Settling in? Yes, it's going relatively smoothly. There are still pictures to hang and surfaces that could use a first cleaning, but the apartment is fully functional. Bedroom is already fully disastrous, the clothesbasket having spewn its contents all about the general area. And the archiving of all my writing/photography for the last 16 months has turned the living room into a second war zone.

Work seems to be going well, also. I get to be very independent, and that's nice so far. The bosses seem to be pleased with my work to date, which includes a story about a new dog park, with stories about CROP walk, visitors from Hiroshima (bombing era) coming to town, and maybe even tax levy previews coming up (!). Today I went to two board meetings that were actually very helpful. One, they had a guest speaker who talked about the difference between TIF and tax abatement (economic development funding tools -- I'd never heard of the latter), and in the second they had a review of their affordable housing initiatives. It gets really frustrating in the beginning of learning these things because I'm not familiar with a lot of economic jargon or financial processes, but as I understand the systems they become more fascinating.

Enjoying getting to know my co-workers a little more -- more comfortable every day. Every Wednesday after the staff meeting a group goes out for lunch (a really long lunch) and it's a chance to hear about what they're thinking and about their outside lives.

Yesterday was the beginning of the Wednesday children's programs at the church my family goes to. I was "helping" my mom with the preschool class -- maybe more about that later. Or now, briefly -- my mom's fantastic with kids, especially five and under. She manages them well and they like her and do what she says. This group of four ladies who didn't really know each other was in charge of 20-ish preschoolers, and I said I'd help with whatever they needed, which was pretty much nothing. The kids were cute and pretty-well behaved. It wasn't quite as fun as it could have been because I didn't really know any of them, minus a set of twins I hadn't seen since they were two months old (now four years) and a family friend's son I hadn't ever seen (now four years). Because this church has so many new people all the time, there were kids wearing nametags bearing names that weren't theirs because nobody knew any better (and kids couldn't read them to know they were wrong).

Hopefully, weather permitting, you'll get some photos of Minnesota this weekend. The longer I'm here, the more I realize how different it is from Iowa -- in good and bad ways.

Who saw "Pride and Prejudice"? (The new one with Keira Knightley who didn't deserve an Oscar but could have done worse) The intro theme haunted me after I saw it. I ended up downloading portions of the soundtrack off of iTunes. I could still listen to the theme over and over (still do, too...) as well as once of the pieces they dance to. But of the tracks I listened to, only about two were worth purchasing. It gets frustrating, doesn't it, when the themes and such are two-minute tracks? The soundtracks never seem to really be what they had in the movie to me.