Almost Free

That title has a few different meanings.

First of all, Morgan completed his dissertation and defense, which means he's earned his PhD! Essentially, at least - he still has to complete a few revisions and all the signatures have to go in the right places, but he's been given the stamp of approval by his committee so it's pretty much done.

That leads me to another way we're almost free - that moves us one step closer to leaving Denver. Morgan has been sending job applications for a while now,  but a lot of them don't really close their window for submissions for a while. Therefore, it'll take some time before we find out what our options are and decide where we're ultimately going to end up.

And the final way we are (well, you are, actually) almost free is that finishing that will hopefully mean Morgan has time to blog here again. I've been doing only a marginal job of holding down the fort while he's been swamped, and I am looking forward to a return of the he said, she said format that we started with.

So with that being said, I'm not going to comment too much about the PhD completion in hopes that Morgan will talk about it since it's his perspective on it that really matters.

Penny is the only one who never gets tired

In other news, my kids were here for their spring break last week and we had a terrific visit. We went on a great hike together up at Echo Lake. Spring is maybe not the ideal time to attempt a hike that's at around 10,000 feet up in the Rockies, but we managed. The sun was bright on the snow (that's why Jacob has his head down in the photo - resting his eyes), and in some places the snow was deep enough to have your whole leg break through so that you'd suddenly find yourself up to your hips in it (ask me how I know), but it was a good time nonetheless.

I could go on about how it feels that Emily is visiting colleges this week and that Jacob is studying for the SATs (where does the time go?), but I think I'll save all that sort of thing for another post.