#24 - Visit Aunt Karin once a month.

I don't know if I quite made this one.  But probably close!  Anyway, I'm going to mark this one as complete since I'll definitely be visiting her a few times in the next month to help her with some computer troubles and also with our latest project of transcribing all of my grandfather's journals.

#20 - Develop an address spreadsheet for all family and good friends and keep updated.

I have pretty much completed this one.  I have full information for my family, Mike's family, and most of our friends in a spreadsheet.  I'm still figuring out the best way to keep track of birthdays, anniversaries, and children in the same spreadsheet, but it is definitely past where I thought I'd ever get it.

Completed!

#21 - Write a "Christmas Letter" and send copies with my Christmas cards.

Mike and I sent out around 30 Christmas cards stuffed with our Christmas Letter! Neither of us had written a Christmas Letter before so it was nothing fancy, but it did give relatives that we don't see very often a glimpse into our lives. Maybe next year we'll do one with pictures. :-P

#30 - Send all college-going relatives a "care package" (including Cathy).(4/4)

This one has been completed since October of last year, but I was trying to find the picture I took of the care packages before I posted. Obviously that is not happening. Done!

#31 - Have my family over for dinner.

For Mothers' Day on the 11th, I invited my family and Aunt Karin over for dinner. Elizabeth and Albert helped prepare things, but the biggest preparatory task was getting the apartment ready! It took me 2 whole days, but it was definitely worth it.

Here's the menu:

Appetizers - Bruchetta, Hummus, Carrots & Dip

Dinner - White Chili and Cheddar Bay Biscuits (a.k.a. Red Lobster Biscuits)

Dessert - Chocolate Fondue and Lemon Pudding Cake (seriously, this needs a better name that does not involve the word "pudding")

Also served was Wine. At dessert, my lack of a coffee maker was sorely obvious, but wasn't the end of the world.

All in all, it went really well - it took a lot of stinkin' work, but was totally worth it.

#23 - Take my brother to the laserdome.

Mike & I took Albert to Laserdome on 4/12/2008. Here's what I wrote about it in my personal blog:

4/12/2008: Albert's 15th Birthday! Mike & I were supposed to take him to Laserdome for his 14th birthday, so we thought, better late than never. I called ahead in the morning to make reservations for lasertag ~3:30pm. Mike showed up around 2:30 so I started getting ready to go. Mom dropped Albert off and we headed in a south-easterly direction to Laserdome!

We ended up playing Halo (in the "virtual arena") first. After 4 games of it, I had only managed to kill 5 people. That is major suckage. Of course, I guess since it was the first time I played and it took me 'til halfway through the 3 game to figure out how to stop walking into walls with any consistency. It ended up being about $13 each to play for 20 minutes, so next time we go, I'm all for skipping that. It was interesting, though. 10 people playing all at once was neat.

Right after we were done with Halo, it was time for lasertag! They did a pretty good job at explaining how everything worked and what to do in their training session. Since we had to change our lasertag time when we showed up, our group was called last. And since my code name (tenthz, of course) was last alphabetically, I was the absolute last person to get called for a vest. As is tradition with me, I was picked last for a sport. :-P We were on the Red team (the other team was blue). It was way a lot of fun and for 3 of the 4 games, Albert had the highest score across the board (out of a total of 40 players!). Mike was in the top 10 of all the scorers the whole time. They kept making runs on the other teams base which is what made their scores so ridiculously high. I only did that a few times and the rest of the time I spent guarding our base which I attribute to the fact that we won every. single. round. By a LOT (like 10,000 to 3,000). It was a ton of fun and would definitely do that again.

We each got 44 tokens when we got there so we also spent some time playing in the arcade with those. Albert and I played a lot of the games that you get tickets from and he ended up hitting the jackpot (750-ish) on one of them with his last token. Whoa. He ended up with 1300-ish tickets, so he got a nifty disco ball thing that plugs in and lights up with different colors.

It was a lot of fun, and the next time we go, I think we'll probably just do lasertag and arcade games.

#20 - Develop an address spreadsheet for all family and good friends and keep updated.

I started this one a while ago, but I have to collect addresses and put them in the spreadsheet. This spreadsheet actually has 3 worksheets: My family, Mike's Family, and Our Friends. Right now it resides on my laptop, but I think I am going to import it into google documents and set it up so both Mike and I can edit it.

#22 - Have my brother over for a sleep over.

I did this one sometime in November. After Albert slept over, we went to visit Aunt Karin and later had dinner at Pizza Hut with Mike. Albert slept on the futon and we stayed up late and watched movies "on-demand".

#26 - Go to another Lo Cash Cowboys show.

Hey, I did this! Another completed item. I already wrote about it over on the ol' eljay:

http://tenthz.livejournal.com/976246.html

#30 - Send all college-going relatives a "care package"

Well, on Tuesday I sent Elizabeth (and her room mate Angel) a package of halloween-y stuff. She just got it and said she has a stomach ache from candy corn already! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. :-P

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