Long Time - No Post!

I'm not going to waste a lot of words and space explaining away my absence from the blog--everybody's busy. So, everyone who has bugged me to start posting again, please take credit for my return to blogging. It's kind of nice to be missed! ;-)

Wow, it's November. Where on earth did September and October GO???

While those of you in the midwest are bundling up and hunkering down for cold weather, we out here are finally peeking our heads out of our air-cooled California caves, discovering to our delight that the blistering, burning sun has finally decided to give us respite. Fall is lovely, albeit dusty. We're entering what seems to me like an extended September. T-shirt or long-sleeves or even (if you grew up here) a sweatshirt during the day, nice and cool and night. We have discovered a nice dog park not too far away and took Thomas and Pippin for their first jaunt today. This is their first time in such a large space off leash AND with other dogs. Oh, Joy! Delight! They had so much fun and as this one is bigger, Erik and I can actually walk around a bit while they run. We're looking forward to making it a regular part of our week!

What else have we been up to?

A couple of our friends from church invited us to go to a "Check it out" meeting with their square dancing group. Erik agreed to give it a go, and we went (about a month ago). We had so much fun and have made it a regular Monday night activity! Who'd a thunk it?

We're still enjoying being involved in our church. Small group started up again in September after a summer hiatus, and Erik has been learning how to run the soundboard so that he can help record the service and run the sound. I've started teaching the 3rd-5th grade Sunday school class every other month. I love alternating months with another teacher so that I don't completely miss out on church myself. While we didn't dress up for Halloween, Erik did dress up to help in my class a couple of weeks ago. Meet Shem, straight off the ark! Halloween snuck up on us this year! I bought pumpkins some time ago, but we didn't get around to carving them until Halloween day.Meet Rasputin and Herman:This was Thomas' first Halloween and he let out some loud "ALARM!" barks every time someone came to the door. He and Pippin then rushed to the pet gate we'd set up in hopes of meeting the kids as they got their candy. We had so many more trick-or-treaters than we did at our other place--it was fun to see all the costumes! I know I promised house pictures and I haven't delivered, so here are two rooms.
The Spare Oom:The Loftice (thanks to Andy for that descriptive word):Still no window treatments, and someday we'll paint . . . but I guess you can suffer through more pictures when we finally get to that point! ;-)

Alright, I now solemnly vow that I will try to be more regular in my posting again. Thanks for reading!
Much love from,
christel