X-Mas Recap

My Christmas was rather boring (at least by my family's standards) though my grandmother still thinks it was crazy. My parents drove in from Indiana on Dec 23rd, but I didn't actually see them till the 24th. I worked on Christmas Eve because I didn't want to use a vacation day and knew I'd get a lot of work done because no one would be in. Plus they let us out at 3, which was nice. That night my parents and I went to a Christmas Eve dinner that we've now been extended an invitation "for life." It was with family friends that we did the 3-day with, and they cook 12 meatless dishes. The dinner has grown and now includes about 35 people. They split families up at dinner so you're at a table with a bunch of people you don't really know...always interesting. We ate and ran because of course the Notre Dame game was on.

FINALLY, no more talk about how Notre Dame can't win a bowl game. We decided that Jimmy Clausen has the same cold weather issue as Brett Favre. So if we just scheduled all away games for the month of November...and possibly October...we should be ok. I'm really disappointed that Kyle Rudolph wasn't more productive because I wanted lots of cheesy Santa Clausen and Rudolph headlines in the paper the next day. It was a great game though wasn't it. I was so bored by the 4th quarter that I hooked up my Wii, played 5 games of Wii tennis and took a shower.

Speaking of my Wii, I get to open one present on Christmas Eve and just told my mom to pick one out and hand it to me. Guess what...the Wii. So then the next morning when I open presents, my last present was mosaic grout. I think I did something backwards. Isn't the big present last? Anyway, I also have a Best Buy gift card burning a hole in my pocket, so if anyone has Wii recommendations I would appreciate it. Also while opening presents, my dad opened a present that he was giving to me, but it took a long time after opening it and staring blankly at it for him to realize what had happened.

Then we went to visit my grandfather at the "retirement community" which is usually painful as he complains about the place stealing all his money and how Donovan McNabb is a bum. But on Christmas, he was actually interesting as he told us how a burst appendix ruined his professional baseball career and malaria saved his life. (His plane got shot down in the war but he wasn't on it because he had malaria.) It did get a little weird when he was talking about how Veteran's Day makes him sad because he thinks about the cannibals eating his dead friends.

We went back to my grandma's house (other side of the family) and then the kids came. We realized that we have at least one kid in every grade from 2nd to 11th. Crazy! I didn't think it was too bad except for the spontaneous outbursts of singing, mostly Sound of Music and mostly from my cousin Heidi.

Friday we went shopping....a LOT of shopping.

Saturday was big Christmas celebration. With all the family members from my mom's side along with my Aunt Jane's mom and sister. There were several awkward moments with people calling someone by the ex-wife's name, talking about how banks are stealing our money (Jane is a banker), talking about how the government is wasting our taxes (cousin Brian is a tax collector), and other various non-Christmasy conversations that no one really backed off once they became awkward. My dad said his tongue started to bleed he was biting it so hard.

Well, that's Christmas with my family. No screaming (except by kids which is ok), no punches thrown, no police, no drugs, so rather calm by our standards.

Sorry, no Christmas Cards

I wanted to thank everyone that have sent me beautiful Christmas cards this year. I love the mail. I also wanted to tell you not to be expecting one from me. I don't know whether I've been watching too much G-word on Planet Green, reading to much Body and Soul, spending too much time on treehugger.com or just generally drinking the Go Green Kool-aid that's been going around, but I decided to save some paper and not mail Christmas cards this year. If you work with me and got one, consider yourself lucky (I gave into peer pressure). So here is my general impersonal blog Merry Christmas to everyone! If I've seen you recently, it was great to see you and if I haven't seen you recently, we really need to get together soon. Stay tuned as Christmas, my birthday and New Year's are always good for some posts (though since two of my cousins are in jail, it might not be as interesting as in previous years.)

Whopper Virgins

Has everyone seen the whopper virgins commercials? Do they bother anyone else? Everytime I see them I think "was this really a good idea?" I mean, come on, have you seen Bizarre Foods on the travel channel? These people drink yak blood and goat urine and think it's good. Am I really going to take their opinion on which burger to eat seriously? In fact, I think it makes the Big Mac look pretty good. McDonald's...we don't taste like goat.

Microwave S'mores

So today was the last day for a lot of people that retired/quit/got laid off so when most of them left after lunch I raided their offices/cubicles/working spaces. I now have actually have a matching set of chairs in my office. Can you believe that? But the big find was a case of marshmallows and a case of graham crackers, so of course of first thought was...S'mores!! Do you know what happens to a marshmallow when you put it in the microwave for 20 seconds? This:

Pretty cool, huh? I highly recommend trying it yourself. I kinda want to put a bunch of mini marshmallows all in together and see them all puff up.

Happiness Is...Having a Job

Yes, I've retained my job. Woot! I was about ready to pull my hair out though. At around 11:30, we discovered that calls were being made to people by HR regarding their status. Later we realized that they were going by alphabetical order. Damn! I had to wait for S. I had a dentist appointment at 3:15, but that shouldn't be that big of a deal, right? Well, the call didn't come, so I went to my dentist appointment. URGH!! (which by the way is a whole other post which would have been posted, if this whole thing hadn't been today.) I come out at 3:45 and have a voicemail on my phone. I call them back. No answer, so I leave a message. at 4:45, they call me back FINALLY. The suspense was killing me.

I'm actually a little bummed that I have my job because I was preparing myself for getting laid off so that I wouldn't freak out and thought about all the great things I could do with the extra time.
1) Go to the gym more. Like Camille the gym freak.
2) Clean my apartment (REALLY clean...clean the oven, shampoo the carpet, etc.)
3) Write the great American novel.
4) Complete my grad school applications before the deadline.
5) Finish the book I've been reading for a year
6) Finish embroidering the table cloth that I've been working on for two years
7) Mosaic...A Lot
8) Wrap presents for Christmas
9) Blog more
10) Sleep in...every day

Sigh...that will have to wait.

Eli, you can send me the invoice for my half of the Houlihan's bill.

Long Time, No Blog

Sorry, I haven't blogged in a fairly long time. Things have been CRAZY since getting back from Indiana and then this weekend I was at Duke. I had randomly applied to go to this MBA Women's Weekend thing and shockingly got picked to go. Duke paid for everything, the hotel, meals (alcohol), I just had to get myself to Durham. It was about a 6 hour drive, which wasn't bad since I'm used to driving 9 1/2 between Harrisburg and South Bend. The only thing that was annoying was that since my car CD player is still broken, I had to seek radio stations the whole time. Upon entering North Carolina, I lost the radio station signal that I had been listening to, so I hit seek and the first three stations I came to were Jesus stations. Not that there's anything wrong with Jesus stations, that's just a lot of them.

We stayed at the Washington Duke Inn (or Wa-Duke) which was amazing. We had been alphabetically assigned to roommates and mine turned out to be pretty neurotic. She was stressed out the whole weekend and taking the thing WAY to seriously. She took notes on EVERYTHING that was said. Then the night before our interview studied them for about an hour. We had already been told that the interview was more like a conversation with a current student to make sure you were a good fit for the culture of Duke. That turned out to be true. In mine, we ended up talking about Bob Davie...go figure. But my roommate was SOO nervous she told me she thought about running out of the interview room. She was also really concerned that if she had to leave before the optional apartment tours on Sunday that it would be held against her and asked every alumna/staff member/alumna that we met to make sure it was ok. Despite doing research on all other aspects of Duke life (restaurants, traditions, apartments, etc.), she apparently missed one integral part. I had skipped one of the sessions (I had already gone to the marketing part and didn't care to listen to anything on finance, consulting, or general management) and headed to the hotel early. I was watching the Duke/Michigan basketball game when my roommate returned.

Her: Who's playing?
Me: Duke and Michigan. Duke's going to lose though. They're down by 7 and there's only 23 seconds left.
::she looks at the TV::
Her: But that's only in the 2nd
Me: Half
Her: Oh
::They show Coach K walking off the court::
Her: Who's that?
Me: Coach K
Her: Oh, that's the guy they were talking about in the part about personal branding. What's he famous for?
Me: Um...basketball

I should've told her that I heard they were going to be asking about basketball later, so she'd freak out. Then she went on the bus and announced to everyone that Duke lost, like she actually knew anything. The rest of the weekend went pretty much like this. Information, eat, information, eat, information, eat, drink, eat. In fact at one point, we walked out of the classroom where we had just finished box lunches and there was a table of snacks outside. Is that really necessary?

In other random news, also attending this event (which included 120 prospective MBA's from all over the world), was a girl from Notre Dame that lived next door to me sophomore. Literally next door. We had rooms 221 and 223 and she was in 225. CRAZY!

Talking to the people there made me feel a lot better about myself since they have even less of a clue what they're doing with their lives than I do. Like the girl I met who was the same age as me. She attended Notre Dame my freshman year. Transferred to Florida State and graduated with a degree in anthropology a year and a half. Didn't know what she was going to do with that. Went to law school. Passed the bar. Practiced law for three years. Didn't like it and is now going to get her MBA because she really doesn't know what else to do. Oh and she has a four month old and a husband that she's trying to drag to grad school with her.

I also spent an abnormal amount of time discussing: where I am from, why Girl Scout Cookies have different names in different areas, where I'm applying to school, when I'm applying to school, what exactly "smart casual" is, if I was wearing jeans the day it says jeans are appropriate and if our student liaisons were reporting back on us even though they said they weren't (we decided no, but that if we did something inappropriate ie got extremely intoxicated and dance on tables, stole ornaments off the christmas tree, or asked why there were so many at the business school that they may have to report that.)

Duke/Fuqua (that's the name of the business school) has moved its way up on my list, but probably the best thing that came out of the weekend is that they waived the application fee, so that saves me $200 or so.