Loses and wins, good news and bad...

The last part of our vacation we spent with Jon's family in Auburn, Washington. We had third Christmas, which was quite fun. We had lots of game nights, including a new train game from my family which was pretty fun. Also a highlight for me was playing with the 5-6 player expansion of the Settlers of Cattan game where I actually won for the first time! Also saw a Seattle Thunderbirds hockey game (which they lost) and as part of my Christmas present to Jon we went and saw a Seattle Seahawks game, which they won!! It wasn't a terribly high scoring game, but it was really exciting to be there, the seats were amazing, and we got to see them make it into the Playoffs! We took the dogs for a walk most days, got some last minute items at Walmart to fill our present suitcases with, new haircuts, and even managed to squeeze some paper writing in :) It would have been nice to get more done, but we certainly got quite a bit done, forcing ourselves to write about 700 words a day. Luckily, my deadline got pushed back a few days, so I have a little over a week to finish mine up here in York. This was a bit of good news amidst some pretty terrible news.

We got an email from our neighbor the day we left America that he was pretty sure he heard loud water in our apartment and thought our pipes had burst. After our flight through Iceland, we arrived home to find indeed, a flooded apartment :( A stream of water was shooting from one end of the kitchen to the other, there was several inches of standing water throughout the apartment, plaster and dirt was everywhere, holes in the walls, the floors and walls were bubling up- it was bad. Luckily our stuff wasn't really damaged, just the apartment. We're currently staying with friends in a town about 45 minutes away from York. The water had been going since about Thursday morning, and we finally got the water company to shut it off after two days and multiple phone calls late Friday night. The water has drained quite a bit, now it's a matter of damage control. We'll keep you posted....