My name is Heather, and I just got here from Chile...

(For those of you who didn't spend time with or live with my husband during college, this is a line I've edited from Moxy Fruvous's "Kid's Song".)

I am now back on US soil after three quick but great days visiting the folks I work with in Santiago. Traveling there was a little bit of a surreal experience -- you spend 10 hours on a plane, but wake up in the exact same time zone (i.e., no jet lag) and, in my case, with the exact same weather. However, instead of the trees being in flower and starting to bud, they were losing their leaves because it's fall in the southern hemisphere while it's spring here.

My foreign food report: I've discovered that the Chilean diet is perfect for me. There is a lot of Avocado... for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. (8 meals in Chile for Heather = 8 opportunities to eat one of my favorite foods!) Also delicious was the raspberry / strawberry juice that I drunk like it was going out of style.

Jeremy was betting that my travel last week to Branson and then to Chile would provoke news on our referral, but no such luck. (Perhaps this is for the best, as I really did need to get some work done in Chile and would have been too distracted to do anything if we'd actually gotten a referral.)

But we continue to make progress on the preparation work around here. The children's books from my roommates arrived from Amazon, and they are all adorable. We also got our first secret pal gift... another posting on that later. Still no word on when our furniture is arriving, so I guess we'll have to add "call the furniture store" to the top of our to-do list for this week.