Sorry I've been MIA....

Wowsers.  I haven't been on blogger in what feels like a very long time.  Sorry I've neglected you friends!!

But the last few weeks have been busy.  Besides all the holiday hooplah I have been finishing up my first class in grad school and took a mini vacation to Las Vegas and now back to work!

And in the midst of all that my aol email account kept getting hacked!!  I use that email for just about everything so I figured if they were hacking into that then maybe other things could get hacked.  So I set up a gmail account and was changing email addresses on fb, twitter, etc and passwords.  Definitely a mess.  I changed so many passwords I'll be surprised if I remember what I changed them to. 

Yes, I am happy to report that school is DONE for the semester!!  I now get to enjoy a solid month of reading for leisure and nights filled with mindless tv and movie watching, instead of hours reading political science articles and writing papers. 

Our final for the semester was to design a research project we would like to carry out.  What question would we pose and how would we go about studying it?  What would our hypothesis be and how would we know if we were right or not?  Actually pretty interesting.  We had complete freedom on the topic, which sometimes can make it more difficult having to come up with something.  We had to do a 10-15 minute power point presentation the last night in class and then turn in a 15-20 page paper as the actual final.  The research design was 30% of my grade and I am very happy to say that I managed an A- for the class! 

The final paper was due last Tuesday and then Thursday morning I was on a plane headed to Vegas!  This was not a wild and crazy time in Vegas, but a family oriented trip.  My mom and I went out to visit my brother and his wife and son since they couldn't make it home for Christmas.  My nephew is 6 months old now and just too freakin cute!  I will try to get some pictures up later! 

We did a lot of shopping while we there, went to a shark reef aquarium at the Mandalay Bay one day, a little gambling, and drove through the largest Christmas lights show in Vegas!  All in all it was a pretty quiet trip, but a fun and relaxing one.  What we all needed I think.  I was very happy to get to see my nephew at his first Christmas.  In March, they will be moving to another continent and it will be much harder to see them. 

Mom and I flew back home on Monday, I was at work Tuesday morning and work all week, even on Christmas Eve.  Sounds like a whirl wind!  Where has the year gone? 

Am I the only one that feels like Christmas has already past?  I was quite in the Christmas spirit early on, but now it just doesn't feel like Christmas.  Maybe it's just because of the busyness of everything.  I'm glad I did my shopping early, but now I start doubting things I got for people.  Wondering if I should have gotten something different or just something more.  But oh well. 

I hope to spend these few days before Christmas watching Christmas movie after Christmas movie and going into a dessert coma with sugar cookies, fudge, and whatever else is around. 

How has your holiday season been treating you? 

Merry Christmas to you all!