when your blog readers are family, they have to forgive you, right?

hey, does anyone remember me? it's been a crazy busy november and once again my poor blog is headlining the list of things that are getting neglected.

i don't remember what my excuse was for october.

we have done a bit more traveling than we've done in quite a while. matt went back to OU in october and before he got back, i left for a working visit back to madison.

but we definitely updated our kitchen set.

we are still pretty much in love with our new chairs, though we haven't been able to bring ourselves to get rid of the old ones. i'm sure my parents are 0% surprised about that.

then matt had the plague for a while.
or at least something close.
we ate a lot of jimmy john's during that time.

i carved some pumpkins. matt was the appropriate level of supportive for someone who really doesn't like to carve pumpkins. we had somewhere around 5 trick-or-treaters on halloween before we had to leave for a function with the department. i had come to believe that we wouldn't have any, as apparently bozeman starts TOT later than i remember it happening in iowa (i never got any trick-or-treaters coming through my apartment buildings during grad school). i told matt it felt like nobody was showing up for my birthday party. . . and about 30 seconds later, a little girl escorting a tiny captain america rang the doorbell. and when we pulled out of our driveway about 10 minutes later, we could see kids coming into our neighborhood from all sides. so, we've made a deal to make no plans for halloween next year.

and november has held another working trip to san diego and a trip to kansas city for erin's wedding. and then it was now, which is pretty ridiculous by any normal standard of time. this is the first week that we've had snow that has needed to be shoveled and that continues to stay on the ground (note: i was definitely trying rake up the last of our leaves last weekend when the snow started falling. so, that ended up as a fail). i'm not thrilled about the cold, obviously, but i'm surviving. and it's awfully pretty to see the snow-covered mountains on all sides of the city. there's much more now than in the photo that i took below, but it does't matter. . . it's always pretty.

we joined the on-campus gym last week. although i surprised myself a few times in madison, i was already anticipating wimping out on some of the really cold run days. matt's agreed to learn to play squash and i met one of our friends for yoga over a lunch hour last week. it's the best deal in town as far as gyms go, so we thought we might as well give it a shot.

otherwise, we don't have a ton of exciting news. there is a week and a half of classes left, which seems really impossible. we'll both be teaching one course in the spring, so we're both planing to assemble course syllabi and tie up some loose ends with papers that we're working on over the winter break.

we're really looking forward to being in texas this this week, though we are also looking forward to getting some in-person time with our families in december. i suspect that it will all come and go before we know it. that's just how time seems to work anymore.

happy thanksgiving to all!