Adapting to City Life

Its been a few weeks since we have written so we will try to give you a brief update about what's been going on.


First Heather....She finally had 1 full week of work physically in the GP building; she's finally done with 4 weeks of training!!! From all accounts things seem to be going well. A ton of different meetings, which is weird since she's only been there for a week but hey that's life in project managment.


No Janae and Jo, she doesn't sit at her desk with her feet up, eating popcorn and drinking soda all day like mom. :) [inside family joke]


She has adapted well to taking the Marta (train) to work every day. It's about a 10-15 minute train ride to GP from our corporate housing. It sure beats driving to work plus it saves on gas $$.


I (Mark) am continuing the job search. I've sent out several resumes in the last week and starting to hear back. I'vehad a couple of interviews and some phone interviews this week. We're both confident the right job will come along and that we just need to be patient.


Two weekends ago we went to Piedmont Park (http://www.piedmontpark.org/) for the first time. For those of you unfamiliar with this park it's 187 acres for various activites such as soccer, softball, tennis, bike ridding, running, walking, flying your kite, playing kickball, lawn darts, and numerous other outdoor activities. As we were walking around there was a wedding group of approximately 20 people getting pictures taken, it defintely made us think that we were no longer back in WI. The park was not only for people though, there were many people that brought their dogs, we soon discovered that we weren't far away from a dog park area. Being a huge dog lover, my wife graciously agreed to take a walk over the dog park and let me admire all the pups.


Last Friday I met Heather downtown for lunch; well and because she had forgotten her filing cabinet keys at home. Running home for lunch isn't an option for her like it was back in Wisconsin. After lunch, I did some sight-seeing and discovered the Atlanta public library and Underground Atlanta; which is a not so nice part of town anymore. Heather swears though about 10-15 years ago it was nice shopping and restrurant distrcit. I'll just have to take her word on that one.


This past weekend we took the Marta downtown to the Georgia World Congress Building to a health show convention. We saw some unusally weird stuff, along with some really great things. We signed up with one of the vendors to have them come to our home and cook us a free meal. We have no idea of what the catch is but hey a free meal is a free meal so we will keep you posted on that. We also sat in on a cooking class that was being presented by Publix grocery chain. The chef preparted Chicken Stir Fry and of course we had to stay long enough to get the free sample and we both thought it was really good! Publix has a cooking school not far from our new apartment. We're hoping that once we get settled in the new apartment we take a class together. The other highlght of the day watching a protest going on outside of the CNN headquarters downtown. Several Chinese people were holding signs demanding an apology from CNN for the recent comments they made about them.


We've also started the process of church shopping a couple of weeks ago. There are so many different types of churches that's it's hard to know where to start. So far we have a list of 3 or 4 churches we want to try. The one we are scoping out right now is Perimeter Church http://www.perimeterchurch.org/; a large GBCC type church but about 2.5 times bigger. We're hoping to find a church that has an active couples ministry and a nice women's ministry for Heather.

Over all we are enjoying our new city. The weather has been good, the people are nice and there are so many different restrurants and many of them are within walking distance. It's so different to be able to sit outside at restrurant in the middle of April. We're definately enjoying that perk of living in the south.



Tootles,


Mark and Heather