Happy End of Year

I have been mostly without internet since the last post. So here's a recap of the past couple of weeks. We celebrated our anniversary by skiing at Monarch in southern Colorado. I was a bit nervous about skiing after being a couch potato for so long. However, I was perfectly comfortable turning and heading downhill. In fact, my abs feel better after a day of exercising than after a day of sitting.

Then we continued on north to Denver to celebrate Christmas with Troy's family. We also found some time to go hiking through the snow with Sarah and Srin.

I always like to take a project with me when I travel. This time, I didn't have much that would travel well. Fortunately, one of my Christmas gifts was a ball of yarn, a pair of knitting needles and a set of instructions. A day and a half later, I had a scarf. Troy was so excited about this homemade scarf that he would have kept it for himself if it weren't pink. Instead, he drove me to Hobby Lobby during a snowstorm (Denver got 10 inches of snow that day) so that I could get more yarn to make him his own scarf. His is not done yet. I will have to learn how to make the scarf more than one-skein long.

Another semester is done!

In celebration of finishing my 2nd semester of grad school, I am sharing with you an image of a wave propagating across the surface of a torus. In other words, these pictures are mathematically generated to show how a wave would interact with itself if every edge actually wraps back around to the other side. So this is what I do in school.

Now that I'm done with classes until January, we're heading up to Denver for Christmas and skiing at Monarch for our anniversary. Hopefully I won't suffer too much muscle pain from skiing. We have several pre-paid lift tickets for ski areas in New Mexico and southern Colorado. Then we're headed out to the east coast to meet my new nephew (and visit his family)!

Christmas crafts

Naturally, I have had plenty of time to work on crafts during my recuperation. One of the projects I picked up recently was a pre-printed fabric cowboy stocking kit from Hancock Fabrics. These two stockings will eventually be Christmas decorations hanging on the wall, because I have no need for more stockings. I am busy making them Christmas shiny with sequins, beads and stitching. Then I'll stuff them and sew them. There are also some smaller patterns with little cowboy boots, starts and holly that I may sew up and turn the whole assemblage into a cowboy-Christmas mobile. (I'm on a painfully slow and error-prone internet connection today, so you're lucky I was able to post at all, but no photos).

As of Thanksgiving, I am supposedly allowed to resume all activities including exercise. However, today I had such intense abdominal muscle pain that I had to take a Percocet (I tried ibuprofen first, but it just wasn't enough). I can already hear my Mom asking what crazy thing I did to overexert myself... well, I didn't climb a mountain, go skiing, or even go running... I swept the floors and vacuumed the living room.

According to the doctor, this muscle pain is perfectly normal. So she gave me an all-better diagnosis at my follow-up appointment this week. I guess I'm better, but I really can't jump into all of my usual activities yet. This leaves plenty of time for me to get more crafts done :)