Catching Up

It's been awhile since I've updated our blog (minus the Australia trip) and there's good reason for that --- not much has been going on. Nonetheless, here's the latest news from around here... however mundane.

Kolby had to start back to work this year a week before my classes started so I was able to go on a fun mini-vacation with three of my best friends. My friend Laura is now at grad school in Colorado so Katie, Jessica and myself drove back with her and then skied for a couple days before having to get back home. We've been friends since 8th grade and there's nothing in the world like hanging out with those girls.

Jess, Laura, Me, Katie

Last Tuesday was my last first day of school and it was bittersweet. I've been in school for 19 years straight so I'll be happy to FINALLY be done, but at the same time --- I love school and I'm good at it, and the thought of entering the real world and (hopefully) starting a real job is scary because I don't know if I'll love it OR be good at it. I guess I've got to grow up sometime.

Kolby is still loving teaching and is very often commended for being great at it. The kids (or adolescents, I guess) really look up to him and it makes them so much more interested in what he has to say. His latest funny story from school was that a student came up to his desk and upon seeing the framed picture of us, commented "woah Mr. Kerr, your wife's really young... she's like 22!", implying that he had robbed the cradle. Kolby replied to her, "how do you know that I'm not 22?" and received a very puzzled look. Apparently he has them fooled into thinking he's much older than he really is.

Today I FINALLY started the write-up for my thesis. Even though I have been working steadily on my research for over a year now, I had yet to put pen to paper on the actual thing. My oral defense will be coming up in early March and it is quite likely that I will implode from the stress of trying to write a graduate thesis paper in a matter of weeks. My research is all empirical (i.e. I am doing completely new research by running statistical analyses on a dataset from Bangladesh) and it took me much longer than expected to get everything ready and output some meaningful results. The other day I received a copy of a previous student's paper and just about died when I saw that it was sixty pages long. OH. MY. WORD. In lighter thesis news, I had to write an acknowledgements page --- thanking my advisor for his guidance, thanking the econ dept for financing part of my trip to Ghana, etc. --- and I seriously debated including a shout out to Maya. OK, maybe not seriously, but I'm home alone all day long working on my research and I don't know what I would do if Maya wasn't here keeping me company. I mean, who wouldn't be grateful for this little cheerleader:

I'll end this less-than-riveting post with a quote:
Kolby, to his parents on the phone last night: "you know that sweater that you got Emily for Christmas... the blue one... well she tried it on and it was too small around her arms... do you have the receipt?"
Thanks, honey. Heaven forbid you had just said it didn't fit.