Finished With Finals

Even though I've been back in Georgia for two days, I wasn't actually finished with my finals until noon today.  Sure, I'd taken my exams, but I still had a 1500 word essay due.  Of course, once my delta flight landed Saturday at 2:30, the procrastination officially began.  It wasn't a hard assignment, but I just couldn't bring myself to write it.  That is, until 6am this morning.  But you know what, I finished it with  23 minutes to spare.

The Family Christmas Party
Part of my reason for procrastination was our family's annual Christmas party.  Yesterday, we all gathered from far and wide and spent the afternoon celebrating the season.  Even though we only get together once of twice a year, it's always a wonderful catching up session.

My Mom Gave Us These Glasses as our Advent Gift
and We Decided We Had to Take A Kid Picture 

Cute Parent Pic 

Ma and Her Granddaughters 

All the Kids Listening to Matt Read
the Real Christmas Story, Luke 2:1-14

Time to Celebrate
Now that my semester's done, it's time to celebrate.  Becky and I are watching Disney's Once Upon A Christmas on VHS.  I love its previews; the movie's from 1999, so they all  say "now available to own on video"...seriously, too cute. And, I'm excited for an entire month of fun reading.  I'm in the middle of Candace Bushnell's Lipstick Jungle, and after that it's on to Super Sad True Love Story.  The Strand displayed it as one of best books of 2011, so I'm excited if my idea of a best book matches theirs.  The third novel by American writer Gary Shteyngart, it takes place in a near-futer dystopian New York where life is dominated by media and retail.  The son of a Russian immigrant, protagonist Lenny Abramov, a middle-aged, middle class, and otherwise unremarkable man whose mentality is still in the past century, falls madly in love with Eunice Park, a young Korean-American struggling with materialism and the pressures of her traditional Korean family.