The next update.
Oops, it's been over a month, hasn't it. I had every intention of posting for Thanksgiving, but things got busy. Shelle and I made our own Thanksgiving feast. We were a bit nervous, but it turned out wonderfully. Here are some pictures of the fun.

We decided we needed cooking snacks: carrots and celery with ranch dip
and shrimp cocktail with Wheat Thins... Yummy!

Our kitchen is a little small, so we put all the "extra" appliances
in the front room.

Here's a glimpse at the cooking. Three pumpkin pies (yes, three! they don't
sell small cans of pumpkin) and potatoes a-boiling for mashed potatoes.

We were pretty good at keeping up with the dishes.

Here's a look at the one side of our little kitchen. Even with all of the other
appliances out we still had to put a lot of stuff on the bar. The two baking
dishes on the counter contain two more kinds of potatoes: heavenly potatoes
(known to some as funeral potatoes) and sweet potatoes. We are from Idaho
after all. :)

Here's a peek inside the fridge... and we didn't even have leftovers yet!

Here we have the 4 dozen rolls we purchased.
Shelle and I both like rolls... a lot!

My first tentative (that's French for attempt) at real whipped cream.
It turned out quite well, if I do say so myself.

One of the intrepid cooks.

The other intrepid cook. We both just got out of bed and got cooking.

The turkey in all its roasted glory. The smallest one we could find was 11
pounds. Needless to say, we have a lot of frozen turkey meat!

The preliminary spread.

Here's the real deal. We've got turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, heavenly
potatoes, mashed potatoes, milk gravy, turkey gravy, apple and banana salad,
seven layer salad, orange jello, rolls, olives, and salt and pepper. I don't think
I'm leaving anything out. It was a lot of food for two people.

So much food, in fact, that I couldn't finish it all. Here's what was left on my
plate after everything else was cleared away. Oh, the yummy, yummy food!!

We cooked from about 8:30 to 1 or so. We enjoyed our delicious digs, and then took a little rest. We were going to pop in a movie, but the time was too far spent and we had tickets to the 3:30 showing of Twilight at the new theater they opened in Orem next to the mall. Shelle had seen it the weekend before with her Mom and sisters, but it was the first time for me. And I liked it. I thought it was good, especially for the small budget they had to work with. I thought the actors were very well chosen for the characters portrayed, and they were pretty faithful to the story line. The only thing I didn't like were the silly, sqealing girls when Edward came on. And these were not 12 year olds, I'm fairly certain they were in their twenties (if not older in some cases...). After the movie Shelle and I came home to feast some more and watch the new version of Sense and Sensibility that she had Netflixed. I like that one, too. We ended the night fairly early, crawling into our beds with full tummies and happy hearts. :)

After the Thanksgiving break school started up again with a vengence. It was only then that I realized something very vital: I only had a week and a half left of classes!! How time has flown. I am now at the point where there are only a few days (three to be precise) and then it's reading days and finals week!

My finals aren't that bad this year. In fact, I don't feel that stressed about them (knock on wood). For my two French classes we aren't having an actual final test, we just had projects to do. In French Composition we chose an article in English and translated it into French. Mine was about the death of Paul Newman. It was pretty easy and didn't take me very long to do - probably because of the translation class that I took. I know what to look for to make the article fairly approachable. Dr. Unlandt, my professor, said to choose something you're interested in. Some people took that to heart and chose articles from medical journals (nightmare! all the technical language... I shudder.) and one even chose an American revolutionary text. Poor things. My other project, for History of the French Language, was to create a Latin based language with a group of people. It has been so fun, and we're pretty much completely finished. Our language is a combination of Latin, Hebrew, and a little Arabic. It has come out quite nicely. Part of the project was translating something into our language. We decided on The Giving Tree, and guess who did the translating... Yep! Me! I enjoyed it a lot, and I get to be the one to read it in class for our presentation tomorrow.

My two other finals, Phonetics and Hebrew, will be challenging, I'm sure, but they don't seem to me to be impossible. I'll have to study for them, and I'm definitely going to any review sessions that will be held, but I think I'll be pretty good to go. And then Christmas break! I am smiling very widely right now. I'm planning on heading home the 19th or 20th and then coming back to Provo on the 3rd. I pray that the weather will be good. We don't have any snow on the ground here in Provo yet. It snowed for the first time yesterday, but none of it stuck. All I really want, though, is no snow on the roads. I don't care if it's all around, just not on the roads.

So next month I will be embarking on my final semester of college for a good little while (if not forever). People have been asking me if I'm excited about it. And, strangely enough, I'm not. Not really. I'm not dreading it by any means at all, but I'm not jumping for joy either. It just seems like another bump in the road, just the next thing that I'm doing. I'm sure as it gets closer I'll be more nervous and excited, but at this point I have too many other things to do.

Well, I think I've probably written enough. I'll try to be better about keeping up. But in case I don't, Happy Holidays, everyone!!