St. Thomas

I am in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. It's warm here. :) I am SOOO excited to be here!!! It is beautiful with mountains, green, and gorgeous water. I just arrived today and cannot wait to go play in the water. Kristin Hoopes lives here and is letting me stay with her. (She is so sweet!) She took me to some over looks of the island and to a beach with nice soft sand. I am so in my element. :) Maybe I'll just miss my plane back.
I'm here for a few days and then off to St. John. I am just relaxing and enjoying the warm weather. Life is wonderful! :)

Sing praises!

Yea and halleluja!!! I am finally done with school. I cannot even express my relief for being done. The weight of it has just been over whelming. When I finished my class presentation on Monday I came home and cried. I felt like I had just been let out of jail. All of a sudden I could do things again. I woke up on Tuesday at 5:30 and could have slept until 7:00, but I realized that I actually had time to clean so I got up and vacuumed and organized. It felt so good to be able to do what I wanted and to get organized, get my life back. I feel like a real person again. :) Emotionally I am doing much better too. Some friends at work said I was glowing. I told them it's because I get to go on a long vacation and I was finally done with my own torture for the semester.
I love December (when school is over!) :)

Birthday Celebration Continues in DC

Julie and I (and Julie's friend Alex) went on a home tour in Logan Circle this weekend. It was an extremely cold day (especially with the wind), but it was so interesting. We got to see several beautiful homes that had been renovated and some penthouse apartments. It's amazing what you can do with a lot of money. :)

Julie and I ate at one of my favorite restaurants Le Pain Quotidien in Georgetown. It so soooo good!!!! This is our cute waiter. He was so cute and even invited us to play pool with him sometime in Dupont. :)

Georgetown was all decked out for Christmas. I loved their snowflake trees. I just love Christmas lights in general. They just make me happy. :)

Just one more week and all of my school stuff will be done. I'm so happy it's all almost over!!!

Birthday Dinner

Mauree McIntosh, Carrie Johanson, Melissa Hill, me, Julie Bohn. Here we are on at the National Christmas Tree in DC. It was so pretty this year. :) Usually it is really ugly. I picked Mauree up and warned her that it is usually ugly. I was so pleased that it was so much better this year. We didn't get there until a little before 10:00 and it was closed. We were so surprised. It is a a tradition for us to go to the trees for my birthday. So fun. :)

Here I am outside Old Ebbit Grill.

Melissa Hill, Nicole Davis, me, Mauree McIntosh, and Carrie Johanson. This is the tree inside Old Ebbit Grill.

Julie and I at the National Christmas Tree. I really like this picture of us! How beautiful are we. :)

I have a final on my birthday this year so my friends and I celebrated early. I wanted to try a restaurant I had not been to. I remembered that I had heard really good things about Old Ebbit's Grill in DC so we went there. It's right across from the White House.) We had such a good time! They were extremely accommodating to my food allergies and brought a piece of cake for the table for me to blow out the candle even though I couldn't eat it. It was funny because the waiter would tell me what I could and could not eat. :)
I have such great friends!!! I feel so blessed to have their friendship. We went over to the National Christmas tree after dinner. It was raining a little, but not too bad.

Happy Thanksgiving

Julie and me the day after Thanksgiving.

Julie came down to spend Thanksgiving with me this year. I have tons of school projects to do and wanted to work on them over the break. Julie was a huge help and spent hours with me editing my paper. It's not due until next week and it's done. Yea! It may not have been such a fun break for her (or me), but it's exactly what I needed.:)
Julie and I ate really well at Thanksgiving dinner. I had turkey, ham, and lots of salad. Julie is trying to eat healthier so she ate like me. We were doing great until they brought out the fudge. I don't know why, but wow I wanted that fudge. So I turned to Julie and said I think that it's time to go. She agreed.:)
School is extra crazy right now as I have papers and projects to complete. I am building a website and really struggling with the CSS. I am hoping and praying that someone at school at help me fix the problems tomorrow. I just keep thinking that in less than two weeks I will be in the Caribbean playing in that beautiful water and actually relaxing. Oh, I can feel the wonderful breeze on my face. I am so looking forward to it!

Building

I have worked at George Mason University for over eight years and this building has always been part of my view. (Normally it looked a lot better without all of the debris. :)) It was supposed to be a temporary building, but it's been here since at least 1988--not so temporary. They are tearing it down with the orange machine in the background. It's wierd to think soon this will just be a memory of what it used to look like.
Paul (a colleague) was so excited to get to see the building come down. He said if there was a gas leak in the building and they made us evacuate he would still stay because he wanted to see it come down. It is kind of interesting to watch. I wonder if the man doing the tearing down enjoys it. :)

Baby Shower

Here are the cute give aways Alison made. They are candy kisses with just the light blue and the sliver. Here is the cute mother to be Mauree and me.

We had a baby shower for my best friend Mauree last Saturday. Alison Loveridge and I hosted, but I have to say that really Alison hosted and I showed up with a few things. She really made it very cute. I'll post pictures below. Mauree is still so small. She is eight months pregnant and to me only looks about five months. My sister, JL, had a shower when Addison was born and they decorated onesies. So we decided to do the same thing. Alison has lots of stamps and found that you can actually stamp on fabric and it will stay. Everyone had a great time stamping their cute little onesie. I think Mauree is set for those. :) I wasn't able to eat any of the scrumptious food. Sometimes things look so much better than they actually are when you can't have them. :)

Alison bought this cupcake cake from a bakery. It was so cute. She had little cupcake boxes (who knew those even existed) so people could just peel off a cupcake and take it with them in their little box.

Here we are with our little onesies. I need to get a close up picture and post them. They turned out so cute!

Here is a closer picture of how the onesies turned out.