Happy New Year!

January 1, 2010

My very first post and I will admit, I already cheated. This picture was probably taken a couple hours before the actual date of January 1st, but I make my own rules, remember? The other pictures taken on my camera as I brought in the new year, mainly "selfies", were not as good as this one.

A bunch of my friends and I rang in the turn of the decade in Madison, Wisconsin, the state's capital. The University of Wisconsin, which is where a few of our friends attend, being the reason we had a place to go and sleep etc, is one of the top ranked "party universities" in the country... and a party it was! I arrived in Madison with Michelle, Jackie, and Jamie around 8pm to our other friends Brittany and Megan's apartments. Then we took a couple hours as more of our friends arrived to their apartment to get all glamour and glitzified. In the midst of the bumpin Trey Songz and Chris Brown songs, Jamie's constant tweets, and the funny, british voice of the navigator lady, I struggled on the ride up with a wad of taco meat that was stuck in the empty socket of my recently pulled wisdom teeth, and a bobby pin simply could not get the job done! Gross, but true. (Michelle saved me later in the night by pulling out the taco meet with a tweezers.)

Anyways, once all the girls were ready to go and the boys were ready to give up on waiting for the girls to finish getting ready, we set out for what is now marked in my lifetime as The Coldest Walk I Have Ever Had. It took us about 15 minutes to walk over to Greg's apartment, but when we got there, we were instantly thawed because the rooms were packed from wall to wall. We put our coats all together in the basement in the drying machine, and well, partied like it was 1999! +10 years. About a half hour before midnight we began to rally up all of our friends so that we could go three blocks away to our friend Paul's apartment, in order to bring in the new year in an environment where we could actually move our elbows and hug each other. We busted through his fifth floor door just seconds before the clock struck midnight and bam!- Happy New Year!

The night continued, as did the fun, and eventually we all ended up back at Brittany and Megan's to sleep for the night. We woke up early-ish, drove on home with a stop at McDonald's, and after chatting with my parents for a little while went upstairs to settle in for a nap. My nap accidentally took up the whole day... and I woke up just in time for dinner.

My family (this particular occurrence included mom, dad, Hannah, and Stephen) sat down to a nice New Years meal and afterward all helped each other out in de-Christmasing the living room. When that was finished, I laid by the fire for a little while, still recovering from my freezing walks of the night before, and read my dad's book titled Faith in the Freshman. Yes my dad wrote the book I was reading. It's his first book he's ever written, and he plans to write one coinciding with each of his children. This particular book is written based off the life of my brother Andrew (13 months older than me.) He's constantly teasing me about how everyone else in his life has read the book except for me, but I was waiting for a moment exactly as last night to lay down and "read my dad's book". After I read and thawed for a while the family and I ordered the movie "Up" on demand. Such a good movie even after already seeing it once.

My friends Louie and Josh came over toward the end of the movie and we sat in the basement and hung out, caught up on life, shared stories of our crazy new years adventures, and watched episodes of MTV's "Jersey Shore".

Just one more thing... Sorry I wrote so much. 2010 has already been pretty eventful!