An unconventional holiday

This year I decided to spend Easter with my friends in Ames instead of going home to my family. I did this for a couple reasons; the first (and most prevalent) is that I don't have very much time left with my friends before we graduate and shoot off in different directions. The second reason was senior design. This is the final week, and we're doing our documentation and tweaking the system before our demonstration on Friday. Everything has to be perfect, and since I've written around 90% of the code our team needed, I have to be here to assist in the testing and modding efforts. By the way, I'm not saying that to make it seem like other members did less; the coding was only about 1/5 of the total work in the project, so it balances out pretty nicely.

Anyway, back to Easter dinner... we started out by going to the store, which took much longer than it probably should have, but we ultimately ended up with a nice little assortment of foods, including chicken legs, sausages, salad, spaghetti, brownies, mashed potatoes and green beans. We tackled the cooking effort on two fronts; Brett and Kassie did the chicken and a couple of the sides at their apartment, while Mike, Nicole, Kelly, Sara and myself went to the "Theta" sorority house to use their (fairly awesome) kitchen. We were in charge of making some sausage stuffing and a Ceasar asparagus dish. The stuffing ended up taking an hour longer than we thought, though, because nobody had bothered to read the recipe past the ingredients list yet. Rookie mistake.

While we were cooking at the Theta house, I got a call from home. Everyone gathered around my mom's phone to yell "happy Easter Ryan" at me in unison. I was pretty touched by that. It's just a shame that I was otherwise occupied with keeping stuff from burning, but it still brought a smile to my face.

After we put stuff in the oven, we played cards for a while. Once everything was cooked we ended up meeting back at Mike and Brett's apartment and finally ate at around 9PM. I ate way too much, and it was amazing. The sausage stuffing that Mike, Kelly and I made turned out really great. That probably has something to do with the fact that we're epic. Even though I enjoy spending time with my family around holidays, I'm glad I stayed here for this one. I'm going to miss all of my college friends a lot when I move, so I'd better make the most of the time I have left with them.

That's all for now. I've got another post in mind, but I'm too tired to write it at the moment, so it'll be the next one. Good night, and Happy Easter to all.