Where is Fall?

Mid-September already. Time does fly. Jason and I both went back to school in the past month, so if you haven’t seen or heard from us as much you may think is normal just rest assured we are probably either doing homework or frantically trying to keep the house in order, do laundry, house/yard-projects etc.

We're both excited for fall but here in Salt Lake with temperatures still in the upper 80's it seems like once fall gets here we'll proceed directly into winter. We'll probably have snow in the mountains again before we know what happened and here in the valley soon after. One sure hint of fall however is that football season is upon us! I'm not sure why I'm SO excited about football this year, but I won the football pool at work this week which always helps :). In case anyone wonders who to cheer for our teams include the Wisconsin Badgers, Utah Utes, Green Bay Packers, and San Francisco 49er's. I will also be watching Minnesota games to see Brett Favre (to put it nicely) "get his ancient rear end sacked".

Exciting news in Jason's world--he recently was awarded a government contract to pattern-search and report geological features in a large area of national forest a few hours East of here. The good news is he'll now be getting paid to hike and cave in an area he spent a lot of time in this spring hiking and caving for free. On the downside I might not see much of him come next spring-fall depending on how long it takes him to cover the area he's been assigned. I won't rule out going along on some of the shorter trips, but will probably elect to stay home quite a bit as well.

Over the past month I got some serious basement projects done along with a few painting projects just for fun (see pictures). New paint does so much to brighten up a room (even a dark basement room), and upstairs I’ve been working to get some sense of color coordination going. I’m currently working on painting the laundry room and making some wall-hangings for upstairs and will hopefully have pictures to include next month. Anyone on facebook has probably stumbled across some of these pictures however--for those who haven't--the first picture is of a pair of foot-stools I've had since college and recently painted to match one another. The second picture is a shelf that used to be an ugly brown that I patterned to match the footstools. The next three pictures are before and after pictures of the [sadly underutilized] basement work-out area. In the second picture notice the one stripe of new paint next to the window. Trust me when I say that the "before" pictures do not begin to do justice in showing how dirty that old paint was.

I will also include my favorite pictures of Kiki from the month. We recently got her a harness for out-of-doors adventures, and she spent part of Saturday happily hunting bugs in the grass. I also caught a picture of one of her favorite (and more curious) sleeping positions atop Jason’s old office chair. I only wish I could make all sleeping positions look as comfortable as she does.

Work is repetitive lately with a lull in data collection leading to lots of data analysis. With any luck I will get to start working on my thesis data in the next week or two. The only thing really holding me back from digging into my thesis at this point in my lack of available time to do a literature review. I’m going about this process completely backwards…I already have the data, but haven’t solidified a research question. Hopefully I will still manage to finish by May.

Another two new babies this month! Congrats to Andy and Sarah Kahler who welcomed Henry, and our front desk girl Alicia and her husband Corey who welcomed Owen! I won't admit to being baby-hungry quite yet, but perhaps after school is finished I will consider it :D. For now playing with everyone else's kids is just fine with me!

I almost forgot! Jason and I just purchased plane tickets to come home January 6th-12th. We realized it's not exactly on the holidays, but our vacation time for the year was severely depleted due to a little wedding thing that happened in May ;). WE are currently planning trips to Dubuque, and the Winkel-Hassler wedding, as well as a late family Christmas in Reedsburg on the 10th. Please pencil us in, and let us know what you're up to so we don't miss each other while crossing paths.

I think that sums up the last month in SLC. I hope you're all doing well. Be in touch!
S.~