it's groundhog day!

"what if there is no tomorrow? there wasn't one today." -Groundhog Day
yeah so I love that movie. it's so hilarious. and interesting. bing! but yeah, so Phil saw his shadow and we have some winter to deal with, which for me means more days of high 60s and sunshine. wow that sucks. hehe. just kidding.

so I haven't posted in a couple of weeks and here is the reason: school is back in session. ugh. yeah, I've been crazy busy. but I did have fun the two weekends in between so far.
the first weekend after school started, I and some other of the grad students went out to Queen Creek to do some hiking and rock climbing. it was very beautiful and a perfect day for being outside. we all had a good time.
last weekend, I, Adam, Katie, Angel, Oscar, Hwi, James, and Mike went skiing up at Sunrise in the White Mountains in eastern Arizona. it was so much fun! it was my first time skiing ever so I took a lesson, which worked out pretty well. I was able to go down the green slopes by the end of the day with no problem. it was definitely easier than snowboarding (where I was on my ass every five minutes - not so fun). they had a bit of a snowstorm the day we were up there, so it was totally freezing by the time we were ready to leave the slopes and head back to the cabin, but at least Angel was able to make his first snow angel! :) I have some pictures, maybe I'll put them up tomorrow.

also, as a side note, I have just recently switched browsers to Mozilla's Firefox which I must say is excellent (the best part - it imported all my bookmarks and stuff; and I can tab now. woo hoo!). those also already using this browser will notice that I have fixed this site's html so that it now looks as it did before in explorer. look, the sidebar is actually on the side now! ahhh, and everything is as it should be. fantastic.