We’re back home from Indiana and enjoying one last official day of vacation.

I spent two weeks in Indiana visiting my family and friends, and Lucas came down to join me after his deadline at work was over to spend the second week with me. It was non-stop action; I think our itinerary was full every single day. That was fine with me because I’d not seen most of the family and friends back home in about a year, so the more I could cram into the trip, the better! I won’t bore you with every single thing we did each day, but some of the highlights include getting to spend time with my family, taking my little brother out to celebrate his 21st birthday (belated, since I wasn’t there when he turned 21 back in September), visiting my grandparents, shopping with my mom, visiting my old work and seeing all of my former students graduate from 5th grade, celebrating my brother’s graduation from college with our entire family, and bowling with friends. We also saw Scott and Amy in Morristown for a party, Somer for lunch in Cincinnati, Kurt who was in town from Pennsylvania with Kimmy (congratulations on your engagement!), and we got to hang out with some friends from high school I’d not seen in nine years. We had a blast! And I’m sure I’m forgetting a lot of other things. I of course took several hundred pictures over the course of two weeks, and you can see a large chunk of those in our gallery under Travel -> Indiana Summer 2007.

While there was a lot I missed in Indiana, there was one thing I definitely did not: the humidity. I’d forgotten how sticky and hot Indiana’s weather was. The morning that my plane was due to leave at 7:30am, we’d had a freak snow storm that dumped about 6 inches of thick, wet snow on Calgary overnight. We got to the airport around 5:30am, and my flight was already delayed at least an hour and fifteen minutes. My flight would be delayed by 2 hours by the time they’d de-iced the plane and other technical precautions were taken care of. Which wouldn’t be such a big deal, except it meant I missed my connecting flight in Chicago and I got pushed back yet another hour once I arrived in the Windy City. All in all I was 3 hours late getting home, and I went from experiencing dry, below 0 C weather in the morning to enduring humid 35 C weather all before 7pm that same evening.

While we were on the trip I hit my one-year-in-Canada anniversary, so it seemed fitting that my Permanent Resident card was waiting for me on the coffee table when we got back Thursday evening; the card came in the mail for me while I was gone. Coming back on Thursday meant that we had a nice long weekend to get settled back into routine and relax before it was time to go back to work. We spent Friday during the day running around getting my Social Insurance number and my Alberta driver’s license, among other things. We also met up with Tom and Craig to go see Ocean’s Thirteen on its opening night, which I thought was pretty good. If you liked the other Ocean movies, you’ll like the third one. Now I’m busy browsing the paper and online sources for a summer job to occupy my time until next school year. It’s all so exciting!