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We drove up to Meghan’s parents on Christmas Eve. Our Christmas Eve meal was a delicious ham and potato dinner.

After eating we played monopoly until late. My canny ability to avoid landing on Park Place and Boardwalk kept me in the game a few hours more than I perhaps should have! It was easily the most fun monopoly game I have had.

The following morning we woke up and opened our presents around the tree. Meghan’s parents were very generous and we came away with lots of nice gifts.

After we had opened our gifts we made our way down to Boston to see the rest of Meghan’s family. We had a delightful Turkey and Lasagna dinner with the most delicious pumpkin pie dessert courtesy of Meghan’s sister.

After dinner we made our way home again and opened our gifts from each other.

Here are some of the many generous gifts I received over Christmas:

It has been an interesting week weather wise. It started with an ice storm which knocked out power to over 400,000 people in New Hampshire, then later the same week we had two full days of snow. After spending an hour outside shovelling the snow from around my car, I had a drive around Dover and took some photos. The roads had been ploughed and the wind had blown most of the snow from the trees but I still got some nice winter images.

Here is an Animoto video of the images I took today:

Here are some pictures of my first Gingerbread House. We bought the kits for something to do during the ice storm (as we had no Cable or Internet!) but never got round to it. I built the house last night and let it set overnight and today I decorated it. It looks nothing like the perfect house on the front of the box!

On Thursday night we had a big ice storm which knocked out power to over 1 million people in New England. A state of emergency was declared in Massachusetts, Maine, New York and right here in New Hampshire.

Luckily our apartment was one of the only parts of our town to retain power, however we lost our Cable TV, Internet and telephone service from Friday morning until Sunday evening (a few hours ago). The power losses were caused by heavy trees coming down under the sheer weight of the ice. As I type, there are still 200,000 homes in New Hampshire without power. More than 500 power crews have lent support to New Hampshire from other states as well as Canada.

We were very lucky to have kept our power as I can only imagine what a struggle it would have been without it! We had a drive around and most of the traffic lights were out and pretty much every business was closed throughout the weekend. The privileged few with generators managed to stay open during the blackout.

Here are a few pictures of the ice outside our apartment. I didn’t dare venture out any further as the icy conditions made it very hard to keep me footing: