Okay, I feel horribly guilty that I haven't posted anything since that first one. Shame on me.

I'm back at home since late Monday night. My poor body is still trying to adjust to New York time from Austrian time (6 hours ahead of us). Luckily I don't have to be at work so I'm napping with my awesome puppy on the couch whenever I feel like it! (Lucky me!)

Spending a week in England and 2 weeks in Austria was great. We were on the run every day trying to see as much as humanly possible! Jake & I were exhausted and can't believe that my parents not only were able to keep up with us... they set the pace! The only thing we didn't enjoy was the record breaking heat in both countries. I didn't need my jeans or my short sleeved shirts (any kind of sleeve was too much in that heat!) Maybe by the next time we go back there (many years from now probably) locals will have come around to believe that air conditioning is actually a good thing! Yes, you read correctly, there was no a/c in most of the stores, homes, cars, buses and trains! We seemed to be the only ones really bothered by it. Oh well - we survived.

I filled my 1 gig compact flash card with fotos during the first week in England (surprise, surprise) and was able to use our friend Aaron's pc to transfer them onto our 1 gig thumb drive. I filled up the card again during the 2 weeks in Austria. I haven't gotten them cropped & fixed up yet or transfered to the Kokak gallery yet for other people to see. That'll probably be my project later on tonight and tomorrow. I'm surprised that I only took about 650 pictures during 3 weeks. Thank God for my digitial SLR though... otherwise it would have been worse than Alaska last year (11 rolls of film in 10 days!). It's going to be hard deciding which ones to print out and put in the vacation scrapbook. (Will I need two scrapbooks (1 for the UK and 1 for Austria) or just 1?) We'll have to wait & see I guess. Hopefully I can get that scrapbook started and finished before school starts up again. (Let's not talk about the San Fransisco vacation pictures from Feb. '05 that haven't made it into a scapbook yet ;-)

Scrapbooking is just one of my projects for this summer. I have yet to move my classroom up to the 2nd floor yet (supposedly the custodians will move my stuff up this week). Once that's done I'll have to spend at least a week (a day here and there) unpacking and setting up. I also want to sort out stuff in our basement at home. We have boxes down there that I don't even know about! Hopefully my Mom was serious about coming up here to help with that. I wanted to paint and redecorate our living room too but Jake just laughs and says there's not enought time. I think that's wishful thinking on his part b/c he likes the living room just the way it is. . . an exact duplicate of the set up in his apt. before we got married ;-) I would love to do the room just to prove that it can be done - & make it more to my liking of course! On top of those projects there are friends to get together with, German Fests to work at and dance at, and other social obligations that were signed up for months ago and were almost completely forgotten about! How can the summer vacation go by so quickly? It seems like I just got rid of my kids the other day!

Speaking of time going by quickly. . . Jake & I celebrated our third wedding anniversary on the 5th travelling from England to Austria. It doesn't feel like it's been that long at all . . . until I look at our pictures and see how much all the kids have grown since then. We've gotten quite a bit accomplished during the last 3 years. The last thing on our "list" is to have a baby and we've taken on the task of trying to get pregant. We thought we might be able to be successful at the attempt while in Europe, but we weren't that lucky to have it happen on our first try. I was a bit disappointed since 2 of our friends were able to get pregant on their first tries. We've still got plenty of time, but I've got my fingers crossed that we won't have any problems like so many of my coworkers have had. Only time will tell I guess.

I'm off to see how Jake is coming outside with installing our new pool ladder. I can't wait to jump into the water and get some relief from the heat. Maybe Bailey will join us!