When you grow up in Michigan, you get kinda used to having snow at Christmas (I
remember snow on Halloween one year, but that's another story)

Well, it's
been a couple of years since we've seen a white Christmas and I was feeling all
Norman Rockwell, so I hatched a plan.

We've got a great friend who lives
with his beautiful wife (expecting their first child in the spring) in
Connecticut. I called, they had snow… ROAD TRIP! We piled the kids into the
car at 4am the day after Christmas and headed North. I can honestly say that by
New York we hadn't seen ANY snow and I was starting to get nervous. Temps were
in the high 40's and thoughts of a 7 hour drive rewarded with muddy hills didn't
really thrill me. Enter CT, looks like the snow is still here (melting fast, but
we'll take what we can get.)

Thanks to the amazing internet, I had
scouted out some possible locations and after a mind numbing trip to WalMart
(okay, I'm the idiot who went there the day after Christmas…) we had our sleds
and couldn't wait til morning. We had a great time sledding down the hill (you
know, you've gotta walk up those things…) in the wet and melting snow, decided
to switch to making a giant snowman (complete with grass goatee… McNally
style!) and generally had a wonderful day laughing and being a family. The rest
of the weekend was spent hanging out with our friends, eating, playing Monopoly
(which I won, by the way!) and generally chilling out.

And just because
that's how we roll, we decided that a detour into Manhattan on the way home
would be fun. Statue of Liberty, subway rides and seeing Time Square during the
setup for New Year's… pretty cool.

A few days later, Wen and I got a chance to head out to Vegas for a convention and ended up having our minds blown in just a few minutes by a tour of Zappos.com. (My cousin is the Mayor of Zappos…)

So now we're back in the studio, getting ready for an amazing 2009. Hope to see you soon!

It's easy to get caught up in the
everyday race to stay ahead of the avalanche, but be sure to remember what's
really important.

-sean