Okay, so I’m not an old master. But I have been scarce.

In the middle of my series of posts about our awesome summer vacation, I dropped off the face of the earth. I predict it was around the time of the first midterm I had to give, and from then on out, I’ve been crazy busy at work, thus coming home exhausted.

Anyway, yes, I’m still around, and yes, things are going pretty well for our family. The kids are busy with school, music, and Scouts, while Dave and I are busy with our respective teaching loads. It’s been an amazing experience, getting to teach Freshman cadets in their first first semester; they are trying to figure out the lay of the land when it comes to balancing school, sports, and military training. Every minute of their day is accounted for, and somehow the majority of them handle the challenge really well.

I don’t usually write a lot of details about my military work, but in this case, I have to say that it’s been a great time being on active orders. This set of orders is longer than the orders I had during my 2009 Middle East deployment.

I do plan to continue my writeups of our summer travels, and I definitely want to write about our amazing August 9th hike up to the Pikes Peak summit (I have a page of notes on that one!). We’ll see how much I get to do during our Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks.

I have a few random things to play “catch up” with family news. I’ll toss those up as separate posts. Stand by…