New Year - New Blog

Happy New Year everyone!

I don't know if blogging will catch on for Jill and I. In fact, I'm not even sure if she'll accept my invitation to become co-author of this blog. I think she will, because she has been reading other blogs and commenting that she should join in. In any case, once school starts again I'll either have no time for this or use it as an excellent procrastination tool, so we'll see how it goes.


The holiday season is pretty much over. We had plenty of activity over the past couple of weeks. The weekend of Dec. 12 we drove with Grandma Noordyke down to Jill's parents' house in Elkhart for Christmas with her immediate family. The next Sunday, we drove up to Greenville for Christmas with my dad's side of the family, only to turn right around and drive back up on Christmas Eve a couple of days later for Mass and Christmas with my mom's family. Both of these trips Jill made on little sleep after working the night before each (she had a couple of drowsy moments during Mass, but otherwise did awesome). We drove back to GR that night so we could have Christmas morning brunch with Jill's parents and Uncle Bill, Aunt Robin, Cara and BJ at Grandma's out in Lamont. With Jill's Christmas celebrations over, she went home to take a nap before working Christmas night, and I drove back up to Greenville for one more Christmas with just my parents, brothers and sister (and her boyfriend Matt). I stayed the night up there to get some quality time with the bros. I beat Vince Vaughn by one - Five Christmases for me! Every one of them was a blast and it was great to see all of our family. It was also fun how each get-together had it's own special personality. Elkhart was different from Lamont was different from Greenville, but all of it was special (and delicious).

Not to be outdone by Christmas, New Year's Eve had its own travel plans for us. We headed to Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Burns's house in Commerce Township, with a side trip to my Uncle Tom and Aunt Sheri's house in Rochester. The original reason was to get their Christmas gifts to them, since Jill had to adjust the bracelet that she had made my aunt and my uncle's gift had not come in the mail when we last saw them. Since they only live 20 miles from Kevin and Megan, it made sense to stop there for lunch and give them their gifts. One key element of that plan, however, involves actually bringing my uncle's gift and not leaving it at my apartment. Oops. Forgetfulness aside, we still had a great time visiting with them; we stay much longer than I had anticipated and enjoyed every minute.

New Year's at the Burns place was too much fun. Jill's dog, Allie, was the life of the party.

And after a couple of days of recuperating from all of that, I plan on taking advantage of my last week of vacation by relaxing and trying to get some things accomplished that have been on my to-do list since about September.

I hope everyone had as good of a holiday season as I did. Again, Happy New Year!

Jim

PS. Yesterday, I got my first grade back from last term (none of the grades are due until mid-February - it's excruciating). I got an A- on the article I wrote for Scholarly Writing, which means I will officially be on the Law Review! This is a huge honor and great resume-booster. It's going to mean a lot of work mostly editing footnotes, but it will be worth it. Here's hoping the rest of my grades are as good...