Its November and that means the holiday season has officially begun (for me anyways)!

It has been busy busy busy the past few weeks! I'll do my best to give the highlights, but I may leave something out. To start with, work has been consistently motoring along since the 3rd week of October. I was doing one ascidian experiment a week for Bill until last week when he laid down the law and said "Finish counting those tastebuds NOW!" Heh. So, I did. And rather handily too, just in time for my mom to come out from California to visit my brother and I for 2 weeks or so. Unfortunately, the tastebuds didn't end on a good note despite my great efforts. The numbers look rather wierd on the F2 group, but its Bill's headache for now. He may ask me to go back and do more, he may not. I'm waiting around to see. But its probably back to ascidian work for the forseeable future.

In other lab news we're probably going to have a surprise Chemical Safety inspection sooner rather than later and that means I have to find time to clean out a fume hood and do inventory on all our stuff. Woot.

For Halloween I was press-ganged by some of the older ladies in the church into service for Cornerstone's annual Harvest Festival. It actually was a lot of fun working with them serving drinks, popcorn, and hot dogs to all the families that came for the night. I think we had over 1500 people attend. Its quite something. The Underground (20-somethings) group had a Masquerade party the Sunday before and we all dressed up. Pastor David and Renae pulled off Shaggy and Velma, it was awesome! We also had a geshia, a gangster, a sumo wrestler, Evil Red Riding Hood (complete with wolf head in basket and knife), and a #1 Guana Soccer Fan. I saw Michael Jackson's Thriller for the first time in my life, and was moderately amused. (All I could think of was watching Captain EO at Disneyland, that and the Moonwalker video game was my sole exposure to Michael Jackson as a kid.)



Jessie came over for a visit with her youngest kid, Lindsey (who now crawls over everything) just before Adrian's birthday to get advice on buying a PS2. We had a great time chatting and now Adrian is happily working his way through FFX. ^_^ Also I started prep work for distributing some of the wire jewelry I've been learning to make to the general public. A lot of the ladies at church like the wire ear bangle I discovered at Otacon, so I've learned how to make those now. If I actually do start selling anything, the design name of course is going to be "Amy's Oddiments". After all why mess with a good name?

As I mentioned earlier, my mum is out visiting me for the next couple of weeks and I am just thrilled about it! This is kind of her present for Tim and I this year, since neither of us can make it home for Christmas. This weekend, Tim drove up and spent Saturday and Sunday with us, and we all talked until the wee hours about everything. Boy am I tired!! I always forget that visiting family can take it out of you, especially if you haven't seen each other in person for a while. Tim is working hard and has been taking this neat theology class that he really is getting into. Through our conversations this weekend it was interesting to see just how different the two of us are. We are good for each other, we each have to learn how to listen and talk to a person different from ourselves. And since we're siblings, we can't give up on learning, especially because we are all the family each of us has out here in Maryland.

There are other things going on at church and such that I'll post about in a bit, but they all are making me think so I don't want to talk about them as news. For those of you who write back and forth with me, be prepared to see the semi-annual Update Your Address email from me soon. Its about time for the yearly Struggle of the Christmas Cards. ^_^ Later!