Welcome back! It's a new year!

A bit of a lapse on the blogging there. First we went crazy with the holiday preparations, with more elaborate recipes, complex food preparation sessions, happier activities, bigger presents and other magnified celebratory undertakings than in the past few years. We also hosted house guests for close to a week, took care of a neighbor’s guinea pigs for over three weeks (never, never again!!) and survived a stomach flu from hell (which we so generously shared with our house guests of course).

And here we are. A little over a week into the new year and I am desperately trying to regain the money spent by taking on more jobs than I can handle. The boys are getting back into their routine with a new schedule (it usually takes us about a week to start following it exactly, and another couple of weeks to completely abandon it again ,but the boys like schedules and lists, so I indulge them), and Abraham is going along with it in his leisurely way. The professor is - as always - in work-mode, with the additional end-of-the-semester exertions disrupting his thought process.

While trying to get over the hump that is January, our post-holiday recovery – pre-spring 2012 interlude, which encompasses mainly dull things like work, diet, and cleaning, I’ve set out to make the best of our daily routine and spice up little moments here and there when possible. (The other day, for example, instead of going to Spinneys in Jnah for our usual weekly shopping excursion, on a whim, we asked the taxi driver to take us to TSCPlus instead as to try something new. The store was really quite horrible and we soon left, however, while trying to figure out how to get to our regular Spinneys and estimating if we could walk, we walked into a different store we had never seen before or even thought of visiting, Monoprix, and boy, oh boy, what a find! More on this in a blog post tomorrow.)

So, if you have any tips or ideas on how to spice up those less exciting parts of life, like grocery shopping, grading, exam proctoring, long hours of translation work, Tuesday night dinner, school-lunches, laundry marathons and hours on the treadmill or around the track, then please, do share!