ah, november

November was a month of many things, both good and bad, and all time-consuming and making me un-blog-motivated.

At the beginning of the month, I had an extraordinarily painful and wholly unexpected minor surgery on my lady bits. It wasn't fun. Less fun was the fact that I was minorly misled about my expected recuperation time; I wound up flat on my back for more than a week, when I'd expected to be back at work in two days.

In the meantime, however, Don and his dad accomplished something quite remarkable: progress!

They took down the wall between the dining room and family room, installing a header to keep the house up, and ripped open a big door from the dining room to the living room. For a good week afterwards, we were hard put not to giggle gleefully every time we stepped through the new doorway.

And then! And then. We bought a Wii. Yes, people, we own a Wii. It is AWESOME. As soon as I was recovered enough to stand up, we indulged ourselves in a great deal of Wii Tennis and Wii Bowling.

Just as the novelty of the Wii began to wear off (who am I kidding? It's still AWESOME!), I suddenly realized that I was quite alarmingly behind in various important school-related things like actually doing my homework. So I had to catch up. Fortunately, I had that whole Thanksgiving weekend! Like I did any work then.

Thanksgiving at Don's parents this year was hectic! All four siblings were there, with spouses and children where appropriate. It was noisy and boisterous and lots of fun. Then, the next day, we headed down to Don's older sister's house for a long evening of card-playing and baby-cuddling, and were rewarded by both: we won seventy bucks and Don caught the baby's cold.

The next night happened to be our four-year anniversary (!), and Don surprised me with a fabulous (and pricy -- good thing we won at poker) dinner at Della Notte in Little Italy and a movie: "Happy Feet." So cute!

Then we discovered that he'd caught baby Mikey's cold. So it was his turn to be flat on his back, as it turned out to be a very bad cold indeed. Wonderful.

Once he recovered and I'd caught up some with school work, we did the unthinkable: accomplished something.

No, I'm serious. Stop laughing.

Having decided to hold off on the fullscale renovation of the kitchen until a) we have lots of money and b) something else in the house is done (maybe whichever comes first), we decided that we need to make the kitchen a little more functional. Part of this will happen on the third weekend in January, when Don's dad is scheduled to come out and help cut a door between the kitchen and the dining room, and when we'll get a new oven -- they have to move it anyway to make the door, so we're seizing the opportunity to replace the only actually nonfunctional thing in the kitchen. The rest of it, though, we can do ourselves. What we need is more countertop space and more storage space. So we built a countertop. We built a frame out of 2x4s and slapped a prefabricated six foot sheet of laminate countertop over it. It's not pretty, but you can chop things on it. I'll put up pictures as soon as I have time to take them.

Time is currently in short supply, of course. I finally managed to get all of the christmas shopping done, and packages are slowly trickling in (including one yesterday, while I was working from home, just after I'd gotten out of the shower, delivered by a really cute UPS guy who didn't even blink an eye when I answered the door in my white fluffy robe). School is finishing up -- last class is tomorrow, and a final review next week. The holidays are fast approaching, with family commitments and parties and blah blah blah. And fraternity doings take up a lot of time, for both of us.

In conclusion:
- Yes, Snay, I'm alive.
- Got some stuff done.
- Had some stuff happen.
- Got a Wii.
- Still crunched for time.
- Sorry I didn't blog. :(
- Wii is still AWESOME.
- Pictures of house coming soon.