Where to go, where to go.....

So for the 4th and (thankfully) last year of optometry school we have to go on rotations, each of which is 3 months long. Since our class starts rotations in May we are in the process of picking where we want to go now. Naive little me thought this was going to be a fun process since there are lots of sites all over the US that we can pick from. Well, I was wrong. It's kinda complicated, but we have to get a certain number of hours in each specialty and we can only get those in certain places...so it's kinda been a pain in the bum to figure it out. However it hasn't just been figuring out the hours thats been tough...I just can't figure out where I want to go in general. At first I thought it would be fun to go all over the place....like try to go somewhere in the north, south, east, and west....but then reality set in and I realized I would have to drive to each of these places. Not only would this be a lot of driving, but I am like the worst driver in the world. I HATE it. The fact that I haven't had a car for 3 years (thanks to Chicago public transportation) has not helped my driving skills any either. Also I'm an only child and my parents are very, very overprotective and freaked out at the idea of me driving across the country. They are all about me staying in Wisconsin and Iowa for all of the rotations....I understand their reasons, but part of me feels like I should go and live in some new places while I have the chance. Anyways, enough babbling....I made a pair of armwarmers for my best friend since forever (forever being 6th grade) who is currently livin' it up in Canada. Here they are (the left one doesn't look quite as holey in real life): Pattern: Hurry Up Spring Armwarmers from Stitch and Bitch Nation Yarn: Noro Kureyon in color 90, 2 skeins (to get the colors to match correctly) Started: late May 2006 Finished: August 22nd 2006. These really shouldn't have taken so long to make but I kept having issues. On the first try I started the pattern out with a k2 instead of a k1 (I'm not sure what I was thinking) and it just looked bad. I didn't have the heart to frog it though, so I started a second one from the opposite end of the skein. However I didn't like how the colors turned out so I decided to frog the first one and reuse that end of the skein to make a third :) And the third time was a charm!!!! Since this was my first DPN project I learned a lot from the pattern. The thumb gussets were probably the toughest part of it for me, I really had to yank the increases tight to ensure there weren't big holes around the thumb. But it was a great pattern and I loved working with the noro!! Since these were a birthday gift I got to play with ribbon and stamps before I sent them off..... I got the idea from reading the Fig and Plum archives to buy a stamp from an office supply store in which you can insert your own letters to spell whatever words you want. Sorry the pic isn't a little closer up.....its a little hard to see the tag in it but you can kinda get an idea of what it looked like :)