The Winter Rut...

Well it's that time of year again!  I look back in years past, and we hardly ever take many pictures in January and February.  I think it is for a combination of reasons.
 #1: We are burnt out from the Christmas picture taking extravaganza.  December is by far our busiest and most memorable month of the year; translation- Tons of pictures!  Lots of family parties and traditions that we need to document.  (Why must we always take a picture of all our presents every year???  I don't know, but we do it!)
#2:  We are now back in Utah, so in January and February it is Cold.  And snowy.  And this year even ICY!  I'll admit that once January hits, I'm done with the snow.  And the cold.  I love the magic of the first snow of the year, (usually October or November)  and who doesn't love the sparkle of Christmas snow?  But after the tree's been taken down, I start feeling a whole lot less magical about winter.
#3:  In winter since I'm a wimp about the cold, we don't get out much.  In the summer it's a lot easier to find fun, and cheap or free activities to do.  In the winter, most things that we would "go do"  require money, and that's always a little tighter after the holidays.


So consequently we have very few pictures from this year thus far.  As I mentioned before, we had an ice storm in January.  It started early in the morning.  It felt like it was wet snow falling (I know that sounds crazy.  It wasn't quite snow, but it wasn't rain or hail either.)  It was very weird.  We kept hearing about how bad the roads were outside, but I didn't realize what was going on until I had to scrape a ton of ice off my car to get into it after work.  The roads really weren't as bad as I thought.  By the time I got off, lots of ice melt and salt had been put down to help with the ice.  But as I pulled into my driveway, I realized it was a sheet of ice.  Literally everything including the snow was covered in a thin layer of ice.  It's hard to appreciate in these pictures cause it was already getting dark.  It was so crazy.  The snow looked fake plastic snow, because it was all shiny.  I'm glad we don't live in an area where we get these storms all the time! 

The only other pictures we have are from Valentines day this week.  It was so great, Justin got me some beautiful flowers, and we went and got Costa Vida for dinner.  It was so relaxed and great to be holding hands with my sweetie.  We have spent our share of Valentines days separated when Justin was in the Marines, so it was nice to be together.