Coming up for air.

_{This is a cake Amynah made several weeks ago. It was delicious. This is precisely the kind of thing I should write about more often}

You know, after my last post, Amynah complained that I was making our lives here seem too exciting, giving people the impression that our lives in France were nothing a series of glamorous Euro-travels and hiking.

I therefore resolved to write a post about our quotidian existence here is Strasbourg – the illicit thrill of watching old Bollywood movies and pirated TV, compulsively surfing the Internet, tasting some new fangled cake Amynah’s taken it into her head to bake, grocery shopping….

Ironically enough, I was never able to write about how boring our lives actually are because during that time I have not been drowning in a flash flood of social obligations, I have been working like a madman, trying to complete several hefty magazine assignments on particle physics, astrophysics, and catalysis chemistry, as well as scrambling to complete some work for my former employers in Canada.

This means I’ve been on the phone almost constantly, with people from Philadelphia to Berlin to Tokyo, attempting to sift serviceable quotes from a series of heavily accented, jargon-strewn verbosity that might as well be Elvish incantations to summon Sauron as any human language.*

The deadlines for all of this have coincided with a visit from my mother- and brother-in-law. Tomorrow, we go to Portugal, to visit Our Lady Of Fatima (with whom Amynah’s mom has business) and then the old Moorish sites my belle mere missed last year because of illness. If any of my editors are reading this, I intend to be working the whole time.

So yeah. Life’s dull, but the blog silence will have to continue for a while yet.

* That does not include my interview with this guy, who was, as usual, both clear and wickedly funny.