Hiatus is the cardinal sin of blogging.  Guilty as charged.  It’s not that I didn’t have anything to write about, it’s just that life got in the way.  Now there’s a backlog of topics I want to tackle and not enough reflective time to do so.  I’m in the home stretch of the farewells in Hong Kong for another year.  Fortunately a better blogger than I tackled the “Why Expats Hate June” topic (http://www.thecultureblend.com/?p=11), so I can check that one off my list, but suffice it to say, saying goodbye to twenty friends in a constant stream of dinners, cocktail parties and junk boat trips is emotionally draining and not good for my liver.  Hong Kong is strange in that way.  The longer you live here, the fewer people you know.

Since my last entry I have been to Vietnam, Paris and the Seychelles.  Each of these voyages deserves a post.  The Bhutan story continues and grows in interesting ways, and I am gearing up to spend the summer in Telluride, a town that’s rife with blogging fodder.  I’ll climb back on that blogging horse once I hit the wild west.  

In the meantime, I am pleased to report that later that day of the snail sighting I talked with Monique (sadly one of the twenty leaving this year) and she told me that on her return walk she passed the palm and found the snail making its way back up the frond!  It had somehow managed to turn around and save itself, crisis averted.  It feels a good reminder as we all feel slightly on the edge of keeping it all together this time of year, that we can always just turn around and head for home when we’ve reached the end of the path.  I guess that’s what those 20 friends are doing and what we will eventually do too.

I’ll leave you with a little Martha Stewartiness…  Here’s a salad I just made up that my teenage son now wants to eat everyday…

Baby kale leaves cut in ribbons (they eat more that way), carrots chopped in small cubes, 1 avocado, feta cheese crumbled, ¼ cup flax seeds, ¼ cup homemade multigrain breadcrumbs, ½ a lemon, ½ cup extra virgin olive oil, Malden salt, fresh ground pepper and a hefty sprinkle Korean gochugaru red pepper flakes.  Combine with whatever else you want to throw in and serve with Ryvita crackers (and some hummus would be great too).  I’ll be serving this all summer.