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...)