Here We Go Again!

These pictures are from our last weekend of summer break (see blog post below). There will be another blog post however just about this weekend. I wanted to at least put a couple pictures up though.

Today is Sunday, the first day of the week. As such, it is technically a work week, and this work week happens to be our first week back to work. In other words, summer break is over. Michelle and I report back to our schools tomorrow morning -- bright and early (well...at least compared to how late we've been sleeping in the past couple months). We have had a great summer. We are so thankful to have jobs that have allowed us to relax, travel, and have lots and lots of fun! We have spent the last week gearing up for the upcoming school year. This week, we have taken care of a lot of things we needed to do and will hopefully be well-prepared for work now and not have to worry about very many other things other than reaclimating to working full-time now.

We went to the temple this week and had an amazing experience there. We know this experience will fortify us for a time and help us feel good spiritually during the upcoming year.

We took care of some important banking and financial issues.

We made a huge and well-planned out trip to Costco. Gotta love the deals and bargains on staples like fresh produce, cheese and milk there; but we can't seem to leave that place without spending a lot of money! At any rate, we are all well supplied on food and groceries!

I stocked up on books on tape from the library for my commute to and from work on my bike.

We organized and cleaned our apartment from top to bottom. We also took care of massive congestion in our walk-in pantry. This led us to the discovery of some moldy rotten boxes at the bottom of the pantry. Luckily maintenance was able to clean the carpet of our apartment and they even actually replaced the carpet and padding in the pantry.

Michelle and I are both done with grad school! Michelle has been done for a few months, but I had to take some online classes over the summer. They were way more time-consuming than I had anticipated, but the important thing is that I got good grades and am now also done with grad school. We are both certified teachers with masters degrees in teaching/education. Since we are going into our third year of teaching, we no longer will have to worry about any Teach For America matters.

Bottom line: we made through all those obstacles and came out victorious! We should be able to just focus on teaching this year!

And finally, this weekend we had one last hurrah and went on an incredible road trip to Luray, Virginia. We went our good friend and neighbor Ryan Bessey. We stayed in a hotel on Friday night and in the morning Ryan and I competed in the Luray International Olympic distance Triathlon. We both did fantastic! I set a new personal best in all the legs of the race, especially swimming which is my toughest part to improve on time so I was really happy about that. We finished off the day by visiting Luray Caverns. This is an underground cave full of unbelievable rock formations, stalactites, and stalagmites. Words do not even come close to doing this natural wonder justice, and really neither do pictures.

We will be posting pictures from the Triathlon and Luray Caverns shortly, as this wonderful final weekend of summer deserves its own blogpost.