Fall for All

Snickerdoodles

We're still plugging away here under the big sky. We had a great time last week during Peggy & Earl's visit. I don't have many photos, given that I actually missed some of the daytime outings to attend meetings. If I did, one *might* include the bear cub that they saw when Matt took them to see Palisade Falls. (On a possibly related note, we now own bear spray.) We had a shocking amount of rain while they were here, but it seemed to clear off for a bit each day so that at least some of Bozeman could be taken in from a dry vantage point. And we sent them away, after some terrific quality time, with some cookies (we're totally in love with our mixer as of late), so it all felt like a win. Except for Kassi, who got pictures of snickerdoodles, no cookies to eat, and none of the above fun. Poor kid.

Otherwise, it's been a lot of work and chores here. I have some major lab setup happening this week and Matt has people signed up and ready to be participants in some of his research.

We have also found a very sweet group of people here (4 young couples, including us) who we see every week and spent some extra time with over the weekend. Among us, we represent three academic departments and a section of the library, which is kind of fun. I never anticipated how much I would appreciate knowing people outside of my own department, but it's been a great way to keep from being sucked into a small section of life and just staying there.

We did do some more hikes last week and this morning. The leaves are starting to turn here, though I'm not sure how many fall colors we'll actually see given how dry things are in the day-to-day. Even without a lot of colors, though, how gorgeous is this photo below? Are you starting to think that I'm just downloading stuff of the internet and saying things like, "oh yeah. . . we were totally here. . . "

no worries. we think it's kind of ridiculous, too. there are a lot of days that we still can't believe that we live here. the hike today also took us past the remains of an old cabin and old mining shaft that we speculated about for a bit before continuing on. we're not sure what was mined here, but it looks old, looks like it would be cold in the winter, and was probably a LOT of work.

We also finally got to something that I think Matt has been wanting to do since he started to realize that he's quite good at cooking. During one of his conference trips a couple of years ago, he tried chicken and waffles and totally fell in love. Today, we pulled together his developing culinary expertise and all of our new kitchen toys (now including a waffle maker, obvi) and made some ourselves. (Yes, the plural is accurate there. I made the waffles).

I don't know that I've actually ever had anything like it before. It was good - we both agreed that it would be worth having again (especially if we have guests in town!) and we were kind of extra proud of how cute it looked.

That's a lot of good news, right?! Now for the bad news:

Holy moly. I don't know what's coming through here on Wednesday and Thursday, but it looks crazy. I'm pretty sure that 99% of the people who look at that will respond the way that I did. One should keep in mind, though, that there is already a legitimate buzz here about winter. People are PUMPED. We have never seen people so excited and eager to get snow. Everyone is still pretty angry that last year wasn't a a great year for skiing; they've apparently been antsy to get in a good day on a powdery mountain since last November.  So, good luck to them. If I make it through the end of the week, I'll try to muster some additional excitement on their behalf!