Fall is definitely here and I'm loving it! The temps have been in the low 20s which is fantastic. We've had nice breezes and the occasional rain shower. It's nice to be able to enjoy the weather some on the weekends. During the summer I was in the office everyday so getting "outside time" was a pretty rare thing. We have more or less landed ourselves into a weekly schedule. We are still doing home improvement projects but our weekends are no longer a 48 hour marathon of unpacking, shopping, and painting. Hopefully we use the weekend time to both relax and explore. Sometimes after a long week you just want to lounge around the house, but if we do that every year then we'll never get to experience anything new and exciting.

Every once in a while we are able to lift our thoughts from the day-to-day work of "life and routine establishment" and do a little mid-term planning. We'd like to take a more proactive approach to traveling while we are in Spain. That was something that was not as possible while we were Sweden and traveling around interior China was not so accessible for a variety of reasons. We've decided to visit Morocco at the end of October and we're investigating fun weekend trips. If anyone has any great ideas, please let us know.

Jess and I are pretty underwhelmed by the variety of after school activities provided by the school. I keep prodding Jess that she needs to work with the school to do an after-school baseball class or some other fun activity for the kids. She's not so convinced yet, but I plan to keep working on her ...

We are now in October and that means Adeline's birthday is getting close. As luck would have it, there is another girl in her class that shares the same birthdate so they've decided to have a joint birthday party. Addi spent some at the other girl's house to do some party planning. She's pretty excited and periodically announces how many days are left until her birthday to anyone who is standing nearby.

I found a new crossfit box pretty near our house. I stopped in a few Saturdays ago to get more details. Of course no one who was there spoke English, but we had enough Spanglish between us to set up a follow-up "interview" on Monday night. The interview went well and I had my first class the following day. For some reason I forgot that I've been a couch potato for 7 months so completely crushed ... the warm-up. After that I was a shaky, pitiful mess. I couldn't hardly walk for days and I had to take two weeks off before my next workout (this week). I'm sure I'm impressing everyone at the gym with my American super powers.

Luckily for us, we've found a new church! This is a big deal for us and I'm super excited. It's not very close to our house (about 30 km away) but the people are nice and English is the predominant language. We've gone twice and had a positive experience both times. More about that later.

Take care everyone. I hope you're all planing killer Halloween costumes, starting to think about Thanksgiving menus, and watching the Broncos destroy everyone else in the NFL.