we arrived home today from a wonderful vacation.  our first plan was to pick up our cat tomorrow after church, but we couldn't wait to see the furball so we drove all the way to orange county immediately after arriving home.

now everyone is lounging on the sofa...we are content.

the land of trees and rain

washington is great! i love the rain and cooler weather and the awesome trees, but joel and i are definitely missing our apartment (and chachi!). when we first bought our new mattress, i was convinced that it was too hard and that we would be taking the mattress back to the store. however, we roughed it out and now love our bed. i didn't realize how much we loved a firm mattress until this vacation.

the reason we bought a firm mattress was because of the mattress at joel's parents' house. he loved the firmness of it and convinced me that getting a firm mattress would be worth it. he was super excited to have the opportunity to sleep on his parents' wonderful mattress again. after a few days we started wondering if maybe they had switched mattress' in our room with the other mattress that was super soft. so we went in the other room and felt the mattress only to find to our chagrin that the one we had been sleeping on was the firm mattress! basically, our mattress is so firm that this one is now soft...ugh.

last weekend we drove to wenatchee to visit my best friend, rachel, and her husband. we had a wonderful three days with them. it was everything a vacay should be - eating fast food, watching tv (yea olympics!) and movies, and chilling on the couch playing games.

tonight we visited with joel's best friend, hutch, and his wife, whitney. they recently moved to tacoma (which could not thrill joel more). we ate wonderful thai food and played a rousing game of railroad tycoon. we love hanging out with them.

last night we drove to port orchard and ate dinner with my family. we then spent the rest of the evening with my cousin jeff and his roommates. i miss seeing them.

we leave this wonderful place on saturday to prepare ourselves for the upcoming semester. i have one more year left of school and joel has one class left before he gets his degree (yea!!!). hopefully, this will go off without a hitch.

check out our website. joel recentely updated it and there are some great photos for you to look at.

we are currently in washington and are having a wonderful time visiting with family and friends. joel's youngest brother and his wife recently had a baby (our first nephew!!) so i have been trying to get in as much time with him as possible. he's so freakin cute and i'm hoping our kids will be equally cute.

on a side note, i finished up my summer associate position at kaye scholer. i loved it...i loved meeting all the lawyers there, the work was great, and i loved all the eating! most of all, i loved that they offered me a full time job! now, all i have to do is get through this next year and pass the bar next july...no more resume pushing!