This is why I’ve been limping around:

My feet hate winter. If I don’t keep them slathered in cream, they develop cracks which bleed, making for very painful times. I haven’t quite gotten to the bleeding point yet, but we’re laying on the cream before bed tonight.

I spent a good portion of my free time this morning browsing around this site. I do get rather frustrated at the princess marketing for little girls, but there are some amazing braids on that blog. I’ve been growing my hair out for the last year going from this:

to hair like this:

(I’m desperately in need of a trim.)
My hair style for the past year has consisted of washing hair, combing it and letting it dry straightish. The next day, I pull it back into a low lying ponytail, and the following day the cycle repeats. But my hair is finally long enough to braid. I love braids. I’m usually a two french braid, straight down the back with the ends tucked under, so it was awesome to get some new ideas. This is the braiding style that I wanted to try today, unfortunately I discovered that I am not dexterous enough to braid my own hair sideways. Instead, I went for 2 french braids that ended 2/3rd of the way down and then brought together and braided the rest of the way. I then took the remaining hair, twisted it into 2 ropes and wrapped everything together. I loved the result:

The twisted ropes were super easy to make; I think that I’m going to head to the pharmacy and stock up on clear little elastics so I can do it more often.

I’m submitting the last round of secondary applications and supplemental stuff early tomorrow morning. I’ve heard back from about 4 programs with definite offers to interview (nothing from my own home program, natch). All of my letters of recommendation were finally sent out (although a couple may still be missing, have to check on that tomorrow too); that took forever. Now I just have to set up the interviews so I can cluster trips together (and hopefully save some money in airfare) to minimize time off. I’ll be doing a couple of interviews in February and April, but the majority will be in March, I think.

I finally updated my pictures on Picasa. You can go there and see all of the beautiful pictures of my handsome little nephew who’s now an entire month older and is a prodigy in every way. Laura B, I also put up some of the pics of your cute kids too. If you want the full size images, let me know. 🙂

And I think you’re all caught up in the life of Julia!