...and we're back!

Dell fixed my computer, faster than they had said they would, which meant I was able to take on a Mammoth job last week, which meant that I wasn't able to write much. But hey, I'm here now! Stay tuned for an update on our transfer to a new location and the general state of our lives.

Ha, ha! And just then...

...my computer broke. My nice Dell laptop with touch screen was sitting closed on the couch in front of me, when a roughhousing, playing baby and husband came flying through the air, and in a moment of save the baby or save yourself, my husband landed on his elbow on my laptop.

Aaahh!

By some miracle, there was no physical damage to the laptop bar a small dent in the lid, however when I opened it, it became apparent that the screen was broken. Black. Nothing.

When I spoke to Dell - just a few moments later - I was informed that a new screen only costs $79. Wow. Pheuw. I was worried it would be expensive, since the last thing we need right now are extra expenses (my husband doesn't get paid over the summer). My relief was brief, however; the repair process costs $179.

Ugh.

Radio silence is over

Well, there it is: 3,5 months without a single blog post, photo, check-in. Dear reader, I am sorry I haven't been able to keep up. At all.

What happened? Life took over and I capitulated: our days became filled with spring time busyness, baseball season, study, trips, conferences, work, homeschooling coop activities, hikes, and oh, Max started crawling, and he is everywhere, all the time, vertically and horizontally. We have to keep our chairs away from our table at all times, or he climbs up on our rather high dining room table. He gets into everything. If you happen to leave the toilet seat open, he is right there, splashing away with all his might and joy. Between everything and him, I realized in early February that something had to go, and I more or less consciously gave up blogs all together: reading and writing.

But I miss it. It is fun to read about other people's lives and ideas, and it is fun to write. Now that the baseball season just ended, the semester is over and we are starting our nomadic life again before returning to Lebanon in August, I want to give it another shot. Maybe there's still someone out there - mom? - looking through this looking glass, and if there is, welcome back! If not, then welcome back to me!

Snow in Atlanta, GA!

Eating out in Atlanta, GA

Sometimes we just don’t feel like cooking, or dealing with a messy kitchen. I’m sure most people feel like this, and I often wonder how they solve it. I suppose that if we lived closer to family, or if we had any friends, we would be invited to dinner once in a while, maybe even once a week, but since we have nobody, it’s just us. Three meals a day (since everyone is always home for all the meals).Every. Single. Day.

We’ll go for a couple of weeks of cooking, doing well, but then we’ll either run out of exciting groceries/meal ideas/energy to cook, or I just can’t stand the idea of doing or orchestrating another set of dinner dishes ever again.

One meal out or one night of ordering pizza is usually all it takes to set me straight though. We are good cooks and even when we cook a simple dinner, it’s always delicious and usually healthy – sadly, we have yet to find a restaurant where we can afford to eat that serves better food than ours, and that doesn’t involve eating too many calories (we have our go-to places where our entire family can eat for under $30: Papa John’s, Panda Express, Taco Bell and Burger King. The food here is acceptable tastewise, but not exciting and certainly not healthy).

But we keep trying. So every once in a while we try a new restaurant that is somewhat within our budget.

The other night we tried Holy Taco on Moreland Avenue: it was tasty, different, but it ended up being way too expensive for us, since you pay per taco, and our big boys can eat quite a few of those nowadays.

The Flying Biscuit serves southern food, which was exciting to try, and because kids eat free on certain days of the week, we ended up staying within budget. However, the food was more breakfast like (come to think of it, it seems a lot of southern food is breakfast food – do they not eat supper here?) and it’s quite far from our house.

The Waffle House we went to was something like a diner from a horror movie. The food was badly cooked, and the service awful.

There’s an Indian restaurant near North Decatur Rd that we went to a while back, and we all thought the food was very good, nice atmosphere, fun and exciting, but our bill was closer to $100 which is way out of our budget! The same happened at Top Spice – the bill made us cry – and don’t get me started on Red Lobster. How, or rather, why do people eat there?

We’ve also tried Chili’s and Outback Steakhouse, but again, it turns out to be slightly over budget and they don’t serve anything we couldn’t do as well for a fraction of the price at home. The same goes for the Golden Corral and Sweet tomatoes. In fact, having dinner at any all you can eat buffet is asking for trouble.

I don’t mean to sound like a complete pessimist. We’ve had some really great food in our days in restaurants across the world. We are just a bit picky, is all. But we do enjoy looking!

Hiking along the Chattahoochee river

New Years Eve in Atlanta, GA

Maine lobster from You DeKalb Farmer's Market

Fireworks from Target