This fall has been rather enjoyable. This is the beautiful view on our back porch. Sharon has also written an update, so I will keep this short as we have a lot of overlap.School: I survived the first half of the semester. I front loaded it, so I would have more time the last half to work on my capstone project. This has turned out to be a good thing because no one else on my team seems to have time to get things done, so it's good one of the six of us is thinking about it. That made it sound really bad, but it isn't that bad, it just feels that way some times. Tomorrow we have a major milestone due, that will be a good measure of how much effort everyone has been putting in. I've been enjoying my last classes, trying to get as much as I can out of school before I'm done.
Pregnancy: Sharon is doing well. I am amazed at how easy she makes being pregnant look. I always thought women got moody and cranky when they were pregnant, but so far life has been good. That could change as we enter the 3rd trimester. Everyone has been asking for a belly shot, so we came up with this idea on our walk.
Jobs: Sharon gave a good update on this. The job hunt has been taking a lot of time, about the equivalent to a whole other class. It could have been worse if I were traveling for more interviews; fortunately few companies are flying candidates out for on-site interviews. I guess that comes with difficult economic times. If the executives can't get flown around, why new hires? It's looking like Pittsburgh, Connecticut, or Boston could be potential landing spots for us right now. I've been reading about Connecticut the most and liking the possibility, except for the cost of living.
Fun: We did our annual pumpkin carving. As we were leaving DC we found we found ourselves wondering if they would be smashed when we got home. We took that as an omen. When we got back, they were gone. Down the street a ways we found remnants of pumpkin, but there was no way of identifying if they were ours, just the circumstantial evidence.
In my opinion this fall has been much better than last fall. I don't know if last year my head was down more or what, but fall this year has been
spectacular. We've been able to get out and enjoy it more too. There is a great park near our house that drops into a ravine so you can't hear or see much of civilization. It was nice walking along the path and enjoying the trees. It was a nice calm day with little gusts of wind that would come and blow through the trees knocking dozens of leaves off the branches. The leaves would then slowly and peacefully float down to the ground. It reminded me of watching snow fall in the lamp light in front of our house when I was growing up. It made me happy.Going back to DC was nice. I really liked Georgetown. The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal ride was fun. I liked when they filled the lock to bring the boat up to the next level. It was cool that they still had the original tow paths and had
mules to pull us along for most of the tour. I wish they did longer tours. I liked learning about the history of the canal too. We were lucky to catch it on the last weekend of the year. If anyone is in DC when it is running I commend it.I'm looking forward to the next few weekends. We are going to Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater and a ballet called Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project. So we should have some good updates/reviews coming up soon.
For more fun photos you can see our online photo album.
