So much to say!

Since the last post, Christmas has come and gone as has my 27th birthday, the new year, and my bachelorette party! Wow, let's see what I can remember and recap.

My last few days at ISU were pretty uneventful, except for a nice lunch with colleagues and the fact that my computer wouldn't open. I had a laptop and the hinge broke so I couldn't open it. The computer would have worked perfectly, but I couldn't get it open or turn it on. Grr! Even worse was that it was out of warranty and a recall had recently expired on the recall on the hinge. Cost for repair: $300-400. The dilemma was whether to get it repaired since the computer was fine otherwise, or put that money towards a new computer. My old one was 3 years old, which isn't really old, but in laptop years it's getting up there. After 2 weeks of "thinking about it" I bought a new hp laptop that is very similar to my old one. It's funny how technology changes in 3 years: my old computer had 80 GB of memory while the new one has 500GB, the old had a battery life of 1 hour while the new one has about 4 hours, the old one had Windows XP and the new one has Windows 7, the old ran hot and had a loud fan, the new one has a blue ray player... I've only had it a few days, but I love it so far! And I was so proud of myself, I bought a cover for my old hard drive and found the files and transferred them myself and now we have an 80 gig external hard drive and I don't really have to transfer everything since it's all on the drive already.

Christmas was great, as always. The weather made for some potential travel hazards, but everyone made it home safely. Rick and I grabbed my cousin's 6-year-old son from daycare and went sledding and showed Rick what real sledding was. Christmas eve is always with my mom's side of the family and although I got the 3-year-old in trouble throwing a football in the house he loved my sock monster! He and his brother both liked this one the best and named him Stretch and played with him all night, though he may not still have all of his appendages after the roughhousing he was sure to endure...

Christmas day was with the family and Saturday Jane and Wyatt took us out to celebrate our engagement. But that's a story for another day...