The Holidays

Dave says: December was quite the busy month and as a result the blog has been a bit neglected. Near the end of the semester I was juggling final projects, final exams, and some really interesting ethics research. Since students wanted to participate in the research in order to receive extra class credit, tons of them were signing up.

Our house closed on the day of my last final. It is a short sale that we are fixing up a bit and renting from my parents (they still talk of retiring to Tucson when they visit here in the winters). It is perched up on a little ridge with a great view of the city out one side and of the Catalina mountains out the other. To get to it, the driveway kicks up to 38%. It's lots of fun after a long bike ride.

The previous owner left things a mess and so in addition to moving there have been lots of little projects that we are still working on. My parents came to visit before Christmas and helped us with the move. My little brother Daniel proved especially useful in moving large objects.

We drove to Utah on Christmas Eve to spend Christmas with Alisha's family. All of her siblings came into town and they all now have little ones who are fun to play with. Debbie made us matching aprons (pictured above) as a Christmas gift.

Life has finally been a bit less crazy now that we are back in Arizona. Our annual New Year's tradition is to go to bed before 10 pm and I'm especially looking forward to sleeping right now. The cold weather followed us home and we have become a bit wussy in the last few months. Now we complain about riding outside in the 40s when this would be the best possible weather you could expect this time of year in SLC. We rode to Oracle on Saturday with Alex, Tulio, Doug, and Roger and were surprised to discover that the town was covered in snow. My hands were too cold to take a picture and we rode as fast as we could back to Tucson. Thank goodness that we'll be back into the 60s next week.