Crunch Time

Well it's Crunch Time again, and I WISH I was talking about eating something crunchy. But no, it's the last week of classes and I've been completley swamped with trying to finish up my last big projects/papers for grad school. Sorry about the dirth of posts lately, but I promise to get some more photos, movies and news up soon. My last paper is due this Friday, and then I'll have at least a week totally free of homework. Finally!

A few highlights from this week though:

Nicky had a great Easter. We managed to do everything I'd planned, including planting a little edible garden together. I'll post photos soon, but so far nothing is dead! It's been a week too, so that's really impressive. Some of the seeds are even sprouting! Amazing!

The eggs we dyed and tie-dyed turned out great, and in the last week I've eaten enough eggs to last the rest of the year. I took photos and will share soon.

Nicky found his Easter basket hidden cleverly on the treadmill. So you know it had to be the bunny and not mommy who hid it, cause mommy hasn't touched the treadmill in a looong time. (That'll be remedied soon as the semester is done though!) I have a movie and some photos of him and his basket coming soon.

Then, for Easter dinner we went to Grandma and Grandpas house. Food was great, but the Easter Egg Hunt was even better! Nicky really had fun doing it this year. Maybe next year we'll take him somewhere where there are lots of kids hunting. I have photos and movies of this for you too, and JM even took some photos which I'm sure will come out awesome.

After Easter I was totally absorbed in creating a digital library for my final project in one of my classes. I was in charge of coding the interface so what you see is a lot of my work. I think it turned out really well. Are you impressed? Because seriously, you should be. This was so hard! I basically had to reverse engineer the software to figure out what the heck I was doing. There is very little out on the internet in the way of instruction on this open source software and it's a miracle I could figure it out.

I also made some time Tuesday night after work and had Tom and Nicky drop me off at the blood donation center for about 1.5 hours. I've given blood lots of times before, but this was my first time donating platelets. These are really needed for people fighting leukemia and other cancers, and since my grandfather needed several units of platelets during his fight with leukemia, I felt I should definitely give it a try. I was a little scared as this is the thing where they take stuff and then give stuff back (was not real clear on how that all happened) but honestly it wasn't bad at all! It took longer, but the needle was smaller and it was kind of relaxing, although you're not allowed to close your eyes darn it. I could have used a nap! But they have movies and popcorn and I did a crossword puzzle and they bring you cookies and juice so hooray! I was able to donate two units which is apparently pretty good. And I can do it again in just 28 days. I think I will.

Yesterday we took Nicky to see Bob the Builder finally. We'd bought the tickets way back for his birthday, but the show was just yesterday. We're glad we took him, and I think he was really into it for about 15 minutes. But then he spent the 5 minutes leading up to intermission crawling around on the floor. At intermission we all decided to go out and get a burger and go home for a nap. We'll try a Sesame Street Live show next time I think. I've heard really good things about those. This one seemed a little boring and too "talky" to me for a 3 year old. Too much "let's lecture about recycling" and not enough "watch the machines do stuff!"

So with all the stuff going on, obviously I need to make sure to get a good night's sleep huh.

Well I'm working on getting a new cpap mask from the new company my insurance changed to. That will help I'm sure. I think my mask is leaking quite a bit.

But you know what else would help? Winning a new mattress! Tom and I finally got rid of our old mattress (that we'd bought back in 1994) about a year ago or so. We did that because we got Tom's mom's old mattress when she got a new one. And while this mattress has been oodles better than our old one (at least I don't wake with a bad back every morning anymore!) it's still probably in need of replacement. So I'm entering this contest for a sleep number bed. How cool would that be!

So anyway, that's what's up with us right now. I promise photos and video to come as soon as I kill off this 3000 word paper. 3k? Easy right? Yeah, well except that you have to have 20 citations for it. Not just 20 references, 20 inline citations! Sheesh! Can't wait to be done! Hopefully my summer classes will be easy.