Holidays, 2008 style

I hope you all had a great Christmas! We did, except for a few incidents of the "24 hr" flu. (Who knew that Dad and Chris both have a tendency to black out when they vomit?) This year, my parents' gift to us kids was a trip to the Creation Museum in Kentucky! We went there last spring on the way to Florida and really enjoyed it. Going again at this time of year was great because we could see all the Christmas extras... the live Nativity (above picture), the lights in the gardens, and my favorite - the special "Christmas Star" planetarium show. Plus they have a petting zoo now... no dinosaurs, but there's a camel and a zonkey/zedonk (never found out which one it was) .
















For New Year's Eve we did our yearly tradition of everyone making a batch of cookies. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that's 10 batches of cookies.) This year I made Cookie Dough Truffles (basically balls of chocolate chip cookie dough dipped in chocolate.. really good if not strictly "cookies"). New Year's Day we did our tradition of donut snowmen... it's quite a junk-food holiday for us, LOL.Hope you all had happy healthy holidays! Thank you Jesus for being the reason for the season!

Pictures of our snow creations

As much as I like snow, this -28 F with wind chill weather is too much for me. It sure makes me thankful for a warm house and clothing! Here are some pictures of past creations from the last two years, in chronological order.

Our first major work and masterpiece: the Keep









Stephanie and Snow White (who, though you can't tell in this picture, has a spiked mohawk) on the spiral pedestal.

Me, Stephanie, and Valerie with the arch. The arch after some melting (it was April).










David on top of the mountain.


This year we started on a new one (not telling what it is in case it doesn't work out :P ) but the snow hasn't been real good for packing so we haven't gotten that far. Sorry, still no ice rink picture. I keep forgetting to take one during the day, and right now it's kind of hard to see with all the snow on it anyway.

Ice Rink!

Because this winter is supposed to be a cold one, my dad has decided we could put up the ice rink in our backyard this year! They set up the frame right before it snowed, and on Friday they fixed the broken seam in the plastic sheet. Now it's laid in and they've started filling it. I haven't really helped at all this year, but I'm very excited... it looks like we might have it ready to use before Christmas. I think that's a first! Sorry, I didn't think to snap a picture before it got dark; otherwise I would have put one up.

Post-It note for Aliisa

Hey Aliisa, do you have an email address? If so, do you check it often? If you're willing, I'd like to exchange addresses. :) If you're agreeable to that, reply to this post. If you leave your address, I'll email you and then delete the comment. Otherwise I'll leave my address and when you (hopefully) email me I'll delete the comment. My reason for deleting the comments is simply for security's sake. I don't really want either of our email addresses waiting around for spammers to find.
Hope to hear from you soon! ~*~elizabeth

Update on school

Keep praying!
I'm basically all caught up in every subject except... physics and writing, the two most time-consuming ones. For physics, I need to work on doing some every day. It's a subject that is hard to do more than a day's worth in a day. For writing, I need to just... start! If I think about what to write for too long, but never put down the first sentence, nothing happens. (I can see the novel-length comments from Shane already... :P ) I am a couple projects behind still.
Not much of a post, but that's all for now! Thanks so much for your prayers!

November 4

I got next to zero school done on Tuesday. But I had a good reason! Chris and I served as election judges. It was a very long day; we had to be at the polling site by 5AM and didn't leave until after 8. But it was a neat experience. There were 3 precinct voting at this particular site (our church, as a matter of fact) and Chris and I were assigned to the least populous precinct... hurray! One perk, besides the good pay (that's not sarcastic) was getting to wait and see when there were no lines before taking my turn to vote. There actually was no point at which 0 voters were present, even when the polls opened. The lowest it ever got to was 2 people. Turnout was about 50%, which is pretty high. I like that my first chance to vote was a Presidential election, despite the results. As it turned out though, in our precinct, McCain won over Obama. But it was close, and in the neighboring precinct Obama won by 5 votes.

Halloween and ballroom dancing.

This is my Belle-from-Beauty-and-the-Beast dress! Our next door neighbor made it for her daughter ten years ago and fixed it up for me last minute. She's the best! I wore it trick-or-treating for a little while. (Yes, even though we don't care for Halloween in general we do go trick-or-treating. As kids we like the candy of course, but it is actually a great way to see the neighbors, lol!) My brother Michael said it wasn't obvious that it was a Belle dress but numerous comments proved him wrong!
After about a dozen houses we had to head home so we could leave for ballroom dancing class. I met Samuel. No bad surprises there. He is polite, a bit taller than me, and learns at about the same pace. I think it will work fine. Dancing went well. The only bad part was my shoes kept catching on my hem and one of the ruffle-seams came untacked and it was dragging on the floor. Kind of embarrassing to deal with but I survived. :-} I can't wait to try it in my non-tripping length skirts. (To Aliisa: Not to say I wouldn't try a SiegmannSquare skirt, lol!) I think learning how to follow the guy's lead will be very interesting. I seem to have picked up a bad habit of watching the guy's feet from my attempts at round dancing with my dad. Apparently I'm supposed to look over their shoulder.