Fall Catch Up

Things are so delightfully fall-ish around here, in spite of our lack of anything to talk about on the blog. It's been a bit difficult to post here, what with all the homework (blah, blech), but tonight I'm cranking out the fourth of five 100+ citation bibliographies for my research class, and the only way I know how to get my citation program to work is to give ten minutes between each upload. So, wha-lah. Blog time.

Here's what we've been doing:
* Readers: The big news of the week is that my thesis is now in the hands of my readers--approved by my committee chairperson, who was very complementary (of the FOURTH draft, for the love), and one giant step further down the road to being finished. My gracious boss has let me take a day off each week while Congress is out of session to work on it and I have needed every minute. I don't have to think about it (much) for two weeks now while they read it, and that makes me v. happy.

* Nigella: I miss cooking, which I've given up for all but Friday as we push through to the finish. I think Jason misses me cooking, too, but he's such a good sport. He's more than a good sport--he is awesome. Anyway, I recently discovered the charms of Nigella Lawson, who now has a show on Food Network, and found one of her cookbooks used. I read it cover to cover, hearing her British accent on each page, last weekend. Glee got me through the spring, Nigella is getting me through the fall.

* Apples: Although cooking has generally been sacrificed to the homework dragon, I will make applesauce this year. I will. Which is why my friend Missy and I got up early Saturday morning for our now-annual apple picking trip to Maryland. Kevin, her husband, was craving the delicious Jonagolds from Rock Hill Orchards, so what can you do? And now, of course, the apples are rotting in a bag in my kitchen... Oh, another note--we did not go pear picking, but I grabbed some at the farmer's market a couple of weeks ago and made this. Unbelievable on toast with goat cheese...

* Nephews...s...s...s...s: That's five nephews, for those who find counting hard. We are getting all set to welcome Bucher Boy #3 into the family in February. Dresses are nice and everything, but we really like boys in our family! Shaanti and Adam are such awesome parents, and we can't wait to meet this new little guy! (And see how Mason likes being a big brother...we already know that Cole is ready to be, as he says, "another brother.)

* Graciousness: Another thing I've neglected to mention is how grateful we are that God took good care of Andrea and Baby Jane, who are finally, finally home in Olympia. This makes me so very happy.

* Coffee: It's official: I am a coffee drinker. For some reason this disappoints my mom, who thought that we were the lone holdouts on the no-coffee team (and yet Mom doesn't drink tea, so we're not really on the same team). I have been toying with the idea of learning to like coffee since college, but it wasn't until I started to have classes until 10 pm after a full day of work that I decided the caffeine outweighed the cost, calories, and addiction. And then. Oh, and then I discovered marshmallow mocha creamer. So amazing. Like my favorite hot chocolate from Moxie Java at home, but with a jittery kick. I honestly have to limit myself to mochas on the weekends or I would go through a container of creamer a week.

I am mildly concerned that most of these things revolve around food. And me. Clearly this list should have been entitled "What I'VE been doing." Whatev, he can write his own blog entry (when he gets home from Alabama, where he is doing some training for work). And now I have no excuse to not go back to the creative writing piece I'm doing for class tomorrow. It is awful and not getting better. Oh, what is that? There's an episode of Friends on TV? Just a few minutes is okay, right?