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While we are a little over 20 days into the new year, we are still recovering from the holidays. Particularly on trying to keep up with the blog.  So, maybe the best thing is just to hit some highlights and give some general summary.

We decided to venture out to watch Arkansas play in the Cotton Bowl.  

We first headed to Trusty's, but as Trusty's is the local Arkansas bar, the place was packed. We decided to watch the game at a bar down the street, were we meet up with a high school friend of Ben's.  The game was closer than everyone would have liked, but the Razorbacks pulled away in the 4th quarter.  After the game we headed back to Trusty's to meet up with a few friends and catch up after the holidays. 

The late night was cause for sleeping in on Saturday. Ben decided to get out of bed and start the day on the right foot with homemade sourdough biscuits and deer sausage gravy.  

After brunch we took care of some life chores and finished up the night by watching "The Debt" with Helen Miren. It was a suspense/ mystery about a botched espionage mission from 1966. It was a bit confusing, but overall not bad. We are glad we waited for it to come to DVD.

We kept it fairly casual the next week and spent time at home with the dogs. Kelly's family had congregated in Destin, Florida, where her parents are spending time during the winter.  Kelly decided to  abandon Ben and the dogs to head south for the weekend. Kelly played a few rounds of golf with her dad and spend some quality time with the twins before heading back to D.C. It was a short trip, but fun to see her parents act like teenagers in their retirement community. Unfortunately, her mom and dad were eliminated in the first round of the shuffleboard tournament, but we are sure they will be a team to watch out for in the near future.

While Kelly was gone, Ben and the dogs took the opportunity to catch up on some movies that Kelly would prefer to miss.  

It was a pretty intense couple days, but we got through X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern, Captain America, Fast (& Furious) Five, Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Part II, and Cowboys & Aliens.  When Kelly returned she was not sure if the moisture in Ben's eyes was from the joy of seeing her again or watching about 12 hours of explosions. 

Sunday evening, Laura and Ron, who we worked with in Missouri, came over to the apartment for dinner. Ben made homemade pizza and root beer floats for dessert. It was good food and great company.

We spent the Monday holiday (MLK Day) catching up on life chores and running errands. One of our errands was returning something to Dick's Sporting Goods. Kelly noticed they had a hi-tec indoor demo net with a launch monitor. After almost straining her back to increase her driving distance (to beat Ben), they decided it was time to leave before they broke something. 

After only reuniting for one day, Ben had to fly to Orlando for a work conference. In true rock star fashion, he flew down early Tuesday morning and flew back late Tuesday night. This schedule made for a long rest of the week.

Kelly's office is still in the process of moving, which means she is still working from home. It is great in the mornings because the commute is about 15 seconds, but the days can be long with only the dogs to talk to. Overall, it has been a great experience working remotely and has been very productive.

The weekend was highly anticipated. We were looking forward to sleeping in and spending quality time together. We started Saturday with delicious breakfast burritos. We headed downtown to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum for a IMAX film called "Coral Reef Adventure". It was somewhat disappointing because it wasn't in 3-D, but overall it had some beautiful shots and some interesting facts about the dangers facing the coral reefs. We walked around the museum for a bit after the movie before heading out of the district to do a little shopping. The highlight of the afternoon was finding a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle dart board.

On our way back to the district, we stopped for lunch at Red Hot and Blue. So far, it is the best bbq we have found on the east coast. The rest of the day was spent playing darts and watching the movie "Ides of March".

We started Sunday out by watching "The Help" and enjoying a special breakfast treat made in Ben's corndog maker that he got for Christmas.  He covered sausages with pancake batter and they turned out to be pretty delicious.  The only thing missing was a stick.

The rest of the day was spent picking up around the house, doing a little work, watching football and welcoming Steve from Jefferson City, who is in DC for a couple days.

With the blog back on track, we should be off to a fabulous 2012.