Well, surprise, surprise.  A few people have been asking for an update plus Tim’s been really encouraging me to get back into writing (he knows it’s a way better use of my time than facebook or hulu.com)…so, while I can’t promise to produce anything worth reading, here I am.

Here’s a start on the update:

Tim, our marriage, and I survived outage season (Tim’s busiest few months of work ever)!   No surprise there, right?  Of course we’d survive.  But it’s actually a much bigger accomplishment than it sounds.  He wrapped up  his big project just in time for Christmas, and although our lives aren’t quite back on track schedule-wise, we sure are getting close.  I can’t wait to have him home evenings and weekends again.

Did you know I have a nice new niece?  Her name’s Hannah, she’s the cutest ever, and I’ve seen her twice–once when I flew to Iowa to spend a (November) week with her (and her parents), and once when she (and her parents) flew to Richmond to spend the (Christmas) week with me (and the rest of my family)!  

We had the busiest Christmas season I ever remember.  My whole family came up for the week of Christmas, and we enjoyed seeing some fun sights–including Hannah’s first ever beach experience and the rest of our first-ever oyster harvesting attempt (I would say both were successful, although I think we enjoyed the fresh oysters more than Hannah enjoyed the cold sea-breeze).  Then Tim and I spent New Years (Year’s?  Years’?) week visiting, reading, cooking, and board-gaming with his family in the Shenandoah Valley.  Pop spent a few nights leading up to Christmas in the hospital due to a very mild heart attack.  He’s home and doing much better, for which we are very thankful.   All of his children and many of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren were able to visit at Christmas and into January.  It’s been neat to have our house bursting at the seams for so much of the last few weeks!  Now it feels very quiet and empty (the last of the company left Tuesday and Tim is business-tripping the week away, so it’s just Pop and I holding down the fort until Sunday).

I had an almost-three-week teaching break from my chemistry class, but I’m back at it with a vengeance and celebrated the half-way mark last Monday.  To celebrate, we finished our long and entertaining discussion of the periodic table and jumped right into a rousing perusal of chemical reactions.  My students have been waiting all year for us to get to the chemical reactions part of the class, because the single and sole reason they even signed up for chemistry in the first place was to learn how to blow things up.  So hopefully the small explosions we’ll be able to create satisfy their every expectation.

Of course a million and one other things have happened, are happening, or will happen very soon–but since I can’t get to all of them tonight, I think I’ll hit publish before I think better of it. 

Ta-ta!