Catching up...

So. I know I haven't posted much lately. Sorry. Just doing our thing here...living a pretty darn blessed life. :) Let's do some catching up...

After getting his license at the start of November, Asher's taken over driving duties to and from karate and parkour. This is mostly all good, but I miss talking with the boys during the drive and visiting with people at both activities. Sigh. (Asher's also taken the MasterDrive winter driving camp, driven to movies and laser tag with friends, and run errands for me...hooray!)

We finally got a new thermostat installed. Back in June, ours broke. We managed to fix it just enough to get the AC working but not the whole house humidifier (which is kinda necessary here in dry Colorado during the winter). Last month, we finally got a new smart thermostat and had it installed so that now everything is working again. Yay!

In another piece of adulting, just before Thanksgiving we also had to replace our oven/stove. It was the last appliance in the house, I think, that hadn't been replaced, so sadly it was time. The new one we picked has a flat glass top (not induction, but so much easier to clean!) and a double oven, which came in very handy over Thanksgiving and, we're hoping, will be more energy efficient. Plus, fortunately, Black Friday appliance deals were taking place for the full month. (We also ended up getting some new pots because our old ones were from when we got married 22 years ago and had copper bottoms...and apparently the raw copper could transfer to the glass stove top. And we had to rearrange the kitchen a bit because the double oven means no more storage drawer under the oven. But. All good and so thankful that we're in a position where replacing things was just inconvenient and not worse.)

We had a lovely little Thanksgiving here with all the traditional foods. (Tremendously thankful for Whole Foods, lol.) Just us on Thursday, then with friends on Friday...and plenty of leftovers. Yay! (Noah was home for the week, as both CSU and CEC had the entire week off.)

Didn't do any specifically Black Friday shopping but did place a number of Amazon orders, lol. Yup, almost done with all our Christmas shopping...

It wasn't Christmas shopping and it wasn't "fun" but we also bought a new chest freezer for the garage. The city has a great freezer/refrigerator recycling and rebate program going on until the end of the month so we've got it scheduled for them to pick up our old garage freezer (that we've had since we lived in Oregon) and will replace it with the new, more energy efficient, chest freezer.

Last weekend, we got our Christmas tree from the same lot we've been going to for years. We took what have become our traditional photos there:

We then went home and hung outside Christmas lights also. We'll wait a couple weeks before putting out the inflatables to finish our outside decorations...and apparently we're going to wait also to hang ornaments on the tree (which is now happily set up in our front room) until Noah's home for break.  

Also last weekend, I enjoyed a lovely afternoon tea at the Boulder Teahouse with friends:

(The pictures don't really do justice to the yummy foods and tea.) I've known these two since our freshman year of college and am so glad we all ended up here in Colorado within an hour of each other. We don't manage to get together as often as we'd like, but I love when we do.

And now it's onward to finals. Asher's got his final papers in and his first final tomorrow with two more next Monday. He'll be on break starting Dec 11. Noah's plugging away at final projects this week and has final exams next week. He'll start his break Dec 13. Thankful that that all means we'll be off for winter break sooner than most of the kids in town.

Okay, that's pretty much it. Just checking things off the lists now and trying to get to the next things as we work our way through December. I'll try to check in more regularly. :)