It's All About...Looking Back, Moving Forward

Miss me? Considering there are about 4 of you who actually read this, probably not. But I missed you. I missed writing! (I would say that I missed taking pictures, but I really haven’t stopped that because my camera is an appendage. Truly.)

So geez. What’s happened? I had a beautiful 4-day vacation during which I drove to Maryland and Pennsylvania. I finished the HTML class from hell. I destroyed my bedroom in a flurry of rearranging to make it more functional. (The piles should be removed by Saturday. At the latest. Or I will go even more insane.) I made a bazillion plans to take place during the next 3 months. And I completed one year fast-food-free, ate some junk, and started on the next year. I ran a half mile non-stop on my treadmill.

The road trip:

The weekend before Halloween, I headed back to Maryland for my semi-annual scrapbooking trip. It might have started with scrapbooking, but it's mainly about the friendship...and the food. One tradition is that we eat at Galaxy 66, a really nice restaurant along the coastal highway. We had quite a crowd with us this trip. As it was last March, the food this night was incredible:

The kids got creme brulee for dessert:

After a long drive, I did very little scrapbooking the first night. I woke up right as the sun was coming up. One of the nice things about staying in a hotel right on the ocean is the view, especially of the sunrise:

There were other views that were pretty good too:

After getting dressed and going to get donuts at The Fractured Prune, I spent a long frickin' time at CVS trying to get some pictures developed. It would have made sense to get this done ahead of time, except that I never know what I want to scrapbook until the mood strikes. And when checking my photos, I wanted to scrapbook about Barefoot. Of course, the CVS I chose had a myriad of printing problems. (And a really adorable guy who helped me a lot, thank you Sihrish.) I think I got back to the hotel in time for lunch. Oy. But I did get a ton of scrapbooking done that afternoon, thank you very much. We attempted to meet J's husband and son and stepkids for dinner, but plans went awry (as they often do with J and me...no biggie!), so it was just she and I who ended up at a crab shack for some serious seafood:

Afterward, we made it back to the scrap room in time for a demo of some really cool Creative Memories scrapbooking software that, of course, I couldn't live without. And I got several more pages done.

The next morning? More scrapbooking, of course:

And then it was time to hit the road. We took a few last pictures on the beach in a LOT of wind:

And north I drove, through Rehoboth, around Philly, and out to Hazleton. (This was a mistake...I should have gone right to see Bree first, but didn't, and it cost me WAY too much time.) Then I took the really weird, convoluted, twisty, climby, LONG route that GoogleMaps had provided to get to Bethlehem to see my lovely stepdaughter. She took me to a really cool brew pub where I blinded her several times with my ubiquitous camera:

And she gave me a nighttime tour of her campus haunts and the town, and a brief trip through her home. It really is the coolest thing to see her so independent and...well, cool. She's pretty cool. I hated to have my visit be so short, but there it is. I had to go. So BACK to Hazleton on a vastly shorter route (thank you, atlas) and I crashed into bed.

HTML Class. Check.

After a brief 10 hour drive home the next day, I did homework. For the Next. Two. Days. Straight. I worked in there too, but free time was almost non-existent. I wrote HTML code like a MANIAC. I finished my final project for my class with about 13 minutes to spare. Sheesh. I have rarely been so pleased to have a class be finished. I got a B in the class, and I don't even care. (That's very weird for someone so attached to her 4.0 GPA until a year or so ago.)

What else?

After completing my year of no-fast-food on Oct 29th, I ate all kinds of it for 6 days. Yuck. Other than Wendy's chocolate frosties, nothing tasted very good, and it all made me kind of perpetually nauseous. I'm back on the wagon for another year (with a scheduled exception for a KFC Famous Bowl...the only thing I really craved consistently the entire year, and that I didn't eat on my "break").

I'm planning a trip to see my brother in San Francisco, hopefully in January.

I have a vague plan to try and run a 5K by January -- still looking for races. (I need a closer goal than spring.) I started a 5 week training regimen yesterday.

I should have my car paid off by January.

I switched dressers and moved stuff around in my room. The room -- still completely trashed. One person just does not need all this CRAP. So it's 3 more days of sort and toss. The goal is a stress-free room by Sunday night.

Bored yet? I'm not. I feel like I'm just getting started. On a lot of things. I hope you'll put up with the erratic entries and stick around to hear about it.