General

Happy New Year! Yeah, I'm late for everything.

So I bet you've been wondering what's been going on. Well, just pretend. I've been busily procrastinating on blogging, emailing, and doing writing of any kind, as usual. But also as usual, I have been working on my projects and thinking about others. I will get back to that in a later entry.

I went home to Texas for Christmas. My brother and sister also came, as usual, and my sister's high school friend Kimberly, whom my family kind of adopted after graduation. It's like an annual tradition. We all gather once a year. It was good. Each year I try to get a little better at balancing the time that I spend with my family and the time I spend doing my own stuff, and I think this year's trip was a success (I consider it this year, even though it was last year). We watched movies, went shopping, decorated, and just hung around the house and talked. It was all pretty laid back.

Now I am back, and it is cold. We had a few warm days a while back, but now it is hovering around bitterly cold. My threshhold for bonechillingness is -8 degrees Celsius, which is between 18 and 17 Fahrenheit. On Saturday it was 7. I stayed indoors. Unfortunately our boilers decided to freeze on Sunday, so my apartment building has no heat. But with my space heater and extra clothes and blankets, I've managed to stay decently warm. They hope to have it fixed by the middle of the week.

I had a dream last night that I accidentally took our cat with me on a plane trip, and I had to figure out some way to get her back home. When I woke up I did some research, and it turns out you actually can ship cats.

It went really well. I had seven people from my old small group helping me, and it only took about two hours. I felt kind of bad that they had to help me finish packing and that I had sooo many boxes of books to lug around, but they didn't complain too much. ;) I am really grateful to them for their help.

And now I am in the slow process of unpacking and organizing. It's slow because I do a little at a time and take long breaks to do all the other things I'd rather be doing. But I am progressing.

I worked from home on Wednesday while I waited for the phone technician to come to my apartment. Or I would have, if the power hadn't been out in our building from about 8 till 1. My laptop's batteries are worthless, so I couldn't do any work and spent the time unpacking instead. Then the phone guy arrived at 2:30, did his thing, and I went to work at 3:30.

On Thursday I went over to the college to see John Piper. :) He spoke about the problem of evil. It was hot in the auditorium, especially for him, but he was very patient and let the Q&A time go 40 minutes over. You can listen to him here (it was the September 6th evening session). I was supposed to meet Don and his wife there. I didn't see them, but Joel and a friend found me and sat with me.

While I was without Internet, my mind did what it normally does in those circumstances and became productive. It's like the web is a suppressing agent for my ideas that would normally bubble up and flow over the sides of my mind and onto paper. So I did a lot of writing one particular night, and I'm going to post a lot of it here, with minimal editing, so you can see how my mind works when I'm not writing for an audience. Well, I always have some kind of audience in mind, but it's not as conscious (and oppressive) when I'm writing for myself as when I'm writing online.

At last I am moving. Some of my old small group are coming to help me, which is nice of them. I lured them out with pizza. ;) The carpet in the apartment is being replaced tomorrow, which is cutting it pretty close! But I'll be moving in the evening, so it shouldn't be a problem, assuming they actually get it done. The nice thing is that I was supposed to sign the lease tomorrow, but the landlord wasn't going to be around, so we did it today and I got the keys.

It's a studio and quite a bit smaller than the apartment I'm in now, but I'm kind of glad. I'm taking it as a challenge to get rid of all my excess junk, which I've actually been doing all year in anticipation of moving, even though I didn't know my space would be so restricted. I just wanted to have less to move. ;) The smallness of the apartment will give me an objective goal for weeding my possessions. If I can fit things comfortably into that space, then I've done enough for the time being. Since I have the keys, I'm going to go over later tonight and measure everything so I can plan my furniture arrangement better.

Dumbly, I waited till yesterday to get my phone service set up, so I won't have a phone line until next Wednesday (I don't have a cell phone) and Internet access till Thursday. But I don't use the phone much anyway, and I'll be closer to work, so I can easily pop over and use the Internet there or at the library, which will also be closer.

Also dumbly, it turns out that I could have stayed in my present apartment rather than moving, even though the complex had been converted to condominiums and I think it was explicitly stated that we'd have to move if we weren't buying. But now they're even taking new renters. I was able to stay a month past the end of my lease because they allow us to pay month to month, and apparently I could have stayed indefinitely that way. I also got a "renew your lease" notice after giving them my written notice that I was leaving. Somewhere there, communication wasn't happening. Anyway, by then it was too late; I had made up my mind. It's been nice living here the past three years, but I'm moving closer to all the things I do, and I'm looking forward to it.

On another note, I've been watching the original Battlestar Galactica online at Netflix the past couple of days. I remember seeing bits of episodes when I was little, but I never knew the plot until I read the general premise a couple of years ago, and even then it didn't really stick in my mind. Well, I ran out of things to watch yesterday, so I flipped through the Netflix instant watching list, spied it, and figured now was as good a time as any to inform myself. I had thought it was basically an sci fi action show. Boy was I ever wrong! Yes, it has action, but wow—it is weighty and epic. The issues it touches on are large. I felt emotions during the pilot I do not normally experience while watching TV. So I can see why it was so popular, and I'm looking forward to watching the remake. I don't have cable, so it'll all have to be on DVD.

The other sci fi series I remember watching but not understanding was Buck Rogers, which is also available for Netflix online viewing. See what you guys are missing? Join Netflix!

The Stephen Ministry training coordinator from my church left me a message on Wednesday telling me I'd been accepted into the program and asking me officially if I wanted to join. She said she was hoping I'd reply with a "resounding yes," so the next day I did. :) I had to leave a message for her, but I made sure to say that my yes was a resounding one. ;) The training starts next month and goes till April, and then I guess I'll start meeting with whoever they assign to me who needs help.

Ah, now maybe I'll feel like I'm doing something with my life. I feel like I'm naturally suited for this kind of ministry, since I'm often in this type of reflective listening mode with my friends. I'm looking forward to honing my skills during the training.

There's an acronym out there on the Internet that's used whenever a long and boring article is presented for consumption and the user can't be bothered: TLDR, "too long; didn't read." I would like to add my own variation on this phrase: "too long; didn't write." This is how I feel about everything from blog and forum posts to email responses to my own personal journal entries, basically anything except IMs. Seriously, if you are my friend and you want to keep in touch with me, IM is the best way to do it because I seem incapable of communicating otherwise. If you call me, who knows when I'll get back to you. I might as well throw in "too long; didn't say." At least I am now keeping up with other people's blogs again.

Miraculously I happened to feel up to blogging tonight, so now I will run through some of the things that have been going on in my life that were too long to write about.

- Doctor update: A month after my colonoscopy I went back to the doctor, who told me I would have to take this colonitis medicine forever to greatly reduce my chances of another flare-up. That was slightly depressing, but I'm used to it now. To answer Kaz's question from the comments, I asked him what drugs he had given me during the colonoscopy, and I wrote them down somewhere, but I'm too lazy to find it right now. He also told me that I was asleep during the procedure and only woke up toward the end. Oh well. I still defeated the amnesiatic effects! I'm supposed to see him again in the fall. I'll go when my prescription refills run out.

- Chili's with Joel: I invited my coworker Joel out to eat a few weeks after that. I had been wanting to develop more of a friendship with him, and he has responded well because he's just a great person like that. We've hung out a few times since then. The most recent was last night, when we went to Panera Bread with our old coworker Don (more on him below), during which we had a really good, 3-hour conversation. I might start attending Joel's weekly prayer meeting with his group of friends.

- Leaving small group: After a year with my small group at church, I decided to reprioritize my life and focus on other activities that I thought would be more beneficial to me, and I left the group. And indeed it has left me feeling more free to pursue other activities. But I made it clear that I still wanted to be connected to the group and said they could invite me to things. So a couple of weeks ago I helped them move one member of the group to her new condo, and it was a good experience. I felt more at ease with them than I typically had before. I'll write more about that group in a later entry.

- GTD: In May I read a terrific book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. As the subtitle says, it's about "the art of stress-free productivity." The basic idea is that one reason life is so stressful is that we keep too much of it inside our heads, when it would be much easier to write everything down in an easy-to-use system that was organized in the way that we actually think and live. That way you wouldn't have to think to yourself, Oh yeah, I need to buy milk, 50 times. You could write it down and not think about it again until you're at the store.

I was excited about all this at first and bought a nice planner and set it all up, but my excitement has waned since then and I haven't been keeping up with it as much, I think because Allen's organizational scheme doesn't quite work for me, so I'm going to try reorganizing. Otherwise it really does help me get things done that would otherwise sit there forgotten.

- IT: Back in November our art director/IT guy left, and it became my job to take over most of the IT functions. I never thought I would learn about networking, but it has been kind of fun and not too stressful. Fortunately we haven't had any major disasters, and most of people's computer problems seem to solve themselves. We joke that I have a good computer aura that makes them work whenever I'm around. With the regime change we've been taking the opportunity to upgrade our MS Office, our Internet connection, and our server. The server will be installed soon by an outside person who happens to be newly married to one of our project managers. It will of course be very educational to watch him set things up, and I'm looking forward to having it in place because it will hopefully solve a few of our problems and give us some extra features to play with.

- Accountability with Don: One of the new activities I've picked up since leaving my small group is an accountability partnership with my friend Don. I have been thinking of this year as a year for self-improvement, and one aspect of my life that has definitely needed it is the spiritual, and I really need help. I am just not good at keeping up with my devotions and such. Well, Don has been a good person for the job of keeping me accountable because he cares a lot about people's relationship with God. I can't say that I spend time with God every day now, but it's up from none, which is an improvement. And interestingly, the devotions I do have are almost always meaningful, which I've had trouble with in the past. I think it's partly the more relaxed approach I'm taking now. And also my devotional desk.

- Devotional desk: On June 3 I made a spontaneous decision to act on an idea I had had for a while--to create a sacred space for myself in my apartment where I could have my devotions. I call it my devotional desk. The basic idea behind it is to give me a specific place that I associate with time spent with God and to make it a place of visual reminders of spiritual truth. I had an idea of what I basically wanted it to look like, and after that it would be like a rotating art exhibit that I would continually be adding to as I gained new insights from my devotions and found ways to symbolize them.

It took a week to gather my materials and put it together, and it does indeed impart a sense of specialness to my devotional times. I will most likely write about this in more detail later and post pictures of it. I wanted a secluded place to put it so I would feel closed off from the rest of the world, but the only place in my apartment I really had room for it was in the corner of my closet, so now I have a literal prayer closet. Now if only I would use it more. I think the next thing I need is a fixed, sacred time of day to spend in my stationary sacred space. That will be a challenge. I have never been good at following a self-imposed routine. In fact, I have always been bad at it in the extreme.

- Stephen Ministry: Another activity I'm trying to involve myself in is a ministry at my church called Stephen Ministry. It's sort of a lay counseling ministry but not really, since Stephen Ministers are there to encourage people and listen to them and pray for them rather than giving them advice. I'm hoping it will get me more connected at church and teach me about caring for people (with 56 hours of training, I expect so!). I had my interview for it on Sunday to see if I would be a good fit, and in the next couple of weeks I should find out if I made it in. The training starts in September.

- Apartment hunting: In June I spent a stressful week looking for a new apartment, since our apartments have been converted to condominiums and I didn't want to buy. My lease was ending on July 31. Well, I applied at two places in rapid succession and cancelled both, the first because it got horrible reviews at Apartment Ratings and I didn't feel like living among drug dealers and gangs, the second because I took a second look at my budget and realized I couldn't afford it. But I ended up finding a nice studio closer to work, and I'll be moving at the end of August. My nice apartment manager let me stay past the end of my lease and isn't even charging more. So now I'm trying to get rid of stuff and figure out how I'll fit everything into this new apartment. I measured all my furniture and made sort of a scale model of my new apartment on paper so I could work out the arrangement. It turns out I'll just barely have enough room to breathe. ;)

- Harry Potter (This paragraph has no spoilers.): I had listened to all the previous Harry Potter books on audio, read by the terrific Jim Dale, and I wanted to finish out the series that way, so I put the audiobook on hold at the library. But then I decided everyone else was probably doing that too and it would be months before it would be available, so I bought it on Amazon for a very reasonable price. It arrived on Monday, and people at my work scheduled a lunchtime book discussion for Wednesday, which meant that I had two days to get through 21 hours of listening. And despite already being sleep deprived, I did it. If only everything were as easy as listening to an audiobook! I would get so much more done. Anyway, it was a great book and a fun discussion, and now I'm tired.

- Drupal: As a final note, I am planning to redo my site in Drupal sometime in the hopefully near future. WordPress is great, but I think Drupal is a more natural fit for my ideas for the site. I have to do a lot of WordPress hacking to get it to do what I want, and even then it isn't quite the way I want it.

Well, that was a successful experiment. I gave myself an hour to get through the list of topics I had planned, and it turned out I was able to pull out of my brain what I wanted to say about each one and say it without worrying so much about phrasing everything the right way. I believe I will continue this practice.

And with that, my blog is finally updated!

Well, I didn't think it would happen, but I finally found something to post on YouTube. I've had an account for a while, but only to comment on other people's videos. As I was leaving work today (it's still Thursday in my mind, since I haven't gone to bed yet), I drove past a family of geese crossing the street. :) So I pulled over and got out my camera to document their journey. I wish I knew where they were trying to go, because they sure weren't getting there very fast. One of the babies was hobbling along way behind the others, poor little guy (girl?). Maybe he was like me and was just lost in thought. ;)

My C-Pen arrived today! I ordered it last week. It's a handheld scanner. You drag it across individual lines in a book, and it scans the text and OCRs it into a document. I tried it just now, and it works great! I'm really impressed. This will make taking notes much easier, and I'm hoping it will make my reading more productive and help me churn out projects a bit quicker. Plus it looks kind of like something from Star Trek, so I can pretend I'm in the 24th century when I use it. ;)

Hi folks! Now that it's the end of April and Easter is several weeks behind us, how was everyone's? Mine was okay. I didn't have any special plans, so it was a pretty normal day. I know we were supposed to be celebrating the Resurrection, but I guess I hadn't been in that victorious of a mood, so I couldn't get into the spirit very well. :-\\

On to today's topic! I warn you it will not be appetizing.

My Good Friday was spent in the hospital. :) Part of it was anyway. Since about the middle of December I've been having these weird bowel problems, mostly a strange and stubborn case of diarrhea. When it didn't go away after a month, I decided to go to the doctor. Not a bad idea, since I hadn't had a checkup in ten years. Well, he said it was probably chronic constipation from not eating enough fruits and vegetables, and he put me on some laxatives. Those didn't really help, so he sent me to a gastroenterologist.

I went to the gastro last Thursday, and he said yeah, my symptoms sounded weird, so he recommended a colonoscopy. How about tomorrow or Monday? o.o I'd been putting up with this for four months already, he reasoned, so why wait? I concurred and decided on Friday, since I didn't have work that day. My friend Joel agreed to be my ride, since I wouldn't be allowed to drive afterward.

So that night I got to prepare for it. Joy. I didn't mind having to go to the bathroom every few minutes. I did mind having to drink a gallon of that disgusting medicine. And I mean literally a gallon, 8 ounces every 10 minutes for three hours. The pharmacist provided these flavor packets, but that didn't help. They gave it a weak fruity odor, but the dull, salty taste was still there. The consistency was almost like regular water but slightly thicker, so it was like drinking oil. It wasn't too bad at first, but after about eight glasses of it, it got a little nauseating. Plus I felt like my stomach didn't have time to catch up with its digestion before I was pouring more content into it. So I dragged it out to every 20 minutes or so. Finally when there was one liter left I took my doctor's advice and added some Crystal Light lemonade mix, and that made it much more tolerable, so I recommend that.

The next day we drove to the hospital, I signed in, the receptionist told Joel to come back about an hour too early, he left, I waited, my name was called, and I went back with the nurse's aid to get ready. The patient's waiting area was this big room with a desk of some sort in the middle and small rooms along the walls with curtains instead of doors. We went into one of these, he took my blood pressure and asked some questions, I signed some forms, and he gave me my gown to change into and left.

After I had changed into my gown, a nurse came in and gave me the remote to the TV that was mounted on the wall in the corner of the room, since there was someone ahead of me and I'd be waiting for a while. A few minutes later she came back in to put in my IV, and I turned off the TV because I knew I'd be trying to pay attention to both the TV and the IV at once, and it was too much stimulation for my little brain. She said I could keep the TV on, but I said I'd rather watch what she was doing, and she smiled and said that most people wouldn't. But I didn't think it would be a problem, and it gives me more of a sense of control when I can observe stressful events happening. I said at least it wasn't a PICC line! She put it in the crook of my elbow, which was good, because I get a little weirded out by the thought of inserting needles into the back of my hand.

After the IV was in, she left again and I flipped through the channels, but the only thing on that was at all interesting to me was Spongebob, and I didn't feel like advertising that fact to the medical staff, so I turned off the TV and lay there on the gurney, contemplating. I thought about how the spot with the IV needle was a little achy, but other than that I was fine and not even nervous.

I also thought about something my friend Don told me when I told him I was having this colonoscopy. He said he would be praying that I would know that God was with me. I paralleled this with Natalie Grant's song "Held" and its statement that "[God's] promise was
when everything fell we'd be held." And when it comes down to it, this makes sense because his promise was certainly not that all our problems would be solved in the present life or that we'd be protected from all danger. Many Christians have been martyred, after all. No, the promise is something like moral support. God will be present with us, and the more we are aware of this the better. Since then I have added to this thought that God's presence with us means that he is able to bring about good in our bad situations if he decides to. So he's ready both to comfort us spiritually and to physically help us.

Then Joel came in. They had brought him to my little room for some reason, and he thought my procedure was already done, but I told him no, they had given him the wrong time to return to the hospital. So we talked for a while, and then they sent him back to the waiting room and wheeled me in to the operating room.

The operating room was large and kind of dark, and there was a long counter along the wall with cabinets underneath and probably overhead, but I don't remember. They stopped me off to one side of the room next to where they had the monitor and other equipment set up. Then another nurse stuck heart monitoring electrodes to me, put the oxygen tube in my nose, and told me to turn over on my left side. I tried to get in a comfortable position.

The drugs were my favorite part. :) They gave me a painkiller and some non-anesthetic drug to put me to sleep. They had told me that I wouldn't remember anything that happened in the next couple of hours, but they were wrong. My herculean mind defeated their puny drugs! I do have some blanks in my memory, but I think they said I was awake the whole time, and I can even remember watching part of the procedure on the monitor. I was hoping for an out-of-body experience like the ones I've read about, but oh well, not this time.

It was fun to feel the drugs take effect though. First I felt light headed, then my eyes started doing that thing they do when you spin around and suddenly stop, and then the people's voices started sounding echoey. But I don't remember dropping off. I just sort of lay there waiting. And then I remember watching the screen and seeing them pluck out bits of my colon for testing. The doctor did this sort of three count thing, and whoever was operating the device got it into position, stuck it to my colon wall, and pulled it off. The painkillers were working quite well, and I could tell they were moving around in there, but that's it. I vaguely recall the doctor whipping the scope back out, but the next thing I remember was being back in the curtained waiting room with Joel and one of the nurses.

The nurse gave me my clothes back and told me to change my shirt and when she came back she'd help me get my pants on so I wouldn't take a nosedive. I felt stable enough to do it on my own, so I did, and I stayed upright. Another nurse brought me apple juice and some tasty Lorna Doone cookies, and later the doctor came in to give me my diagnosis.

He said I had a mild case of ulcerative colitis on the left side of my colon near the end, and he gave me a prescription for an anti-inflammatory. Ulcerative colitis is a rare bowel disease that may or may not be autoimmune, and it can be treated but apparently not cured without removing the affected parts of the colon. It can go into remission for decent periods of time.

The nurse walked me to the bathroom, and the next thing I knew I was on the road with Joel. He asked me if I wanted to go to Taco Bell first or to the grocery store to pick up my medicine. I was surprised and asked how he knew I wanted to go to Taco Bell. He told me I had told him on the way to the hospital. I thought that was funny. So I hobbled into Jewel with Joel (actually I was walking okay by this point), bought my rather expensive medicine, went through the drive-through at Taco Bell, and was dropped off at home.

Joel told me he would call me that night to make sure everything was okay, and I learned something that I didn't fully appreciate until reflecting on it later that weekend. There are different kinds, perhaps levels, of goodness. I am a nice person, in that I try not to offend people or get in their way if I don't have to, and I am even a good person to talk to because I try to listen carefully without judging. And I am cooperative and generally willing to help people when asked. But my form of goodness is fairly passive. I usually don't go out of my way to find good things to do for people. So I would be happy to drive people to the hospital and the pharmacy, but I doubt I would even think to check up on them later, or if I did I would be lazy and dismiss the idea. It was a small gesture, but Joel's ownership of the situation impressed me. That's the kind of goodness I want to strive for.

I took it easy the rest of the day as the doctor ordered, and right after I got home I called Don and my family to tell them the results of the colonoscopy, after which I forgot whether I had called them, so I called again the next day to make sure. hehe

The medicine seems to be doing something. Some of the symptoms are clearing up, while others are pretty much the same, but I'll see what the doctor says when I go in next week. I've decided it's building my character in any case.

So that was my expedition to the hospital. I don't go very often, so I thought the experience was worth recording. It was all too much information, I'm sure. ;)

Okay, okay, fine, I'll write. Yes, I know it's March and I'm still writing about Christmas. (That was addressed to me, by the way.)

I just wrote a little script that concatenates my Gaim logs in chronological order and divides them into files by month. My IMs are like my journal because I tend to tell my friends what I've been doing, so it's handy to have it all in order for times like this when I've totally forgotten what I did.

So, the rest of my vacation. Christmas night I played Apples to Apples with my family, which was fun. That's one of my favorite games because it has to do with language and takes no skill.

Tuesday night my brother, my sister, and I played some Christmas hymns. I was on my new French horn (yes, I finally bought one!), my sister played her oboe, and my brother played the piano. It was messy but fun. Then we watched Cast Away, which was really good. I had never seen it, as usual. I liked the ending because it was more true to life than the typical happy ending, yet it wasn't depressing. It was the right way to deal with circumstances you wouldn't choose.

Wednesday night my sister was in a crazy mood. First she was pretending to be a ninja with a wrapping paper tube. Then she was talking like an Indian (from India). While this was going on I was mediating a group IM conversation between my friend Rob and my family, who was sitting around me. It was funny.

Thursday we went to the mall to watch Charlotte's Web and shop. The movie was really good, but I was really tired, and the mall didn't have a bookstore, so after I bought the clothes I needed, the shopping was reeeeally boring. But I survived, barely.

Michael went back to Boston on Friday. On New Year's Eve (Sunday) we watched War of the Worlds, which I had just bought at Half Price Books. It was a lot less scary on the small screen and when I knew what was going to happen. The scenes went by quicker. In the theater I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, and each scenario seemed to last forever. Still a good movie. Abbie missed the ball drop in New York, so at midnight she dropped her Hello Kitty kickball. ;) And on Monday I went back to Illinois.

Finally I'm done with that! In my next installment (probably sometime in April), I'll be telling you about some major developments in my life from the past few months, and sometime around then I'll have a book review.

*sigh* I know, I never blog. I'm going to have to come up with some strategies to get myself to write more.

Anyway, to comment on my sister's comment from the last entry: There is no way I would think you are less entertaining than Michael. You're our substitute for TV, remember? ;) But you have to admit, we did spend a lot of our time by ourselves doing our own things those first few days.

I came up with a theory over Christmas that systems, such as families, develop patterns of behavior that incorporate all their members, and for the system to behave the way we expect it to, all the members have to be present, at least in a small system such as our family. That's why when one person in our family is gone, the house seems so much quieter, even if the person who's missing isn't especially loud. For our normal feeling of (relative) liveliness, everybody we usually expect to be there has to be there.

So, the rest of my vacation. Dinner with Heather was good. I think I managed to ask the whole range of missionary questions that I usually wonder about. And we gave her some contact info for one of our other missionary friends so they could possibly collaborate in some way. I love connecting people like that.

That night I stayed up till 4:30 doing some audio editing. RumTumTugger, one of my TheologyWeb acquaintances, wanted me to record her singing happy birthday to Johnny, another TWeb acquaintance, because she wouldn't be in Paltalk that night to sing it in person. But while she was singing it, she paused just before Johnny's name because she didn't want to accidentally sing my name or Brandalf's, who was also in the chat room. This, of course, was too good not to parody, so I recorded some more of the conversation and made an "alternate" happy birthday song. It was so much fun. I laughed a lot while making it. And people on TWeb liked it too, so I was happy.

On Christmas Eve we went to church in the morning and in the evening. As usual my brother and I were greeted with the typical Southern enthusiasm by people we barely knew, but there was less of that this time, thank goodness. It was interesting to look around at people I grew up with and to see how much older they looked. I don't get to Texas much, so I only see them once a year, if even that often.

Christmas day was good. Abbie's friend Kimberly, who moved in with our family after graduation last summer, spent the morning with us. She said that's the most presents she's gotten in a long time (ever?), and I was happy we could be generous with her like that and treat her as part of the family. I got mostly books, which is always good. They were from my Amazon wishlist.

Abbie had ordered a book for me too, but it didn't arrive until a couple of weeks after Christmas, -.- so instead she gave me the Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition. :) Then I ordered the other two with an Amazon gift certificate, and back in Illinois I've been watching them with my LotR friend Tim. It's nice to have an excuse to have him over, since he's usually so busy and I rarely get to see him. We've been talking a lot during the movies, so I like to say we're doing our own commentary track.

This is long enough for now and I want to eat lunch, so I'll get to the rest of the vacation in another post. And there's plenty more I have in mind to write about. I really will try to do it soon!