The past week

So much has happened since I last posted so I will try to remember everything.

First off my trip to Chicago was a lot of fun. When I arrived at the airport I met up with Danielle and I had my first of many experiences riding the el. It took us around 45 minutes to get from the airport to her house since Midway is on the opposite side of Chicago from where she lives.

Thursday I spent the day by myself since Danielle had to work. First things first I walked the half mile to Wrigley Field. Lucky for me there was another touring couple there who took my picture. From Wrigley Field I walked to Lake Michigan, somewhere between a half mile and a mile. It was a pretty cold and very windy day so I didn't stay long. The waves on the lake were like the ocean though. Then I walked up Belmont, got my nails done ate some lunch and headed back home. That night we drove the 40 miles to Vickie and Robs and visited with them for awhile. We weren't sure if we should even make the drive since they live so far away from Danielle, plus it was going to be rush hour, and then it started snowing- hard. Which means that on top of already bad traffic now you get the dumb snow drivers too. However we made it and in record time because when we rang their doorbell they couldn't believe we were already there. I was pretty pleased. Max and Jack were a lot of fun and it was nice to visit with Vickie and Rob. Josh and I are hoping to make another trip out there in May when I dance at six flags.

Friday Danielle and I went to Navy Pier, walked the Magnificent Mile and did some shopping there. We ate supper at Giordanos, this very famous pizza place, although we didn't have their very famous pizza... We also went out to celebrate St. Patricks day (which is HUGE deal in Chicago.) Basically they celebrate for two weeks straight with festivities including two parades and dying the river green. We ended up at some med school party (her roomates are med students) at the Hyatt downtown, it was a very expensive club. They had tons of lights a dance floor surrounded by water and huge tv monitors all over showing aquarium scenes. I'm not sure why we didn't go to one of the many Irish bars...Danielle lives by Clark St. and basically every other establishment is an Irish bar. One was even open for 17 hours on St. Patricks day, with no cover.

Saturday Danielle and I visited this cute little Austrian tea place and had potbellys for lunch Fabulous subs! Then we went to Millenium park and did some more shopping on Michigan Ave before I had to leave for MN.

While I was there Danielle helped me to plan out a quilting project that I am going to start as soon as I get my sewing machine, which I ordered online yesterday. I am so excited!! I don't know that much about sewing but Danielle helped me make one quilt already and I feel confident in myself that I can do it again. So as soon as I start I will let you all know how it goes. I feel that if I can master making a DVD from a camcorder without any instruction then I can definetly make a quilt all by myself.

Spring Break

My stressful busy week is almost over. Just one more test tomorrow, the last of four tests this week. One which was worth like 40% of my grade. At 2:20 tomorrow afternoon I am a free woman! Well sort of, I actually have to stick around the U until 3:15 because I have to have my mantoux test read and I have to do some lab work before I go to the doctors and secondally I'm only free for a week, but hey I'll take it.

I have so much planned for my vacation. Hopefully I will be able to start it off right with a little bit of shopping tomorrow afternoon. Then Josh and I are going to go to the fishfry at Epiphany and Stations of the Cross, hang out with the family. Saturday I'm going dress shopping with Emily! Maybe sometime this weekend Josh and I are going to go buy some bikes, it is finally get nice enough out to start thinking about biking to school.

Then I'm just going to hang around the house until Wednesday when I leave for Chicago. I'm only going to be gone for 3 days but what a wonderful three days it will be. Danielle and I don't have much planned yet but I am planning on staying busy. Thursday she has to work so I am going to explore the city by myself.

Only one test left before all the fun starts!

What a headache

After three full days of trying to capture video from our camcorder to our computer so I can burn it to a DVD I finally succeeded! First I made a trip to best buy to buy speakers for my computer because without sound there would be no movie. Then I figured out that the USB connection was just not going to work so I had to make another trip to the store, this time to comp USA to buy a firewire cable thing. Then I realized that the windows movie maker did not burn to a dvd, only to a cd and I'm pretty sure that that program is not capable of making an MPEG-2 file which is needed in order to make a DVD. So on Sunday Josh and I made another trip to best buy to buy a program to edit video and make dvds. After loading the program and finding out that I couldn't register because their website was down (what kind of bad luck is that) and knowing that I needed to register in order to get the rest of the program to encode/decode mpeg I quit. Until today when I finally succeeded. It only took me about four stinkin hours, just today to finally get it to burn. And then I thought it wasn't working on our DVD player but it finally decided to load.

So now Matt and Laura can finally get their wedding video that we have had this entire time. Hopefully I can get it to them by their one year anniversary.

Its kind of a crappy process because you have to play the entire video when you are transferring it to the computer and then putting it on DVD takes an excurciating long time. And depending on how much time you put into editing...

Anyway, I feel a lot smarter now that I have finally figured all of this out. I now understand why videographers charge so much.

My expensive Friday

Today I spent $825 on a pair of glasses. Loupes to be exact. High resolution, 2.5 magnification dental loupes. And I haven't told Josh yet...

An Update on the Life of Eric's Favorite Dentist to Be

Last week was an exciting week in dental school. I did my first amalgam filling-in a tooth! I also did my first sealance in a tooth. Now granted the teeth aren't in a person's mouth, they are mounted in casting material in a little cup but its better than doing a filling in a plastic thing that doesn't even resemble a tooth. I also did my first prep for a compostie filling- in a tooth, which I will fill this Friday in my totally awesome biomaterials class. This week in prosthodontics we are taking impressions and making a stone cast of a set of teeth, that has teeth missing so we can make our first removable partial denture. So exciting.

Josh and I finally got the office room tidied up this weekend. We've only been living here a month... but it looks good. I can't wait until we get our couch and chair, hopefully it will be soon, but the way things go we won't get it until its been 90 days. Oh well at least (according to Eric) we don't have to pay for it until we actually recieve it. We are enjoying our dining room table though.

This weekend Josh and I will celebrate our one year anniversary. Who would have thought we could actually do it??? We want to do something fun this weekend, so if you have any suggestions... we are also looking for a nice restaurant to go to. We thought about getting a last minute deal to Vegas, but the deals just aren't as good as I thought they would be. I'm going to keep looking, so if we don't answer our phones we are probably on the plane...

Supposedly we have plans for Friday or Saturday night with Emily and Eric to look at pictures. I even bribed emily with beef stoganauf but it looks like we might get stood up anyways. Well maybe we will be the ones to stand them up if we go on a weekend trip.

This week looks to be a pretty quiet week. but next week the tests start. I think we have 6 different tests next week. Excellent. I think I'll stay in Vegas.

Man! I feel like a Dentist

On Friday I had my first biomaterials class. The first hour is a lecture where we learn about the different materials used to make crowns, take impressions, make casts, fill cavities etc. Friday was learn all about amalgam day. After the hour lecture we have a three hour lab where we get to play with all the materials. Friday was play with amalgam day! So here we were, 97 students playing with mercury. It was so cool. An amalgam filling isn't all mercury, its a mix of a silver copper compound mixed with mercury. So after playing with this amalgam, learning the consistancy we got to fill our first cavity. It was in a plastic cylinder, nothing that resembled a tooth but it was still very exciting. I think semester is going to be a blast! Well at least Fridays will be.

Our Anniversary

Its not even our anniversary and we have already bought all of our anniversary gifts for each other. We decided to buy new furniture, since we moved and we needed something to fill up all the space we now have. We bought a new dining room table with four chairs and a new couch chair and ottoman, in a colored called fawn. But basically it is white. I figure that this might be the only time in my life that I can have white furniture and have it stay white. I can only say this because I know Josh won't be using it since he is always upstairs.

As of tonight we bought our second anniversary gift. Airplane tickets to DC!! Now this wouldn't have to be an anniversary gift but on all those little lists that say what to get/give for anniversaries, paper or a clock is the gift to give for the first year. So I think etickets count as paper! (So matt and laura be ready... you might have some house guests. I think we will be able to confirm our tour of the whitehouse for the 13th (of May) so write this on your calendar so you don't miss out.)

So here I am searching for plane tickets and writing blogs instead of studying. This semester is of to a great start. I have ten different classes to keep track of this time. I think just staying organized will be a challenge and then all of the studying on top of that... It will be a crazy semester. Which is why I was so adamant about taking a break to DC- I'll need sometime to just have fun before jumping into a very busy summer schedule.