Chasing Your Tail To Spite Your Face

Or something like that.

It's been about a week, and I needed to update. I don't believe I made my promise to blog every night official, but I said it in front of Jeff which amounts to the same thing. His rationalization as to my failure to comply is essentially the one I would pose, so I will.

Dr. Vakili got back to me on Wednesday saying he hoped I would be able to get some work done over the break....but that was it. So we played email tag until Friday when I broke down and called him (at 8:00 in the morning, mind you - I could have slept until 10:00). We discussed it, and he told me to work Monday through Thursday of this week. That's not so bad, but it would have been good to know before finals got started. I just needed a yes or a no.

On Thursday, the Wyld Stallyns (Jeff and I) won a $100 gift card at Buffalo Wild Wings. So far, that makes for around $500 that I've had a hand in winning since we got started back in the summer. Not bad, at all.

Saturday was Brent Elis's wedding. It was a very nice service (a Baptist wedding, which is weird, because most of the weddings I go to are Catholic). The church looked neat with all the Christmas trees. I did get to meet Julie, and her dad (who is Mom's cousin). Nice people, but neither of them acted as if they knew of my existence before Saturday. Well, I had Facebooked Julie a few days earlier. But anyway, it was a little weird. On the one hand, I didn't really know about either of them very well before a week or two ago, but on the other hand, I'm way more interesting than most of the people I know. I think Aunt Eleanor dropped the ball when it came to bragging about me.

Jennifer followed me back up to Tullahoma on Sunday so we could hang out a little bit more. On the way up, we stopped off in Nashville to check out ICE! at the Opry Mills Mall. After spending an hour looking for the darned mall (we couldn't leave the hotel parking lot), we finally made it in. They have lots of animal ice sculptures, ice slides, and a crystal clear Nativity scene made of carved ice. It was very cool (puns!).

Research has been coming along well, characterization is painful, but still kinda neat. I've come to the conclusion that *groan* a database is really what we need to start storing all the data from each run. Right now, we're set to have 50+ Excel spreadsheets. That's going to get hard to pull data together very quickly. Such is life, I suppose.

Jennifer headed back to Memphis this morning, but I'll be back sometime Thursday evening. Right now things are looking like I'll be in Memphis for a solid two weeks until January 7th, so let me know soon if you want to do anything. Dates are already filling up.