Well its been a while.  Now that we are all settled there doesn't seem to be much to write about.  Daily life is pretty mundane.  Same as it would be in Canada.  Work, school, figuring out what's for dinner and what should we do on the weekend.  And I certainly wouldn't be blogging about that at home so topics are slim to none. 

So on that note I will write on a seemingly innocuous topic of salt. Yep salt. 

Its winter so you would think that salt would be every where in Prague (although all the ice and snow from earlier in the winter is long gone).  But they don't use salt.  Instead its some kinda crushed rock stuff.  Very fine and just as annoying as salt.  Not that its really important at all but I have been wondering why they don't use salt at all on the roads during the winter.  And then it hit me.  They don't use salt on the roads because they use every available grain of salt on meat.  It does not matter what kind of meat, what cut of meat, whether you buy it in the grocery store or order it in a restaurant; there is so much salt that I cannot stomach it.  Ground meat in particular is very bad so our typical winter diet of chili and shepherds pie has gone by the wayside. 

So what to do, what to do?  Well, at this point I don't really know.  I've become much more of a vegetarian and much less of a meatatarian for now.  Thank God the for tomatoes and cheese.

Happy New Year

Hard to believe but we made it through another year. Looking back, I'm still not sure what side of the fence 2010 falls on: there was good and bad and ugly.

Lets start with the good. We finally made the move to Prague where work became easier and harder at the same time. Everyone seemed to adjust well and we are all going about our business thank you very much. The year brought a lot of opportunity for travel for all of us and was capped quite nicely with a Christmas ski holiday in Val Gardena, Italy. The mountains were breath taking even if the skiing wasn't all that great as the weather was unusually warm. And it was nothing, if not educational. Here are some of the things we learned...

...don't let your mother have your iPad to play with. It's like pulling teeth to get it back.
...if you put the 4 boys in one car and the 3 girls in another car for an 8 hour drive, the girl car smells better at the end of the day
...at 86 years old, papa can still put on the skis and do some runs
...at 46 years old, I am too old and fat to do much of anything
...it's not really feasible to lock 7 people in an apartment in a foreign country and expect sanity to be maintained
...Italian TV is worse than German TV
...that nana would rather visit a mall than a historical site, no matter the significance
...it apparently snows everywhere in Europe except where it is supposed to snow


As for the bad, I suppose in retrospect it wasn't really all that bad although at the time it seemed as if the sky were falling and I was the sole target. But when you think that we got through the turbulence with our health and relative happiness intact, then we are very lucky indeed.


And the ugly you ask...Jamie's one and only haircut in Prague. Still gives me the shivers.


Happy New Year everyone and all the best for 2011.