Mid-February is the time of year when parents with babies and young kids too young to ski or go sledding catch cabin fever. Unfortunately, the Hoobing Family is not exempt from this generalization and the President’s Day three-day weekend was a excuse to get out of town and visit our friends in McCall.

When we lived in China, we went out of our way to find a bar that was showing the Super Bowl and even missed a half a day of work (on Monday) to partake in what we thought was our duty as Americans to watch the popular game. It has not taken much time back in the US for our excitement level for American football’s biggest day to plummet to the ranks of the noise. For this reason and also because we do not have a tolerance level built up to more than a dozen kids in a house at once, we decided to decline the Super Bowl party invite we received and have dinner with friends instead.

Our friends and co-workers Chinese wedding photo.

Once they were asleep, we ate dessert, watched “Four Christmases” and then tried to decide if we wanted to share our first minute of the new decade with Carson Daily orRyan Seacrest. Upon careful consideration, we chose Ryan Seacrest in hopes of being able to see Dick Clark.

Andy took this photo this morning when he dropped Belén off at school. The improved cell phone photo quality is due to the fact that he is now the proud new owner of a Droid phone. So now it is Droid versus iPhone in our household just like the phone has Belén in a face off with her classmate, Drew. Drew was born within two days of Belén’s birth date, but you can tell he is really getting close to crawling.

“Rejoice” is, in my opinion, an underused word in today’s day and age. I was reminded of this word yesterday at the wedding of Jill Aldalpe and Xanti Alcelay. The ceremony was at the remodeled version of the same church where Andy and I were married, St. Mary’s on State St. in Boise. It was a packed house full of people excited to “rejoice” in the union of two of Boise’s awesome citizens with Basque heritage.

I have been ready for a new job for quite awhile…really ever since we moved here. I finished my MBA last year and now have over eight years of experience at HP, most recently a lot of coordination and project management but still a fair amount of programming. My goal has been to move into a project management role, but it has been nearly impossible to do while we are in Shanghai since if you are hiring a manager, you either want a local hire or experienced manager from the US as an expat. In February, a great Project Manager within my organization decided to leave the company to become the R&D Manager at a start-up in Boise. I put my feelers out about the job and started getting a lot of feedback that I would be a good candidate to replace him.

The blog entry this week is written by our guests and feature writers, Stefan and Christine from Germany.

It’s Friday, October 26th, 9:03 am and Christine and I are just about to take off back to Germany. After three weeks in China we’ve seen a lot of exciting places, we’ve met many nice and interesting [...]

I think my favorite thing about living in Shanghai is that I learn many things every day that I feel are shaping who I am as a person. I also like the fact that when I wake up in the morning, I never know exactly what is going to happen that day and where I might be having dinner or who I might be having a conversation with later that evening. These past two weeks have exemplified these attributes of life in Shanghai.

I had felt a lot of anticipation for my 30th birthday. Probably six months ago, I heard a program on NPR which I had listened to as a pod-cast. It had a woman on it who mentioned something about life consisting of seven-year increments.