What a Month!

It's been thirty days since my last post and forty since I vowed to blog more often. Unfortunately life got in the way since the beginning of November. In the middle of October, Roxi's grandmother Nina was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer which prompted us to take a spur-of-the-moment flight to Lafayette to visit her over Halloween weekend. It was a good trip and although she was tired and in some pain, she seemed to be in good spirits.

Upon returning to Memphis, I continued doing odd jobs while looking for a full-time position and Roxi stayed very busy with her work at the university. By the end of the week, we received the sad news that Nina had passed away. We spent the next week mourning and preparing for another trip to Lafayette for Nina's memorial service. To complicate things, two days after the memorial, we had plans for a trip to Shanghai where Roxi was scheduled to present a paper at an academic conference. Needless to say we had an emotionally and physically exhausting weekend in Lafayette and a mere twelve hours back in Memphis before a twenty-hour trip to Asia.

After spending a week in Shanghai (more on that later), we took the grueling time-zone discombobulating trip home to Memphis in time for Thanksgiving. We spent a day trying to get re-acclimated to Central Time but that didn't work out so well. We managed to wake up early enough to go to a Thanksgiving buffet with our friends Amelia and Susana, international students in Roxi's lab who have been visiting from Spain and Chile respectively. That night I watched the Aggies play a very inspired game against arch-rival Texas only to fall short in the end. Roxi and I spent the rest of the week trying to get back to normal, but we're honestly still a little out of whack from all of the traveling.

Now I'm simply amazed that it is already December and 2010 is just around the corner! Where, oh where does the time go?!?