Accepting Suggestions

I was talking to my friend Elizabeth recently, and she asked me if I'd decided yet about keeping up my blog, and I realized I'd missed it. I know life in Knoxville isn't always as adventure laden as our stint overseas, but I thought I'd try this out anyway.  We were both in agreement that "Foreign Territory" is no longer an appropriate title, but I couldn't think of anything off the top of my head to change it to. Then I decided I should try something new and just offer the naming up to anyone who comes across my post.  Please name my blog! I welcome your suggestions.

So, we're in Knoxville. Joel and I are both taking classes at UT. I'm full-time and he's part time. We both have jobs outside of school, and spend the majority of our time at home studying. I'm not in love with Knoxville yet, but I am coming to really like certain things here, such as:

1. Fall perfection. I have to hand it to these trees. They were stunning. I'm really sad it's over now, but it was gorgeous while it lasted.

2. I have a public library card, and I'm not afraid to use it. Did you know that most libraries now have online databases so you can download e-books and audiobooks strait to your kindle or iPhone from home? Free audiobooks! What a marvel. I've really been taking advantage of that.

While we were in China I got spoiled by the amount of reading time I had on my commute. I spent about 2 hours a day on the bus to work, so I got in a lot of quality reading. I read over 50 books while we were in China. I'd always intended to make a separate post about that with my 2010-2011 recommendations out of the huge pile of books in my "finished" stack, but I never got around to it. I've had to slow it down a bit here. I'm still reading constantly, but mostly books like Speech and Language Development and A Guide to Narrow Band Phonetic Transcription. Not quite as enthralling. I recently finished the first book in the Mitford series by Jan Karon and I'm working on Kate Morton's The House at Riverton. I really enjoyed The Forgotten Garden, so I thought I'd give another of her books a go.

3. McKay's Used Books. I love a good used book store, so I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that Knoxville has one. When Joel and I merged our lives we quickly realized our combined book collection was out of control. Going through our up-teen boxes of books from the last move we discovered we had duplicate and triplicate (but there are only two of us? I blame Joel.) copies of the same book on our shelves. I made it my mission to sort them all out and then we took boxes full to McKays to sell. In exchange we got gift certificates so that we can buy...that's right more books!

That's all for now. Joel is at work, and I'm supposed to be studying for finals to finish up the semester this week. Instead, I have homemade oatmeal bread rising pleasantly in a bowl next to me, a recipe of my mother-in-law's that I love, and I made some deliciously spicy hummus (another first). Earlier I made laundry detergent from a recipe that I found on pinterest. At least my studying rebellion has been a productive one, right? Don't forget to leave me your suggestions for my new blog title.

Happy Holidays everybody!