We are officially HOME in Utah.

I guess we've been here 5 days now. Mom and Dad came out here with us to help us move - isn't that amazing and super generous?! Mom and I did a lot of the new-home-out-of-state shopping while the guys got our stuff out of our storage shed and unloaded all the heavy card board into the house. It was amazing to have so much help!

This afternoon we finally got the internet up and running. I've been trying to catch up on emails and your blogs these last 5 days, which is a big task and one that i seriously am not spending that much time on. But it's great to have a break from unpacking.

I will post pictures of the house once we get it together. Right now it's still a mess, though we only have about a dozen boxes left to unpack. My biggest challenge, which i haven't even begun to tackle is my office. An amazing thing about this house is that Landon and I each have our own separate offices. If you remember, in Illinois, Landon's desk shared a tiny room with our guest-bed and a few bookshelves. I had my desk in our family room, across from the kitchen and all of my files and supplies at the other end of the house in boxes in the laundry room. This year, Landon has a room set aside for only his desk and 19,000 books and my desk and all my supplies are in a large room with the guest bed. I'm so grateful that at the end of a work day i can shut the door to the room and forget about it until the morning - i've really had a challenge at building boundaries between home and work these last few years.

There is a trail that goes right in front of our house that goes through the beautiful plants and the Utah Botanical Center, so we've been on a few walks there in the evenings. We have 4 LDS churches that we know of within a square mile of where our house is. This is interesting. Sunday morning M&D and I took the dogs for a walk on the trail in our tshirts and jeans and i felt like sure a heathen as i noticed all of my neighbors emerging from their homes in suits, ties, and dresses and all walking down the sidewalk toward the churches. On the up side, the roads were vacant so i had an easy time driving Mom to the airport.

I think it may take me awhile to get used to "Mormon Standard Time": on Sunday Starbucks closes at 5pm, many of the other stores and restaurants are closed, and Saturday evenings everything shuts down early also. Crazy. Monday afternoon was the WORST possible day for me to choose to do grocery shopping. I have and have had many wonderful Mormon friends throughout my life, i've just never lived in a culture shaped around Mormonism before, so it will take me a little while to get used to, i think.

Tomorrow: Landon has orientation at the University and I will be back full-swing into working for ACSI.

More from HOME tomorrow.