Christmas Eve and Day were both great, hanging out with my family again was very refreshing and of course very fun. I was given the honor of playing the trumpet for my parent's church service on Christmas Eve (I normally do for Easter/Christmas services). That went well, and we had a quiet rest of Christmas Eve. Christmas morning was fun with the opening of the gifts, and in the afternoon we had a great time at my grandparent's house in Spencer. Unfortunately, as we were literally in the driveway about to leave, my grandmother tripped over a marble spacer on the floor and fell. Her kneecap cracked (not quite broken completely, but almost), and bruised up her face pretty badly. She is in the hospital now, and due to the fall, she's having complications in her brain. The doctors are working on fixing her up, so we all hope she'll be okay soon.

In more uplifting news, I received a new camera from my parents! This will come in very handy for our trip to Costa Rica coming up this Thursday (whoa!). We'll be there a full week, all-inclusive with an open bar. My brother and sister-in-law (and mother- and father-to-be) were super generous and gave us a Ryobi Table Saw for Christmas. Now I can finally start making some basic furniture for our house. I just have to give myself a quick lesson on it, and I'll be ready to go.

Okay, well that's about it. Below I've included a couple of pictures I took while I was there. The house pictured is my parents house, where I was born and raised. The second is a panorama of train tracks down by my grandparent's house in Spencer. When we were kids we used to run down there while we were visiting them and put pennies on the track to get them all flatened. The photos below are resized considerably, given that the originals were over 8000 pixels in width. If you'd like a higher resolution of either, go ahead and leave a comment.

The software used to make this couldn't be easier to use. AutoStitch allows you to open up the several photos you've taken of a certain area, and automatically stitches them together for you, with almost zero effort required on your part. The only effort should come from swimming through the Options of the program, to make sure you yield a high-resolution panoramic photo. I think I had to change a total of two settings. It's that easy.