry Christmas!

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Christmas Pictures

It's that time of the year...time for Christmas pictures. We went to a studio in Louisville and got a bunch taken. It was pretty cool...we did the photo shoot for about 30 minutes, reviewed the pictures and they printed all of them for us right then and sent them home with us along with a CD of them...nice! Gotta love digital photography...maybe all the studios do it this way, but we haven't been in to have pictures taken for us in a long time...it was pretty sweet.

Here are a couple teaser photos to check out. The rest with be 'released' after Christmas...we won't say why, but you might expect to see a few around then :-)

More Christmas pics, but not all of them :-)...we'll just say Blake takes pretty good pictures...wait until you see the rest..
http://picasaweb.google.com/jasen.bankson/ChristmasPictures

It's Beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Well, we made it home from our trip and are enjoying being back at home for a while. We have had a few small snow storms and some REALLY cold weather in the last week or so. We had an 'arctic blast' which is exactly what it sounds like...freezing. It was about 5 degrees for the high for a couple days. Brrrr. At night it was -34 with wind chill. Fortunately this is really unusual weather for here and we're mostly back to the more normal 40 degree December weather.

We went out and got our Christmas tree and Blake had a nice time helping us pick it out. It was funny because we went through the normal 'get really picky about finding the perfect tree' routine at the nursery and looked at probably 100 different ones trying to find the one we wanted. We finally 'settled' on one that we thought was acceptable and would do the job and brought it home. Ironically I think it may be the best Christmas tree we have had...that worked out nice. Blake did a good job choosing. What do you think? Kona really likes it too :-)

We put the Christmas lights up and are ready for Christmas...with it not being too far off now we are excited.

CA Trip - Salt Lake City, UT

After all the traveling we did for the 3 weeks on the road we pulled into Salt Lake City, UT to finish up our trip with Abby's extended family and to enjoy Thanksgiving with everyone. It was a good way to finish the trip off with the weather feeling much more like the fall/winter weather that we are used to in Colorado. The food on Thanksgiving was great and we had a full house of people. It was a relaxing and full time.


Friday the girls went and did some shopping while the boys went and hiked some in the canyon. This was the first snow that we had seen this season. There had been a storm a few days earlier and there was still some snow on the ground while we went hiking. Kind of a good way to ease back into the snowy season as we headed home.

Thus ended our trip around the western half of the country over the past few weeks. It was time to head home...

Pics from our trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/jasen.bankson/CATrip

CA Trip - Santa Rosa, CA

Off we went from there to Santa Rosa to visit Abby's family. We had a really nice time visiting with all of them and had our third and final open house of the trip. A bunch of Abby's high school friends were able to make it and it was fun to catch up with them. A lot of them had kids too...


We had a nice time celebrating Sean's birthday with the family at Checkers and Jasen and Sean went and did some float tube fishing at the lake....didn't catch much that day, but that's why it's called fishing and not...well you know...



It was good to spend time with all of them and Brandi was a proud aunt for Blake.

We enjoyed getting see Abby grandparents, uncles and great grandma while we were there. We also made it by the Banksons in Santa Rosa to say hi. It sure was nice to see everyone...it had been a while.

Off to Thanksgiving in Salt Lake...

CA Trip - SLO, CA

San Luis Obispo, CA...what a great place. This was the vacation part of the trip and also the work part of the trip. We stayed at the Spyglass Inn on the cliffs of Shell Beach where we could take in the ocean a little each day. We could see a couple of the old surf spots we used to go to when we were in school at Cal Poly. No swell the days we were there though...it was pretty flat. But, the view was beautiful nontheless.

While in town we went to lunch with some clients and got to see several friends that we hadn't seen for a while. Had a tri-tip sandwich at Firestones (i highly recommend you have one sometime if you never have) and enjoyed an evening at Farmer's Market. We made it over to Cal Poly and got to tour the campus some and see everything that has changed since we graduated. And the weather was beautiful. Sure was nice to visit.

More pics from our CA trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/jasen.bankson/CATrip

CA Trip - L.A. & Ventura

We headed down to L.A. to visit some more family down there and have another open house where we got to catch up with some family there that we hadn't seen in quite a while. It was great to see everyone and we really enjoyed seeing and catching up with everybody. Aunt Mollie (in the picture above) is Blake's Great Aunt. Doesn't she look great for being 92? Wow, hope we got some of those genes :-)

After the couple days we were in L.A. we headed up the coast to Ventura. On the way there we stopped in Santa Monica and a couple beaches up the coast to visit the ocean. That's one thing that we don't see much of in CO. We had a nice time walking around, feeling the sea breeze and smelling the salty air. The weather was good (no marine layer) and it was warm. It was great. We had lunch at our old workplace (while we were living in Kona, HI), Bubba Gumps. It was good...reminiscent...

In Ventura we caught up to some friends from college and got to meet their little girl. We hadn't seen them in quite a while...it was fun to hear how things are going and what they are up to these days.

On to SLO, CA...tri-tip sandwich here we come...

For more pictures from the trip go here: http://picasaweb.google.com/jasen.bankson/CATrip