(On my bday in November)
Just wanted to say Happy New Year!!!!! 2008 is going to be great, because we get to see everyone in July!!!!

hinton/young/francis/wallace/ewing family pic!

We celebrated Christmas at our place (Keith & Denise) yesterday. I made everyone wear a santa hat or antlers for one photo. There were 17 of us stuffed into our very small house. Keith cooked a delicious turkey, Natalie- Mashed Potatoes to die for, Carol - yummiest Cherry Pie, Mardi and her famous fudge, Veronica and her yummy cheesey dip as well as peppermint bark, Debbie- delish sweet potatoes with rosemary, Sandy and her cranberry relish and I made an apple pie.

From left to right: Nick (Veronica's boyfriend), Veronica, Mike, Mardi, Keith, Denise (one eye peeking out!), Stephanie, Jani (Mardi's sister, aka Phoenix), Natalie, Shane, Rick, Rachel, Carol (Rick's mom), Wally Francis (denise's brother in law), Debbie Francis (denise's sister) and Sandy Wallace (denise's mom).

Joey, our dog loves pie and managed to finish the cherry pie this afternoon when no one was watching.

Baked goods before Joey discovered them.....

How can you stay mad at this?

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and best wishes for a happy, healthy 2008!

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas....we did!! And have plans for a fun New Year!
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!!

OOPS forget this picture, I am trying to send a slide show that Kelsey was helping me with but they had to head back to Ohio:( so I will try again.

Photobucket Album

Merry Christmas from Keith & Denise!

I'm done!

Tonight I had my last class.....FOREVER!!!! I have been in school, taking classes for 21 years straight and I am finally done going to a class and doing boring, pointless homework! One more semester to work on and finish my project and I will have my master's degree!! Anyway....I just wanted to share that with my family.....can ya tell I'm excited???

SantaCon!

Every year in Portland, hundreds of people dress as Santa and go bar-hopping for 12 hours. I read about this a few years ago and have been looking forward to participating this year. It was so much fun! I lasted till about 11pm. Thank God for great public transportation that got me home safe. They estimated over 800 Santas took over downtown Portland on Saturday. Ho Ho Ho!

a WICKED weekend

• Okay, so I said that I would post pics from this last weekend, so here they are - - my friend Megan flew into Ohio from Reno and then we drove up to Chicago and went to see the musical WICKED at the Ford Oriental Theater. (for those of you who may not have heard about WICKED before - the play is based off of the book, which is the background story on the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz - the author has also written books about the ugly stepsisters and other characters; it's a really creative idea) It was SO much fun and the play was outstanding!!! I highly recommend it to everyone! The play changed a lot of stuff from the book, but it had a better ending and was still wonderful to watch! We stayed at the Palmer House Hilton, which was exquisite and gorgeous! The theater was beautiful as well and contained very detailed carvings all over the walls, but they would not let us take any pictures of the inside of it. We sat in the balcony section in the first row, so we had one of the better views. We also ate dinner at the Park Grill, which was right next to an ice skating rink : )
• In just one more week I will be flying back to Vegas for 3 weeks! My winter break is the only real break that I get during the entire year (since I have to take summer classes too), and my classes start again during the first week of January.
  
• Enjoy the slideshow : )

We had a great Thanksgiving. Our friends that live Indianapolis came down. After dinner everyone wanted to take a boat ride-as you can see it was a "little" cold-38degrees but hey after drinking Asti Spumante and full tummys why not!! Strange though we were the only ones on the lake-hmmmm- some people just don't know how to have fun:) Natuarally when we got back we had to havc more Asti to warm up.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

Happy Turkey Day!

Happy Thanksgiving!!! Have a great day of eating, drinking and being merry!!

One down... many more to go

• Just thought I'd share with everyone that I finished my first quarter of grad school!! (at Ohio University) We had our last (and worst) final today, but now it's over! Our winter break is 7 weeks long! It's the only real break we get each year, so I'll be going down to Vegas in a couple of weeks - - - Only 7 more quarters until I get my Master's in speech-language pathology and then a few more years if I choose to do a PhD : )

• Here are a couple of pics of some friends of mine - one is of my friend Katie and me and the other is me with 2 of of the 3 students we have in our program from India.

• Hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!! My friend from Reno is flying out and we're going to see Wicked in Chicago this weekend - I'll try to take pics and post some afterwards : )