It's January already?!?!

Oh, sadness. I can see now that my last post was in November. NOVEMBER?!

Sorry to be so out of touch! As a delayed New Years' resolution, I'm resolving resolutely to write more frequently.

Let's see, should I go all the way back to December? We got another big Christmas tree. Rene wheeled it home on the top of my bicycle (I would say "we," but I just got in the way). It was quite a wonderful tree, and I'm sad that it is no longer with us. I was thinking about keeping it for the whole year (renaming it along the way . . . "Martin Luther King Jr. Day tree, Valentine's Day tree, St. Patrick's Day tree . . .). But we got back from Connecticut to find the tree completely dead (guess we didn't leave it enough water?). Sadness. So Rene sawed it up into little pieces to put in garbage bags. It's the only way the city will take the tree away. The only other options are a) drag it all the way across town to a Christmas tree drop-off site, or, b) throw it into the canal. Option b wasn't very viable, though, because the canal was frozen over at the time (it had been quite cold!), and we didn't want to leave the poor tree wallowing on top of the ice like many other trees we saw.

In other exciting news, I took my Dutch exam last week. It's the exam that the government is requiring me to pass (for what reason, I haven't quite figured out since no one else I know has to) and that I've been taking classes for. Monday an Wednesday evening classes every week were becoming very dreadful, and I wasn't learning very much in the class, so I decided to sign up for the exam and see what happens. I'm still in the processes of seeing what happens, though, because they don't tell you the results until 5 weeks after the exam. So, 3 weeks and 6 more days and counting . . . but I'm not holding my breath because it's quite likely that I failed the speaking part. The good thing is that if I did fail the speaking part, I only need to take that part over, and not the others that I passed (hopefully!)

Well, those are the highlights from the past three months, not including our holiday in the States with my family, which of course was very nice (aside from getting sick). Not many pictures have been taken as of late, but I'll see if I can dig out a photo of the Christmas tree :)