Peacocks and Chinchillas

Steve and I are both writing our theses to complete our masters in applied science. So cute, we’re in the same program. In fact, we’ve taken all of the same classes. Steve tagged along for my first couple of classes and then applied and got into my program at the University of Denver. It’s been a long haul – three years and counting in the program, we took all of our classes while also working full-time jobs. We finished our coursework prior to getting married (over a year now!), and were left with the daunting task of writing a thesis. Needless to say, we put it off long enough and it was time to get rid of that nagging sense of fleeting accomplishment. My thesis is that I don’t like writing a thesis! But I did. It’s been a grueling two months, filled with days cooped up in hotel rooms

Keep reading…

Pandora is awesome. You never know what gems are going to come up!

It’s safe to say that Steve and Chris are friends. Real-life Fred and Ted!

I’ve created a Flickr account to display all of my photo albums. I try to take lots of photos of different stages of our travels — trail assessments, meetings and presentations, road trips, mountain bike rides, activities, the Oscar Meier Weinermobile. (I shot this today out of our car window in Austin.) I’m still in the process of updating my account with all of my albums to date (I have 6 or 7 albums that I’d like to share right now, a couple more every week). So come back frequently! http://www.flickr.com/photos/morganlommele

I haven’t updated my blog in a while. On a side note, I’m not a fan of bloggers who log on once a month to talk about how they’re not blogging, then you hear nothing from them in between. I wish I blogged more. There’s certainly excitement in my life that’s worth sharing. Marathon training (Steve and I are running the Park City marathon in five days) , grad school and its subsequent end (of coursework at least, I still have a thesis to write), wedding and honeymoon planning (less than four weeks to go), and of course, always more than the requisite 40 hours of work work every week. I’ve been very busy, but what’s funny is that I can’t envision myself not being busy. I enjoy relaxing, and I certainly enjoy low-levels of stress, but I also really enjoy the four main things that are going on right

Keep reading…

Bell peppers – green, red, yellow, orange – are versatile and most likely very good for you. One of my favorite workday lunches is an amalgamation of bread, some kind of spread, and a veggie and/or protein on top. Today, it was ciabatta bread, topped with homemade pesto (frozen from last summer) and roasted red, yellow and orange bell peppers. Roasted bell peppers are one of the most rewarding fixings, from a cost/benefit analysis. No exaggeration: wash pepper; cut pepper down each side and on the bottom, into about five pieces; place on cookie sheet; cover with olive oil and salt; place in the middle of the oven under a 500 degree broiler. Take them out, peel the skin off where it’s charred and easily removable, and you have a pretty phenomenal, not to mention colorful, snack. My lunch was rewarding. Too bad I had to eat it at my

Keep reading…

Use it in a sentence. This is interesting. Gordian knot. 1. a very difficult problem, insoluble in its own terms; an inextricable difficulty; to cut the Gordian knot is to remove a difficulty by bold and energetic measures: “A territorial dispute over an incredibly small plot of land had become a multi-generational Gordian knot.” 2. an intricate knot tied by Gordius, the king of Phrygia, and cut by the sword of Alexander the Great after he heard that whoever undid it would become ruler of Asia Origin: Approximately 1579; an allusion to the knot tied in legend by Gordius, king of Phrygia. In action: “In ‘Caucasia,’ those bystanders are children, Cole and Birdie Lee. Their mother, Sandy, is the shy, overweight daughter of a Cambridge blue blood (Cotton Mather is a cherished ancestor) and a liberal Harvard academic. Their father, Deck, is a bright, upwardly mobile graduate student who grew

Keep reading…

I am now tweeting, mostly because I like the Twitter bird. Also because Efrem told me to do it. I’m concerned that everything I think about in my head will either sound like a Facebook status update or a tweet. When I’m doing the dishes – ‘Morgan wishes the dishes were already done.’ When I’m running – ‘Right hip flexor hurts.’ When I’m doing homework – ‘Morgan wonders if an ecosystem valuation of opportunity costs related to natural gas drilling on the Roan Plateau would be an effective way t.’ STOP!!! I’m much wordier than this and it usually takes me a good 140 words to even get to what I’m trying to say. We’ll see how this goes. Follow me: mponcelet