Hello everyone. Yes, it's been a while since I blogged. Actually just a week or so, but to me it feels like a lot longer. I hope all your Christmas and New years holidays were nice and well-spent. Ours were good here as well. It's not often that you get to lounge on the beach in the month of January. The New Years passed for me fairly quietly, as Leland and I got back from dinner around 10pm and discovered the water had come back on (count it: 8 days without water). So naturally, I freaked out and immediately began doing the laundry. Don't worry, I have a photo. Here, actually counting down to the New Year isn't as big of a deal as the all night party that immediately follows it. So Leland went out and tried to find this all-night party. I stayed home and did the laundry and actually had a great time doing it. I'm not sure I could have stayed up all night dancing and partying. Plus it ended up costing about $35 for the party, and money is a little tight right now, to say the least.

Well the day after New Years, our friend Caryn came down from Sal to hang with us for a few days. A couple days after her, Mel and Courntey came in from Santiago. It's funny, because out of 45 or so of us Cape Verde volunteers, 9 or 10 of us are Capricorns. Courtney commences the month, and I am the last. Caryn, Mel, and Leland are all Capricorns as well. So we had a mini-Capricorn celebration while they were here. Our plan was also to chill on the beach and just take a relaxing vacation before what we thought was going to be an All-Volunteer Conference. The five of us were supposed to fly back to Santiago together last Sunday and meet all the rest of the volunteers on all the islands for a big large conference. But, of course, in true Peace Corps style, they cancelled it two days before we were supposed to fly out, leaving Caryn a little stranded on our island. The Saharan desert tends to have these really large dust storms that blow all the way over here to the islands and end up grounding a bunch of flights all around the islands. So it appeared as though some of the volunteers weren't going to make it, so the conference has been postponed until March. Needless to say, we are all very dissappointed. We were all looking forward to getting off our respective islands and seeing everyone again. It just makes me even happier that people came out to visit us over the winter break, even though we had water problems.

So now we have all been unexpectedly thrown back into our jobs, and to the dismay of my students, I won't be missing any classes any time soon. It was just such an upset to all of our schedules. Leland was planning all his projects around the conference; I hadn't prepared lessons or anything because I wasn't prepared to come back to school yet. And mentally we were all in vacation mode still. So this week has been a little rough, and it's only Wednesday. I just was not prepared to be working this week.

Time passes quickly here, only because you look forward to the next activity. The conference was the activity that everyone was looking forward to. Now Leland and I have planned to go to another island in the middle of February for a large festival. It's kind of like the Cape Verde version of Mardi Gras. So that will have to suffice as the next large event, even though it is 5 weeks away. But time will pass, as it always does and before I know it, it will be summer (something I also am looking forward to imensely). But we are back to work, back to the daily grind, and back to the daily minor struggles that are our lives. I know you are all feeling the same thing. But another year begins, and here we go.