Money for nothing (...chicks for free)

I made $101.14 in dividends this quarter on my IRA! I'm very excited because these are the first dividends I've been paid in this account (I opened the IRA in September). This gives me 7.039% growth over 4 months! I know not all years will see this amount of increase in value but this is still very exciting for me!

New recipes!

I received several cookbooks this year and I'm really looking forward to getting started on some new meals! I'm going to make it my goal to try and make at least one new meal every week (we'll see how that goes). Maybe I'm channeling the movie Julie and Julia...

Tonight I'm going to make whole wheat mac-n-cheese. The sauce is made with chicken stock, cheese, and Dijon mustard, but it also adds cauliflower. This will be good to get me to incorporate veggies we don't usually eat into out diets :-)

I wonder how many other people find it totally sketch and unconstitutional that the only way the health care bill was passed was by promising the senator from Nebraska that the residents of Nebraska don't have to pay anything for Medicaid and the rest of the country has to foot the $300 million dollar bill for this. ("the federal government will pay 100 percent of the cost of a planned Medicaid expansion in perpetuity, the only state getting that deal") Also sketch is that Montana, South Dakota, and North Dakota received similar "concessions" before they would give their votes to the bill but that no news sources are outlining what those concessions are (but I suppose even the liberal news reporters can't ignore the whole 49 states paying for 50 states worth of medical care thing). I'm also curious about how many people will be dropped from their employers' insurance when it costs an average of $9800 to insure a single employee under this new regime but the fine for not supplying insurance is only $750. You could NOT insure like 13 employees and pay the fine for the cost of what it would be to insure just one of them.

Organizing

We finally ordered our media cabinet last week! I'm so excited to be able to (finally) unpack all of the boxes cluttering up our office :-D And then, a year and a half after the fact, we will be fully moved in to our place. Keegan has also decided to buy himself a desk so that he'll be able to unpack all of his computer stuff and then he'll have a place to work at home too.

Speaking of the office, that's one of the other major things I will be tackling later this week -- cleaning/clearing it. It's become the dumping ground for all the stuff we don't know where to put elsewhere. I also desperately need to go through all of the mail I get; Vanguard sends me shameful numbers of statements (so many dead trees!) that I really need to get into a binder or something so I can find all these month-end summaries if I ever need to reference them for some reason. I've switched to paperless for my checking accounts though, so that's eliminated some of the mess. I also still need to change my name with Vanguard, which is proving challenging. After that though I'll only need to change the name on my car/health insurance, my passport, and my car title. There are so many things I forget about when I'm changing my name and school has kept me so busy it's really challenging to get to all these places during their normal hours of operation to get my questions answered.

I've started a list of my goals for 2010, which I also did for 2009 and I think it helps me feel a sense of accomplishment when I get to the end of the year and about 3/4 of the things are checked off. In one of my investment books the author recommends making a list of things that are important to you (as far as what you're saving for) to help motivate you to reach your goals. I have done that for finances but also just with other goals too.

I had the goal to weigh 125 by Christmas, which was an optimistic, yet unrealistic goal to set for myself. Exams get in the way of exercise time... My new goal is to maintain my current weight (133) through the end of the year and then work my way down to 125 by about March I'd say. Keegan and I are planning to go to Hilton Head with his family for Easter, and it would be nice to be able to wear the bikinis I bought for our honeymoon again :-) It would also be nice to be able to wear my sundresses again! I bought a new dress to wear to The Nutcracker on Wednesday, a more formal winter dress that I can wear to nice events we go to during colder months. Here's a link to one that looks similar to mine, but mine is really bright red and the neckline is a little different. I'll post pictures after Wednesday!

In the spirit of organizing I have finished wrapping all of our Christmas gifts! I know Keegan still needs to wrap the ones for me, but we're almost ready for Christmas. His family came over last night for coffee/hot chocolate and cookies and we had a nice time hanging out with them. I think my mom and siblings will come over later this week to see the place also (I hope so!) I'm going to go buy Keegan "It's a Wonderful Life" tonight as a "we've been married for 6 months!" gift but I'll give that to him early so we can watch it on Christmas Eve. Yesterday I watched Christmas Vacation with my siblings, and Keegan and I will find time for the Charlie Brown Christmas, the Grinch, and Rudolph before the big day. I just can't believe Friday is Christmas! It's almost a little sad -- once it's over I have to wait a whole year for the excitement of Christmas again! (Of course really I only have to wait until August when the first Christmas decorations go up in Target) But I think January and February are depressing months honestly; it's cold without the excitement of Christmas in the air and everything is just bleak with no leaves on the trees, few flowers out, etc. Can you tell I'm not a fan of winter? I do, however, love snow :-) Edit: when the power remains on, I love snow.

Man, this is a long, rambling, and most likely boring post.

Exciting things:

• We're going to see Eric Clapton with guest Roger Daltrey on March 8, 2010!!!! AHHH!
• My friends Emily and Kyle recently got engaged! Yay, happiness! :-D
• I'm going to Boone to go snowboarding/tubing/winter things with Keegan's mom and one of his sisters while Keegan, his dad, and the rest of his siblings are skiing in Colorado
• I had killer grades this semester
• I finished another draft of my paper!
• I'm going to see a few of my high school friends tomorrow for coffee(/lunch?) -- I love catching up
• I got to see one of my other high school friends get married on Saturday!
• Keegan's big project at work was approved for the next phase, so he's guaranteed a job through May (and hopefully longer)
• We have been married 6 months (and one day)
• We're going to see The Nutcracker, my first ballet!
• I'm officially a TA next semester, though not for Monty's class; I'm TAing EGR 75L, intro to statics being taught by (I've heard) one of the best professors at Duke

Well, I think that's enough for now :-)

Freedom!

My last fall semester of classes is over! Hooray! I still have two classes left to take, but I'm taking one in spring 2010 and one in spring 2011 (the one I'm taking in spring 2011 is only offered in the spring semester and it's a very small class, so that's when I was able to get in to it). This spring I will also be TAing BME 202L, a new lab that should be very interesting. It's a combination of two other classes that they're not going to be offering anymore, one that's an intro biomaterials lab and another that's an intro mechanics lab. The class is small and there are some really helpful faculty members that are looking forward to helping me set up the labs.

Although my classes are finished for now I'll be hanging around the lab getting another version of my paper ready for Monty this week -- I hope to have it finished by Thursday at the latest. It's a lot of information-compiling right now. I'm putting together a new table of info that requires me to look back at all the papers I've read and pull info from each of them about different biomedical composites. It's tedious and time-consuming but not especially difficult. I'll probably come in to lab through December 23 because Keegan is working until then anyway and now is a really good time for me to get stuff finished. It's a little weird thinking I'll only have one class to take (maybe technically 2 classes, since I'm also taking a seminar) and one to TA in the spring. I hope I'm able to get a concrete plan laid out as to what exactly I'm going to be doing in all the time I'll have next semester to research.

I am still waiting for some of my grades, but I know I did really well in my bio class because those grades have already been posted and I think my other exam went alright, but I guess we'll see. I believe it will depend on how all the other students in the class did since I think they curve the class to a B or B+ so my numerical grade doesn't matter so much as my score compared to the class average.

Saturday night was Keegan's Christmas party through work; it was held at a restaurant in downtown Raleigh called Humble Pie and it was veeeerry tasty. Our meal was tapas-style which just a bunch of different appetizers that made up the dinner, but it was really nice to socialize with his work friends and enjoy being finished with all of my studying. Yesterday I went with my mother- and sisters-in-law on a tour of historic downtown Raleigh where we were able to tour some of the houses and see all of the decorations. It was really nice and interesting but the weather put a damper on things; it was so cold and the drizzle was a little annoying. All in all a good day though. :-)

I also was able to do some shopping for Keegan for Christmas; I've been waiting to do it because I bought him ski gear and I needed him to go with me to show me what he wants/needs because I don't know anything about skiing. Now we just have most of our other shopping to do! We have finished shopping for my sister, my brother, one of Keegan's sisters, Keegan's dad, my dad, and my dad's girlfriend. We haven't started shopping at all for my mom, my stepdad, or Keegan's mom and we have part of our gifts for both of Keegan's brothers and his other sister. Whew! And then I still need to finish Keegan-shopping. I just loving shopping for people and picking out things I know they want/need and I especially enjoy wrapping presents! I wrap everything we buy except for whatever Keegan buys for me :-D Boy it's a good thing we get paid early in December! (except for the part where I don't get paid again for another 7-ish weeks at the end of January)

I'm not gonna lie -- I'm reading the chapter on cancer immunology for my exam Saturday and there are many sections talking about tumor-associated transplantation antigens, abbreviated TATAs -- and I giggle every time. Hello, I didn't realize I am in fact a 13 year old boy.

Traditional year-end travel review

Well I know technically it's not the end of the year, but I also know I'm not traveling anywhere outside of North Carolina for the rest of the year. I've decided to carry on my tradition of looking back over the year at everywhere I went; it seems like every year goes by slowly if you look at individual days but when I try to think back about all that actually happened it's like it just flew by. How is it already December?!

2009 travel list:

1. North Carolina (duh, not exciting)
2. South Carolina (Hilton Head for Easter)
3. Virginia
   
4. West Virginia (awesome rafting trip!)
5. Maryland
6. Washington, D.C.
7. Delaware
8. Pennsylvania
9. New York
10. New Jersey
11. Connecticut (visiting Keegan's grandparents on the way to the family reunion)
    
12. Massachusetts
    
13. New Hampshire
14. Vermont (Brochufest 2009)
    
15. Ohio
16. Michigan
17. Illinois (conference for self-healing materials)
    
18. Bermuda (!!! honeymoon !!!)

So a lot of these are just driving through states or hanging out in airports, but still remembering where all I went helps me think back through everything that happened during the year. Now I can look forward to all the things I'm doing next year! :-D