aaaaah… home sweet home. we didn’t do anything extraordinary this week, and it felt brilliant. just the novelty of of seeing friends again and sleeping in one’s own bed was enough to carry us through the week.

– there are a million chinese characters to review, and a million emails to reply to… but we’re back to our old routines, and it’s kind of nice to work on things we didn’t get to in a long time.

– the house is freshly painted and what a difference it makes. it looks like new! it rained pretty hard on monday, and we didn’t notice any water getting in on the previous trouble spots, so that is a relief.

– we met a couple of new friends and it was nice to just chat with calm people, who listen and talk unhurriedly. how rare this feel these days, that people just let each other talk without interruptions.

– we tested our cholesterol, just to check how we were after so many weeks away eating out, and surprisingly, we’re not that out of range, nor did we gain a lot of weight… i don’t know what kind of sorcery this is, but i’ll take it!

– i missed the beach.