I mean … it really has been a few years since my last post. The last time I wrote in this blog, my daughter was still one year old! Today she is a healthy, happy, strong, funny four-year-old. I’m still here in Cholula, now with one more (furry) member of the family, a former street dog named Manchas.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but it feels good to write for no reason. It feels good to know I can still put something out on the internet and be fairly positive that no more than perhaps three people will ever read it. I should be working right now, but I’m trying to get back into the whole work thing after a week off, and it’s hard to start up again.

It’s the first week of September, and the summer was a bit of a rough one. We changed houses, my husband changed jobs, my job got busier, my daughter got older, and we didn’t take a “real” vacation because moving into the new house took such an enormous amount of time and money. My husband and I have moved approximately five bazillion times as a couple, and before we were together we had each moved around (different cities, same city, different countries, all of it) about ten zillion times. You’d think we’d be total experts at it but somehow it always kinda sucks in new and different ways. The  new house is only a 15-minute walk from the old house, and in most ways it is so much better. I do miss the big yard and the amazing location of the old house, but I do not miss living in an overpriced, not-maintained rental. We are renting-to-own now, and treating this new place as though we already own it – and I love it.

For a million different reasons – none of which are really that great – this past summer I fell out of my almost-daily yoga/exercise routine I had kept up for almost two years. It’s been probably about three months since I’ve done any formal classes and I can’t wait to get started again… though I dread it at the same time. I will be out of shape, it will be hard to manage the time with my work schedule, and I am still “recovering” from spraining my ankle almost two weeks ago (fuck man, I didn’t know it needed weeks to get better!). That means when I start again, I’m going to have to be all super careful and diligent about not re-hurting the ankle and just the thought of that makes me cranky. Generally speaking, I’m not into soft, easy, restorative type of yoga or exercise … but honestly I just need to start exercise back into my life, back into my routine. This morning I took my daughter to school on my bike (it felt ok, wearing an ankle brace – but yes, I was scared about the consequences of “what if I fall today”) because I just simply needed to get out of the house and move my body for the sake of my mental health. I left the house at 8:08am (I checked the time because I wanted to see exactly how long it took on a bike from our new place to the school), and we were off the bike and heading to the classroom by 8:23am. On the way back, I took the back roads – meandering through the corn, being extra careful on the bumpy and unpaved roads, and I got home around 8:50am. I won’t be able to ride my daughter to school so much longer. She’s over 16 kg now and it’s getting to be a tight fit in her bike seat, but I may be able to squeak out another 6 months, possibly a year. When we are just puttering around the town I don’t mind if she’s riding “lose”, in a very Cholula (or Amsterdam) type of way (meaning sitting on the bar of the bike between the seat and the handlebars), but the road I take to get to her school is too busy to do that safely.

So hello again. I think I like this. A bit of a brain dump to start off the day, and now, seriously, back to work.