Blogging? What's that?

I am really behind in this blog. It's hard to remember what's been going on the past few weeks, but I'll try to update as best I can. It seems to help if I look at the calendar... but there is so much information that is lost in my brain somewhere since I didn't write anything down, that it looks like I'll have to wing it. Hmmm let's see..
The week of January 21st was pretty crazy. Columbia/USC hosted the State LEGO Tournament, and it was partially my job to keep the guy in charge, Donn Griffith, from going insane. Poor guy... he's got so many projects on his plate, not to mention the fact that all of the teams who qualified for Regionals in the LEGO tournament kept e-mailing him loooong after the deadline to sign up for the State tournament that he was still getting e-mail into last week about teams being added to the list... and the deadline was in October. I'm not sure why those late teams still got added... but either way, it created a lot of headache for Donn. So most of last week was spent recruiting volunteers for Friday and Saturday's tournament. We could get a lot of people interested by saying things like "Free food" and "free t-shirt"... but then when we told them they needed to be there by 6:30 a.m., no one was interested. It was kind of a disaster this year- we called people, begged, pleaded, and still we were way short of the number of volunteers we needed. It's hard to describe to people who have never done it before just how exciting it is- and obviously not easy to convince people to get out of bed early to participate. But I have to say, no matter how much I grumbled about getting out of bed, it was well worth the lack of sleep! I loved seeing the excitement on the kids faces as they won awards, or when their robots completed the tasks, etc.. I got to work with the smaller kids (Junior FIRST LEGO League- JFLL) and hear about projects they made based on the topic for this year's tournament- NanoQuest. Some of these 6 year old kids talked about things on the nano-scale that I didn't even understand! It was very impressive to see the things they built out of LEGOs that would help people, the environment, etc.- one group worked on NanoRobots that would scrub and brush your teeth while you sleep. These are things we may really see one day! It was pretty cool to listen to little tiny kids talk about it.
On Saturday I got to be an JFLL Judge... here is a picture of me with 2 other Judges, in our ugly judging shirts. The smallest they had was a Medium, and I was drowning in it...LOL...
That's really the biggest thing that's happened in the past few weeks. I'm still trying to recover physically from it- I honestly walked at LEAST 5 miles this past weekend, probably on Friday alone. I wish I were joking. :)
Other than that, I've been hanging out with Casey when he's not working, and then the boys every Tuesday and Friday evening. Last Sunday, Billy called me and said he was going to pick me up for brunch in 15 minutes, so I took the worlds fastest shower and was barely ready when he arrived. We went to the Gourmet Shop in 5 Points which was excellent. Then Clay called and I went with them to Sunday volleyball. I ended up picking up Charley and bringing him to the park, where he proceeded to run around and get some much-needed exercise. He did really well off the leash (thankfully there weren't any cops around so I didn't get in trouble)... he's listening a lot better these days and it's fun to see how much better he listens anymore. Now I just need to take him on regular walks again... but he hates going outside when it's super cold, like it has been lately. Looks like we might get some ice/sleet tomorrow morning... yippee!
Tomorrow night, a small group is going to Dr. Williams' apartment to make Japanese food. I'm pretty excited about it- we haven't made that in awhile. We're going to try and start a "Japanese Cooking Club" with him and try to go every week or two weeks. We all want to eat healthier, and we miss Japanese food! The Japanese graduate student in our department is excited to participate also. Should be fun!
In other news, the Super Bowl is this weekend... we are going to Dr. Monnier's place on Sunday to eat, drink, and watch some football. It's always fun at their place, so I'm excited to go.
That's it for now, other than the newest news that we finally won Trivia last night! We always get 2nd or 3rd place... but we kicked butt last night. We did have a few extras on our team last night, which seemed to help, but they also picked categories that weren't too difficult.
I guess that's about it for now... back to work, and housework, and the norm... :)

-Ash