Happy Birthday Dianna!

I'm out of practice with writing blog posts that are more than a few words long, but I thought we'd try to make a tradition of wishing Dianna a happy birthday here (here is last year's entry).

Dianna continues to amaze, I'm still not sure how she gets everything done but I think it involves breaking several commonly held physics principles regarding space and time. She is working again at Mt. Sinai Hospital on a bunch of different units (ER, Psych Ward, with trauma patients), watching Maisy in the day while I'm at the hospital, training for a marathon, hammering out church stuff, competing in a city volleyball league, finding time to play in our family fantasy baseball league, etc. A couple of months ago I was approached by several of my medical school classmates who explained to me in no uncertain terms that they had been talking about it and decided that I had the coolest wife of all time. I couldn't agree more with that assessment, Maisy and I lucked out.

A couple of pictures of Dianna in action:

At Work....

At Play....

Teaching Maisy necessary life skills....

ditto...

As always super hot (reference last year's entry for more details)

Happy Birthday Dianna, we love you.

Match Day!

WE'RE GOING TO DARTMOUTH!!!

Hooray! We are SO thrilled. After all this time, it's hard to believe that it's really happening. Dartmouth was our top choice and seemed to fit all our criteria: great program, beautiful New England country, possibility for a house and yard (Maisy can finally get all the livestock she has dreamed of having), ski slopes, Red Sox territory, and bitterly cold winters. What more could you want?

Shaun, you are remarkable. You make your (our) dreams a reality. We love you and we are SO proud of you.

Here's a few pictures of the Hanover, New Hampshire area where we will be living:

Church on Dartmouth's campus

More of Campus

"Downtown" Dartmouth. Note the fact that there is actually parking by the shopping.


And here's a few pictures of where Shaun will be living...the hospital:




It's been a good day.

Our new sister-in-law: the celebrity

This is now old news (and thus not the prime focus of this post), but my youngest brother Scott became engaged a little while ago. The two of them are often found doing stuff like writing mushy notes to each other on facebook, talking on skype, or trying to bend the laws of physics in order to move up their wedding date (which is currently set as July 25). However (and this is where this boring post gets interesting) I was up tossing and turning, thinking about the rapidly approaching match when I came across the following story on the home page of the Boston Globe. Turns out the column linked below was one of their most emailed stories of the day, as well as a nicely written piece. It also seemed like a good way to present the newest member of the larger Odell family to the blogosphere (although I'm told that this has actually been linked in lots of blogs).

Almost forgot, here's the link:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles_of_faith/2009/03/mormon_tv_harva.html?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed5

We hung out with these guys over Christmas, and I can testify that they are just as good-looking in person.

I proposed using this one as their engagement picture, after which I was told I should keep the rest of my wedding ideas to myself.