Post-Holidays

Well, the holidays are pretty much over and now it's time to try and settle back into the "normal" routine.

Christmas was a quiet affair, with Kate and I sleeping in then spending the morning opening gifts. The cats had quite a bit of fun with that! Bill and Tammy came over for Christmas dinner that evening and we feasted on roasted game hens, mashed potatoes, wild rice, green bean casserole, green salad, jello salad, cranberry relish, and dinner rolls. Yum! We finished with a couple rounds of Scattergories and called it a night.

The next week flew by and before we knew it New Year's Eve was upon us. We invited all our local friends over for our traditional fest. Attendees included Bill and Tammy, Ron, Beth and Jeff (with Caroline), and Ben and Charlotte. Although Beth and Jeff retired early, the rest of us stayed up to well past 2am playing games or just kibbitzing. It was a potluck affair so there were plenty of goodies to munch on. ("Real" food consisted of dirty rice by Ron and chicken triangles by Kate.) Games played included Munchkin, Imaginiff, and Wise & Otherwise.

Since the next morning was tricky for the lot of us, we got together the evening of January 1st for a breakfast-for-dinner gathering. Again, we stayed up rather late (no one worked the next day) and most of us were pretty well toast on the 2nd.

But that's all done now and it's time to get back into the swing of things.

Classes at CSU start on the 17th. I'm registered for only 3 classes right now: Intro to Java Programming, Fitness & Exercise, and American Government & Politics. I can't really take any major courses until I finish that Java class. I also still need to go buy my books - that should be fairly gouging on the pocketbook. :-)

In other news, Kate landed a new job at the Loveland Library. She's what they call a "sub." Instead of being exclusively a Youth Services assistant, she fills in for librarians and aides in all departments (Youth Services, Reference, Media, and Circulation). Kate's looking forward to the variety, although it will make her schedule VERY unpredictable. Just today, in fact, we had to cancel our lunch date because she was called in to work at Loveland. Oh, well! (Kate will continue to maintain her job as a backup at the Fort Collins library as well.)

Kate will also start doing some one-on-one tutoring with a high-schooler son of one of our co-workers in Fort Collins. He needs help with "Integrated 1," which is mostly algebra and geometry. Kate's really looking forward to doing even a little teaching again.

We're already trying to plan our vacations this year. Since we didn't visit with either families this year for Christmas, we intend to see each of them for a week sometime in the year. We plan on flying out to Selah, WA over Spring Break (in March) to see the O'Connells. Then we're hoping to take a week out of mid-August to take a vacation to San Diego with my family in Colorado Springs. One of my cousins is getting married sometime in the summer and I was hoping to get out to Iowa to see her...but I don't know if that's going to work. Heck, we'll probably be out of vacation time again by Christmas 2006! :-)

Don't forget to pop by the new website: Across the Miles! Watch for changes to the site soon!

Thanks for reading! Hope your New Year is off to a great start!