Travelin’

Another whirlwind week that we somehow managed to make it through.

Greg successfully defended his thesis on Friday morning! I am just so proud of him, and happy for him. I think he’s just relieved. He was practicing the presentation on Thursday and claimed he put the cats to sleep, but I think it was just that the cats had beat Greg to his chair (I came in at some point, and he was using mine), and they weren’t about to give it up. This was after, while he was working on the presentation on Wednesday night, the power went out for more than an hour. He’s got a few revisions to make, as expected, but the worst is definitely over now.

It’s a good thing Greg got that picture of the tree out front earlier this week, because on Wednesday night, after our 80 degree day, some rain and wind blew through (causing the aforementioned power outage), and blew more than half the leaves off the tree. The next photo will probably be a naked tree! I wanted to use these for an album I’m planning on eventually working on, of our first house.

I’ve been busy at work lately, adjusting to a new boss, and trying to juggle a couple of projects that all need to wrap up by mid-January, when my focus will temporarily change for a couple of months. Things are going well, and, with what I’ve been doing lately, I’ve been creating more of a demand for my time. I’m just hoping that it will be rewarded.

We left on Saturday morning to drive up to my parents’ house for Thanksgiving. The drive wasn’t too bad – we hit areas that were busy, but nothing terrible (despite warnings about the Virginia Tech game today). We saw lots of pretty leaves, mostly south of Virginia.

But the funniest part of the trip was this truck that we saw somewhere in Virginia. It’s a pickup truck with what at first glance appeared to be an empty trailer behind it. On closer inspection, though, there’s a little yellow Tonka backhoe truck.

We made in into Allentown on our way, and stopped to see Mike and Chesh, Greg’s college friends. So good to catch up with them. We didn’t get to stay for very long, as we were just exhausted. It feels awful to only get to spend an hour or two together, when we only get to see them (maybe) once a year.

Now we’re beat and off to bed. We’ll be up fairly early again tomorrow, to take the train into New York City. More on that when we get back on Tuesday (after, of course, I finish that paper that’s due on Tuesday…)