Guus Bosman

Last night we saw "American Hustle", a funny drama and two con-artists and their biggest swindle ever. Very entertaining. I particularly liked the Louis CK with his "ice fishing" stories in a brilliantly played role as mid-level FBI manager.

We had a real 'date-night' together. We put Nora in bed and use the baby monitor, then watched the movie in our TV room for the first time. We don't have a subscription but through Roku and Amazon Prime we could see the move for $13.

I didn't think the snow would be bad enough to stay home for, but Sasha's work recommended it and on Twitter I saw various reports of bad traffic.

Well, I'm glad we stayed home for sure. When checking my email, I heard a loud bang on Lynnbrook -- a driver lost control and hit the parked car of our neighbor, sliding down. When Nora and I went to clear the deck of snow, we walked around the neighborhood. A minivan in front of the YMCA was spinning its wheels and getting stuck, and just as we walked down we heard another loud noise and later saw four cars bumped into each other on the slope of 13th St, going down from Johnson to Kirkwood. A little down Kirkwood two drivers were exchanging insurance information for another fender bender. What a mess.

A school bus was stuck on 14th Street -- it couldn't get up the hill -- and the driver had blocked the road (which explained the extra traffic on Lynnbrook).

On the bright side, Nora showed great enthusiasm for clearing the snow on our deck.

Christmas fell on a Thursday this year so I took today off to make an extra long weekend. Since we were working on Wednesday we started early with the budni vecher preparations -- I started the dough for the pitka on Tuesday night. When the Zanes arrived around 7.00 pm we had the table ready.

We had a great budni vecher although sadly some of our guests couldn't make it. The coins fell to Jonathan and to Sasha, a lucky sign. We made kadaif for the first time, that recipe needs some more work. But the zele surmichki were absolutely excellent and we had nice stuffed peppers with beans. Irena brought grape leaf surmichki and for dessert butternut squash with apples.

Nora was delighted to see Julian and Ilana again and they had a great evening together. Her English is getting better.

On Sunday we bought our Christmas tree and put the lights up, and Monday night we put the ornaments in.

This is the first year that Nora helped with the decorations. Which means there is a little spot at the bottom of the tree where she many decorations close to each other.

Another change we made compared to last year was that I brought a measurement tape to the place where they sold the trees. Last year we got an 8 foot tree -- not a good fit for our 8 foot ceilings and I had to cut off a chunk to make it fit in the living room. This year we have a 7 foot tree and that obviously worked much better.