And I'm off again.

But not back to Russia quite yet.

I'm taking my time getting back to St. Petersburg -- a whole ten days -- and taking a detour through Paris, Berlin and Krakow.

If you don't hear from me during that time period, don't panic. I promise a nice long entry about my time in Europe once I am back and settled in my apartment in Petersburg.

Anyway, I'm really glad I came home for this break. It was much needed, restful, happy, and just enough time to see pretty much everyone that I really wanted to see. I took a ton of pictures over the past two weeks, of course, mostly of Agnes, of course, and am behind in getting those up, but look forward to seeing them sometime early February. Agnes is too cute for words. She's even better in person. I'm glad I got to meet her.

Until I catch up on uploading though, you can at least see my self portraits from my time at home. I think they are pretty funny as I tried to incorporate as many guests into them as possible. Definitely the majority of the people I hung out with over break turn up in one portrait or another, and I broke some records in the project including the most number of guests in one shot (9), the youngest guest (4.5 months) and the oldest guest (75 years). Actually, all three of those records occur in the same image. Anyway, I think the self portraits alone show exactly why I came home and why I am glad I did. There are so many good people in Massachusetts that I had been missing. Well, I'm off to go miss them again for another six months, but this time when I made my round of good byes, things weren't nearly as sad. For whatever reason this next chunk of time seems significantly shorter (just one semester instead of a semester plus a summer, even though the amount of time is almost the same), plus I think everyone was relieved to know that if I came back once, I will come back again. I'm not leaving everyone forever.

So, off I go.