Ironically, holidays - a time when we take a break from daily life - usually end up making us busier! Even though I'm not working this year, the past month has still been super busy due to the holidays. At the end of September, China celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival and then the first week of October is the Chinese National Day Golden Week.

Matt got a week off, so we traveled to Qingdao to visit some friends and give him a chance to spend some relaxing time in Qingdao since he didn't get to enjoy it much while being so busy at work there last year. We had some nice meals, got to hike a little bit, visit the beach near where we used to live, and hang out with many friends. We finished the trip off by getting food to go from one of our favorite restaurants in Qingdao - Burger and Bun.

The trip was a lot of fun, but unfortunately on the first day, as we were getting off the train, I didn't "mind the gap" when I was looking behind me to grab my suitcase, and my foot slipped down into the gap between the train and platform. I fell all the way up to my thigh, so my leg was pretty bruised up and I couldn't do too much intense activity during the trip. We were really grateful that nothing was broken and that I could still walk, just more slowly than normally. So, let this be a warning to everyone: really do mind the gap like the announcements say! It took a couple of weeks, but my leg is fully healed now.

After we came home from Qingdao, I discovered that my Worm Inn had gotten infested with fungus gnats. I've been trying to starve them out by not feeding or watering the worms this month and kill off the adults by putting a bowl of apple cider vinegar and dish soap in the Worm Inn. As you can see in the photo, I've successfully killed lots of gnats, but there are still some in there. Frustrating! So, I've ordered an improved worm home that zips at the bottom and the top (whereas the one I have now just zips at the top and has a drawstring at the bottom, so that's probably where the gnats entered). I'll get the improved worm home when we go to the U.S. in December, so hopefully that will solve my gnat issues once and for all!

At the end of the holiday week, after we got back from Qingdao, it was my birthday, so Matt and I went out to a nice Italian restaurant near where we live in Tianjin. Then, the following week I experimented with making some new dishes - everything bagels and sweet potato cheesecake. The cheesecake turned out really well. The bagels were okay but definitely could be improved upon in the future. During the second week of October, we went to the Chinese church where we volunteer once a month and led music. It was my third time playing piano publicly. It went okay, but it always makes me super nervous to play in public.

The third weekend in October, Matt and I were away again, but not together this time. He had to go to Beijing for a tech conference, and I went to a women's retreat in downtown Tianjin. It was a good time of fellowship for me and a good time of learning for him but also made the month feel quite busy!

​As soon as we got back home, we had another factor to contribute to busyness. Earlier in October, our friend asked us if we would help her family by taking a dog that they had been given by another friend who moved away. Our friend's family is in a busy season right now with health problems, and it was getting difficult for them to care for this dog. Our friend knew that we were open to getting a dog eventually, so she thought this would be a perfect solution. We met the dog earlier in the month and then after our travels were finished, he came to live with us. We've spent the past week adjusting to him and getting him adjusted to us. He was already potty trained and now we're working on getting him to go to sleep later and wake up later (instead of sleeping from about 7 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. like he was used to) and we're trying to teach him to sit and fetch. He's about a year old, so he has a lot of energy but fortunately, he also doesn't mind cuddling with me during the day and taking naps in the sun. So, without further ado, meet Aka!

In addition to adjusting to life with a dog this last week, a couple of other things kept us very busy: Matt was invited to be the guest speaker at a Model United Nations meeting in downtown Tianjin last Thursday, and Friday we had several of Matt's coworkers over for a Halloween dinner party. Both events were a lot of fun but took a lot of preparation work! Now, poor Matt had to go back to the office, but Aka and I have been relaxing today and yesterday to recover from all this busyness. It's a good thing we have a lot of leftovers from the party, so I can take a little break before getting back into daily life, post-holidays.

Sadly, I've fallen a bit behind on my resolution this year to blog at least once a month, so this month, I'll have to post at least two blogs. A record!

First, here's a recap of what made me too busy to blog over the past couple of months.

In mid-December, we hosted two big Christmas parties at our house. Matt spent his Christmas break in California with his family, so I suddenly realized that if we wanted to have people over for Christmas, we had to do it before he left. So, with about a week's notice, I started planning. On Saturday night, we invited one of my classes over. Then on the next day, we hosted my training course members for a special Christmas "Free Talk."

For each party, I wanted to have a lot of homemade American-style food that Chinese people usually haven't had before. (My second post this month will be about an unexpected hobby I've started this year - a return to baking/cooking, which I pretty much haven't done much since we moved to China.) So, for several days before the party weekend, I was prepping food.

The parties went well. People enjoyed trying new food, including salty popcorn (Chinese popcorn is always sweet), homemade bread, potato and sausage soup, hummus and pita, cookie bars, brownies, and more. My favorite quote about the food was one student asking another student about the soup, "Is it sweet?" "No." "Is it salty?" "No...it's just, delicious!" We held a White Elephant gift exchange at each party, and everyone had a great time giving and stealing gifts. The best moment of the gift exchange was when Matt and I had accidentally put one of our wedding photos in the box we contributed to the White Elephant exchange. (Apparently, I had put it there when we moved and forgot about it.) When the student opened the gift, he was like, "Wow! Does the picture come with the gift, too?" After everyone finished laughing, Matt and I told him that unfortunately, he couldn't keep our wedding photo. Oops.

After the fun of Christmas parties and Matt's departure for the U.S., I promptly got sick with a bad virus that kept me in bed for several days straight. I had a low fever for almost a week,  had to reschedule two days of classes, and had no energy to get any grading/planning done. For about three days, my voice was totally gone, and it took a few weeks for it to get totally back to normal. In the video below (which shows one of the only "snowfalls" we've had this year), taken on January 7, you can hear my voice is still pretty stuffy, and I first started getting sick right before Christmas.

It was pretty awful to lose so many days of productivity so late in the semester, but there wasn't much that could be done about it. I went to the doctor's to get a flu test and see if there was any medication that could be given to help me kick it faster, but the flu test came back negative, so the doctor said it was some other type of virus, and I would just have to rest and wait to recover. The second week I was sick, I managed to go to class, and my fever had gone down, but I was still super out of it and not able to get a lot of work done. So, my Christmas and New Year's were both spent in bed - Christmas with a fever and New Year's just still trying to catch up on rest and recover my voice.

After I recovered enough to really work productively again, of course, it was time for finals! So, for the last few weeks since the holidays, I've been working like a maniac to try to catch up on the work I missed when I was sick and to get through the final papers and final exams grading.

On Monday this week, the last exams were finally graded, and my Chinese New Year winter holiday break officially started. I now have almost 6 weeks off, but much of that time will be, of course, dedicated to prepping for next semester. Now that I have more of a feel for these new courses, there are a lot of things I want to change to make the next semester more manageable for me and for the new batch of students I'll have. The more work I do now, the less stress next semester, so it will be a working holiday, but that's pretty much the case for all teachers, I think.

Even though I'll try to get a lot of work done over the break, we'll still do some fun things. We've already enjoyed the latest Star Wars installment at the mall down the street from our apartment, and we're going to Thailand for part of the break.

That's about all for my general life updates. More to come in a later post on specifics (such as how I'm keeping up with my other resolutions...some yay! some...at least I still have half a school year left...)