The new school year started this week, and we are officially no longer adrift. In fact, we're suddenly scrambling to catch up.

The month-long summer vacation that ran from December 11 to January 11 was too much of a vacation: now we've got a month's worth of story to try to catch up with. It's all good: we had a guest for the Christmas holidays, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer from Louisville, a woman who once taught at Jefferson Community College, where Sally used to teach, and who lived in Irish Hill, near where we lived when we first moved to Louisville 40-plus years ago. Once again we fixed a holiday dinner -- this time with two small turkeys, but we're still trying to convert South Africa to pumpkin pies.

Doing Christmas in the middle of summer has a disconnected feel to it. It was hot, and it didn't really begin to feel like Christmas until Father Mark took us to a Christmas Eve festival of carols at his church. The choir sang beautifully, and the music made the season right.

We took a vacation ourselves right after New Years, and flew from Pretoria to Capetown to spend a week at the Nine Flowers Guest House, a wonderful B&B very centrally located in the Gardens district. We walked all over Capetown, and rode the tour buses up to Table Mountain. We ate wonderful meals in lovely restaurants, went to the movies, and visited some wonderful museums, and took a too-brief tour of the wine country. It was just about perfect (and if it sounds like I'm doing a commercial for the Nine Flowers, I am. It was fabulous.)

We came back on Jan. 8, and schools reopened for teachers on Jan. 11, so we were back in the thick of it immediately. Sally began the work she's going to be doing, teaching English to seventh-graders in two schools, and David put in a week trying to get past doing computer tech support -- for him it was a week of installing anti-virus software and trying to clean viruses off computer lab servers and teachers' laptops. Sooner or later he'll teach basic computer classes to teachers and run computer clubs for students, and in spare moments help with some technology courses.

There, now we're all caught up, the slate is clean, and we can try to move on with our lives, right? So get ready for it -- pretty soon I'll tell you about the warthog sausage salad.