Ok, so maybe not the last...

The last day of 2006 is finally here. When I reflect back on 2006, it was a year with many ups and downs. I had so many great experiences this year, and, lets face it, some not so great experiences, but I'm not discouraged. I know life goes through these cycles and as long as I can roll with the punches, I'll be fine. I prefer not to dwell on the past (though it sure can come out of nowhere and bite you in the ass sometimes) therefore I'm looking forward to my future. One more semester of school and then on to the unknown. Scary and exciting. Who knows what 2007 will bring?

Virginia was wonderful. I may not have mentioned this, but we all were staying in the house my uncles are in the process of building. It's destined to be the "family vacation" house. Every year since I was no more than two years old, my family on my mother's side have rented a house on a lake and we all spend a week or more hanging out and having a great time. Through the years there's always been talk of buying a house or building but it never ended up happening until just about a year or two ago when my uncles bought a plot of land on a secluded lake in Virginia.

This year the house it up, though nowhere near finished, and we were all able to go. The whole family together again... just like old times. It was great. When we arrived, it was as I expected... no furniture unless you count folding chairs and tables and air mattresses as furniture. One working bathroom for fourteen people (I won't get into the joys of that situation...) and a kitchen without a working sink. One thing I wasn't expecting was the eight-foot-tall Christmas tree in the living room.My aunt apparently couldn't let our family Christmas go by without hauling the Christmas tree to the house.

You may wonder how we managed to keep ourselves entertained in a place with no TV, no couches to lounge on and the weather too cold to make use of the lake. Well, one of my cousins had that covered. He brought along a projector, speakers and his Nintendo Wii and we spent quite a bit of time pretending we were bowling...I also can't fail to mention the hours we spent playing dominos. My parents bought my brother and I our own domino sets for Christmas so we would sometimes have three games going at once!We also spent some of the time walking around the neighborhood where we discovered another house (a ridiculous house by the way) that was in the early stages of being built. There's no easy way to convey to you the ridiculousness of this house other than to show you a picture of the main living room...You may think to yourself, how could this be a main living room? For one, you could fit a small plane in there and two, there are three garage doors with automatic openers right there on one wall of it... are you sure we're not looking at the massive garage? Oh no... it is by far the strangest house I've ever seen. It's enormous and it's layout makes no sense at all. Or best guess is that it's a party house, plenty of space for people to walk around with their swanky champange and make snarky comments about everyone else in the room.

Besides all these wonderful ways to keep ourselves entertained, I also brought my knitting. I'm on the leg of the second sock which is still going to take me a bit of time to finish. I decided to knit the leg of these socks until the yarn runs out. This is the result of the first sock.It nearly made it to my knee! I had to stop the pattern sooner than I thought I would because my calf was getting too wide to fit into the sock so I just switched to a K1, P1 rib. That seemed to work out fine, plus the cast off method made it stretchy enough to fit. I don't remember if I mentioned that the yarn I'm using is KnitPicks Gloss. It's awesome!

All-in-all we had an excellent time despite somewhat "roughing it" in an unfinished house.

If any of you have lasted this long, I commend you! I can't remember the last time I wrote a post this long! Happy New Year!