Winter Festivities

Nothing is more fun than decorating for Christmas! 

She loves laying under the tree

Unfortunately this year the Dallas-Fort Worth area was attacked by another ice storm but this time it was much worse than the one from 2 years ago. Basically the whole city shut down and everything was covered in a few inches of solid ice. 

All of that is solid ice, not snow.

I apparently I missed the lesson about de-icing the windows on a car. My thought process was that hot water will quickly melt ice, which it did. But I guess dumping hot water on a frozen window will also shatter the window. Thank goodness that didn't happen to me. That would've mad for a very bad day and an angry Aubrey. 

Poor trees all over the area looked like this

Most of the people I work with lived too far to come in, however since I live right around the corner I had to go in. It was basically a joke since 98% of all appointments canceled since the roads were so bad. So we closed early both Friday and Saturday (though I don't understand why we were open in the first place). 

Aryn and I worked 6 days that week and were some of the only people to come to work.
We were thrilled..

So the whole weekend was a lot of this... a lot of napping and watching Netflix

Unfortunately on Monday morning I was responsible to deliver my dad to the airport. 

Cue the spin out on ice store: Thankfully Brent said he would drive for me (it was 4am). With all of the melting and refreezing of the ice the roads were still awful (and something called cobblestone ice had been formed). But most flights were leaving and no longer cancelled (we were praying his flight would be cancelled). By this time most of the neighborhood roads were melted so we thought that most of the highways would be melted as well since we heard on the news that they were putting sand all over the highways and this was now day 4 of the ice. Between the 3 highways to get to the airport we didn't pick the right one. The very first bridge we drove over, which was all cobblestone ice caused the tires to lose traction and spun us across all lanes of traffic to the shoulder where we kindly ran into a tow truck that was already there picking up a car that had spun out earlier and had hit the cement barrier. The tow trucker said many few nice curse words to Brent when he got out of the car. And then he made us sit there for 45 min since he claimed a police man or his supervisor had to be there in order for him to take our information. I was furious! It was freezing and I was scared another car was going to lose control and ram us as we were sitting on the shoulder (and a car almost did but thankfully it gained control.) After looking the car over we saw that no major parts such as the engine or radiator were damaged so the car was still drivable. So when the tow trucker finally let us leave we drove another hour and a half to get to the airport and it was the scariest experience of my life. The whole time I was saying a prayer with tears in my eyes. It was crazy to me how dumb other drivers were as they were flying by going 60mph over the icy bridges. And cobblestone ice is no joke. The drive home was much better since we took a different route, but I was shocked when I saw a girl checking her Facebook as we were crossing an icy bridge. There are such dumb people out there.

So thankfully all 3 of us didn't get hurt and the car didn't get too damaged. Though we didn't have it in our Christmas budget to fix a car..

The Cinemark Christmas Party was the same weekend as the icemeggedon so we stayed home from it. But the following weekend was the 1st Eye Care party where we basically just ate delicious food and chatted with some of my favorites.

I don't know why but this year I am so ready and so excited for Christmas to start!! This will be the first time in 3 years that all of my siblings will be together, so I'm ready to get this party started. I hope you all have a Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday!