Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

It's amazing, I go home on semester break expecting to have all this free time and find myself as busy as ever. I think in the future I'm going to have to demand a day off before I start RevTrak work on Monday right after break starts. I still haven't been able to catch up on my Purdue sleep deficit.

My grades came in a few days ago and they were pretty good overall. Not quite good enough to raise my GPA, but good enough that it didn't go down much. I'm most curious about the true meaning of the 'B' I got in King Air Ground (the class I had no idea how I was doing in) because our grades in that class are competitive against each other deciding who gets their first choice on when to co-pilot the King Air. I really don't care if it's this spring or in the fall, just as long as I don't have to stay at Purdue and do it this summer.

Despite all my double-and-triple checking to make sure I didn't forget anything when I came back to St. Charles for break, I realized a couple of days ago that I forgot something fairly important. I've decided to reformat the primary hard drive on my desktop computer over the break because it was getting to be somewhat unstable (thanks to McAfee and Norton not wanting to play well together causing a crash and me having to do a XP repair install earlier this fall). The problem is that after I went to all the work of backing up all my data and reformatting my hard drive, only then did I realize that I had forgotten my XP install disk at Purdue. [sarcasm]Way to go Shawn.[/sarcasm] So, I'll just have to wait until I get back to school before I can rebuild the machine. The good news is that my data is still safely backed-up on the secondary hard drive and my Tablet is still working nicely. Now, if the M4 crashes, I'm in trouble, but until then I'm ok.

Now my family is up in Minnesota at my grandparent's condo in the Minneapolis area. Mimi, my grandma on my Dad's side, flew up on Friday from Colorado Springs to join us and is on the plane back as I type this. The highlight of our trip is meeting Sam, my new cousin. Those of you with unusually good memories will remember that I just got a new cousin last July (Sarah), adopted from Guatemala. Well, now we have another one. My uncle and aunt (the same ones who got Sarah) adopted him when he was four days old this September. Both of his parents are originally from Guatemala, but he was born in southern Minnesota. He is the most easygoing kid you ever met. As long as he's happy at both ends (fed and otherwise cared for, if you catch my drift), he is perfectly happy with whatever's going on. It's really quite amazing. Sarah is also a blast. She's able to walk now (but she is only willing to walk more than a couple of feet if you walk with her and she can hold onto your hand).

Our plans are to stick around here tomorrow and then head back to St. Charles on Tuesday. Then Wednesday morning I leave for Indy Christmas Conference with Cru. I haven't been to IndyCC since I went with Chicago Metro Crusade back when I was with Elgin Community College. I'm just hoping we don't get a flat on the way there this time (quite a story to the last one).

Before I sign off to return to the Timothy Zahn novel I'm completely engrossed in (The Green and the Gray, but I'd also recommend pretty much anything of his if you want good sci-fi), I think it's been a while since I gave you guys any good links. For those of you who've heard that an engine from a 747 produces 58,000lbs of thrust and wondered just how much that really is, this is a clip for you. It comes from what I consider to be one of the funniest shows on TV, a British car show called Top Gear (you might want to pause it until enough of the video downloads so that you don't have to wait for it later):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1309610693318372088