ahhhh vacation

Oh my, can I tell you how decadent my life has been since 10:30 yesterday morning when my Infectious Disease exams left my hand?  I haven't studied a single stitch of medicine.  Not one stitch.  I had two glasses of wine in the middle of the day, I went on a leisurely non-guilty walk with Oliver, I played video games with my boyfriend and I slept in until 9! (well really only 8, but I stayed in bed with my eyes closed until 9 just because I could!) That's the latest I have slept in in as long as I can remember.  I am going to a massage at 12:30, lunch date with the sister afterwards and a dinner date with the boy, the brother AND the sister.  After that my parents fly in, followed the next day by my little brother and we shall celebrate the holidays at a cabin on a lake.  VACATION is glorious, just glorious. 

Here is our little Christmas tree that I made while trying not to over study for my renal exams. If you look closely you can see a totoro ornament JP made!

I passed all my classes with flying colors, even my terrible, scary, heart-palpitation-inducing OSCE!  I feel lighter than I have in a long, long while.  SO glad/proud/relieved to have another semester behind me, and I really feel like I have learned a lot.  Now the impossible thing to believe is that I start my clinicals in just five months.  Yikes, it's so exciting! But right now it's time to celebrate the vacation on hand!

home for the holidays

Oh vacation was amazing! I bunched all my shifts at the hospital in a clump both before and after the holiday so that I could have the most amount of time home possible, but that led me to work five shifts in six days with no energy left for blogging. I just, just finished my last shift for the week, and am going back on vacation tomorrow! Life without school is a pretty good thing I think. But if I have to have a life with school, at least it doesn't have to start until the 18th of January and from where I am sitting that's still a pretty good distance from today. Joy! In any case, now that I have re-introduced myself as a scattered brain, I have some pictures from Christmas to show you all! We had such a great (although it's always too short isn't it?) time together in Duluth. Christmas day started out a bit rough with me coming off a night shift and then staying up until our flight which was supposed to be at 2:00 but was broken, delayed, waitlisted and then delayed again until around 9:00. At which point, after nabbing a coma-esque nap on the airport floor for a whole 30 minutes, I was basically a ridiculous tear-stained mess of an Elise. We got to Chicago and the airline booked us a room at a Hilton that was attached to the airport. We decided against having a drink at the hotel bar when the menu listed a coors light at a whooping $12. Seriously. BUT we had a great room with a bed, which was all we needed:


Although we missed having Christmas with my family, they waited to start the celebrating, eating and tree decorating and dad even claimed that they wouldn't have any fun at all until we got there. Although there was tell of Micah giving the family an impromptu solo on the panda flute, but I suppose they couldn't abstain from all fun things! In any case, we eventually made it, and were probably in better moods (heh, at least I was) for having gotten a full ten hours of sleep before arriving. Everything went by so quickly, but we made the most of the snow and got out for sledding, and JP skated for the first time even holding his own in a hockey game in which two of his opponents were Joe and Emily who are pretty fierce competitors especially when they are charging at you full speed on skates while you teeter and try not to fall... It was great fun. Here are a few pictures from the trip:






Now it's off to NYC for a Bike & Build P2SF reunion extravaganza!

A Walsh family Christmas!

Christmas pictures this year were great and plentiful, which is extra good because I think my camera is on its very last leg after being dropped down the mountain at the hot springs..might as well go out with a bang though right? Here are a few:

Decorating the tree is one of my favorite favorites about Christmas. I LOVE it, and I love listening to Mannheim Steamroller while I do it and making my siblings put at least one ornament on the tree with me. It's just so nice to unpack them every year and see all the homemade crafts from first grade that are barely still together, the yearly Aunt Kathleen ornaments with each of our names written on them, and the Micah tin-hole punched ones. My favorite two are a Care Bear from the hospital after I was born and a man made out of beans from my godmother. Em and I used to scour the tree for a prime spot and set up a little town on the branches with all of the house and train and people ornaments we could find. See why I love it so much?!



This was the first Christmas without my Grandma, which was hard in a lot of ways. We lit this candle inside of a wreath and a barrier of ice for her and it sat on our front stoop all night on the windy Christmas Eve without blowing out. It felt like just the right way to honor her. Even though we didn't make it to Iowa for the first time in all my 25 years, I can see how our traditions will change and grow to be centered around our family and the families we will soon create, which is a nice thing to see.



Even though our kitchen is tiny, the six of us make it work more smoothly than would be thought possible. We made Arepas for dinner on Christmas Eve and Em took a break from avocado slicing to grab this shot.



As you can see, Dad is still quite the goof ball and is rubbing off on Mom! And yes, he is in fact on his knees, winter wasn't quite that crazy while we were in town!


Another odd thing about this year was that Lake Superior wasn't frozen! I few years ago mom skated on the lake if you can believe it, and usually there are great sheets of ice that form amazing sculptures on the sand!



One thing that hasn't changed since losing Grandma is our food intake. Man did we EAT. and eat and eat..and everything was so delicious and creative and homey! I love eating at home because my family knows all the things I can and can not eat and are very supportive about finding new recipes to take the place of my old flour-rich favorites. Mmmm it's making me hungry just to think about it!



Mostly it was just really great to be at home with the whole family again. It feels like we are spread out far now, although I recognize that this feeling most likely stems from living away from "home" for the very first time.