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Last week we had a holiday so I went HOME for the week! Well, I'd originally planned on changing my April 30 British Airways flight to a later date, but it was going to cost me almost as much as it would to buy a new ticket, so I just used the flight and bought another round-trip ticket here. All the sisters were reunited for the first time since Christmas at Anna's 30th birthday party. The party was definitely the highlight of the trip. As was hanging out with Ellen, bagel-shop-breakfasting with Dad, late-night-talking with Mom, and planning EuroTrip '08 with Jessica and Alice, those fun girls. :) Got any ideas of where we should go? I've heard Nice, Cinque Terra and a sweet mountain town in Switzerland are must-sees. Any tips would be appreciated.

I flew back to Madrid out of Boston so I got to spend a couple days seeing Seth, my good friend Lindsay from Yellowstone, Colleen, John, and, of course, Irene. Seth and I did dinner with Colleen, John and Irene (I keep thinking about that tiramisu) and Irene and Lindsay came to a concert Seth played in at his dorm. Seth and I introduced some of his friends to genuine cheese grits (really cheesy) the morning I left, so I'd say the trip was a success, overall. :) Yeah, it was just a lot of fun seeing everyone. I'm so happy at home. It was hard coming back here, but I'm ok now. :)

Actually, I'm nerdily excited right now. Besides having a holiday tomorrow (San Isidro's Day) and having a really nice weekend hanging out with Biz and friends, I just downloaded a bunch of FREE applications from Apple that I never knew existed (F-R-E-E!): a flash card program (iFlash), a memorize the world's countries/locations/capitals application (World of Where), a Spanish-English dictionary, a Spanish verbs quiz application (it's fun to play), and, most bizarre of all, this is actually really bizarre, a sleep recorder application. It's called Dream Recorder. And it's kind of creepy. :) I used it last night and woke up to its "dawn" effect this morning, then went back to sleep and woke up to my real alarm 45 minutes later. But, I just left my MacBook open all night and my camera took pictures of me every 10 minutes with the program's night vision technology (you can set it to take pictures every 2 minutes, or a video of the whole night). The program recorded every time I moved last night and if I made any noises--it recorded me talking in my sleep! That was the creepiest part. At 3:42 last night I said something that sounded kind of like French, but definitely wasn't. I waited to come to school to hear the rest of what I said--a dark room on a rainy morning was just too much. Too creepy. You should download it. It gives you this neat little graph of your movements and sounds and snores from the previous night, and the times they occurred. And, I didn't get to use this part of it last night, but it has an alarm that wakes you up when you're supposedly the best-rested. Isn't that amazing? I'll probably use it tonight and tell you how I feel in the morning. :)

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/home_learning/index4.html

(scroll down to the bottom hit download! btw, it's only a 30-day trial, I think.)

More later, alligator.