Day 23-34: In which your woefully inadequate blogstress brings you up to date.

So.  HI!  

After we got back from DC we were pretty beat, so we spent a couple of days recuperating and John got caught up on work.  We've been trying to nail down an apartment in Portland, but it turned out to be much tougher than we expected remotely, so on Monday we are flying up to Portland to spend four days nailing down an apartment.  Then we'll come back here, rent another Behemoth, drive back to Portland, and be done with this whole damned thing.  Except we'll just be getting started.

I've also started applying for jobby jobs (about 15 or 16 of them so far), and haven't been getting much response.  I was hoping to have a couple of interviews set up for next week, but nothing yet.  Such is the job market at present.  Ah, well.  I'll keep plugging.

The dogs are keeping us entertained, and we've started taking them to the local 16-odd acre mountain dog park as often as possible to run off their ya ya and get our lazy asses used to hiking again.  

Its been a bit of a saving grace for us, truth be told, because we can't quite shake that 'we live in my mom's basement' feeling, although David and Patty have been exceedingly kind and welcoming and frankly would prefer it if we stayed for another few months, possibly buying the house that's for sale across the way from them and moving in ASAP.  Still.  Its been nice to get ourselves out of the house and into the sunshine and, in Gracie's case at least, the mud.

We've also gotten to chat with really nice people and meet cute pups, including an entire family of seven or eight 9 month old English Mastiff puppies who were meeting up there for a family reunion.  I tried to get photos of that but they were all over the place.  And they were huge.  Really nice pups, though.

The weather has started to turn from summer to fall, and the nights in the mountain house are downright cold.  Patty and David bought a big box of beautiful Colorado peaches and hence there has been cobbler, promises of pie, delicious snacking, and two experiments with jam, one peach and raspberry, one straight peach.  Neither have been entirely successful, but still very delicious.  We'll get it yet.

So that about does it for the time being!  More to come from Portland as events progress.