Wellll…..so, I lied to you yesterday. I have no finished sock to show you (and now I am sad). Instead of knitting today, I worked on cleaning the house. Seth helped - he mopped, unprompted! How freakin’ awesome is that? And then, going to pick up Kato from the airport, I had a minor meltdown, and felt to anxious to knit while we were waiting for them. It’s crazy; usually, when we get of the train in Taoyuan, there are loads of taxis, and they always shout “Airport?” at us. Today? Two cabs. Not especially interested in fares, either - we (ha! Seth did the pantomime while I hid behind him) had to approach a cab and pantomime an airplane. Then, as we got close, the cabbie wanted to know what terminal. Hu-wha? Terminal? Oh. Uh….I don’t know. He seemed to think we wanted Terminal 2, which was the correct one as it turned out. Of course, he was also trying really hard to take us to departures, despite what seemed to me a distinct lack of luggage on our part (well, I had a backpack, but it was neither large nor full, so I guess he was seeing things).
Anyway, we finally got where we needed to be, and now we’re back home, and things are good. So, in the interest of being a good hostess, I’ll wrap this up and go back to actually talking with my friends.
If only because I haven’t posted in a seriously long time. Not much is new with me. We haven’t taught kindy all week, we have most of next week off for Chinese New Year, and we’re finally beginning to catch up on our sleep debt. I went to sleep around midnight last night, and Lisbeth around 1:00, and we slept till a little after 11:00 this morning. We could have used more sleep, too, but we figured we wanted to be able to sleep tonight.
So we spent the day rearranging the living room(s) and cleaning the kitchen, and now we’re watching BSG. Man, I really love that show. We need to find a good follow-up, though, since we’re already into season 2 and we haven’t been watching it all that long. Firefly won’t work, we’ve already seen it, and we’ll probably watch Earth2 soon, but no matter how good it may or may not be, it’s what, 12 years old? Fifteen*? Good or not, can it stand up to Battlestar Galactica, particularly as the following act? Somehow I doubt it. I’m hoping to convince Lisbeth to watch The X-Files with me, but since the only episode she’s ever seen is the single most disturbing episode ever I somehow suspect that’ll be a hard sell. If you watched The X-Files, you know the one. When I told my dad she’d only seen the worst episode, he said “Which one? Oh! With the… With the mom under the bed, and the… Oh, God. I wouldn’t want to watch it ever again either.” So maybe we’ll do Sliders, but that seems like pretty light fare after the loss of Caprica and the search for a possibly mythical Earth. Suggestions, anyone?
Also, someone is reading this blog from Mission, KS, and I’m curious who it is since I know only a handful of people in that area. If you don’t mind, would you let me know who you are either by commenting on this post, or by emailing me at sethcwhite(at)gmail(dot)com? I’d really appreciate it!
*IMDB says 1994, so that’d be 14 sometime this year. I suppose I’d know that if I’d brought my DVDs from the US instead of just loading them on my hard drive.
So, we have tomorrow off. Our branch is moving locations later this month, so they’re using Saturdays to pack instead of teach. Granted, it means I have to teach some other classes on a few random Wednesday and Friday nights this month, but I’ve got tomorrow and the next 4 Saturdays off.
Friday night, meet my big pink cup full of orange juice and tequila. Mmmm….I’m sleeping in tomorrow.
Looking back:
This has been a year that I’ve done, really, some impressive things. There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re big.
- I lost 70lbs.
- I moved, with Seth, to the opposite side of the world on what has been an overwhelming adventure so far.
- I started running (we’ll conviently forget that I’ve only gone two time since arriving in Taiwan) and love it.
Some other things I’ve done:
- I converted to the Church of Mac (I just realized I bought two iPods for myself this year. I used the first nano so much it began showing signs of wear, so Seth got me a new fat nano for Christmas. It’s awesome, by the way).
- I became an aunt (on January 1, 2007, actually - Happy Birthday Eliz!)
- I celebrated the second anniversary of being married to Seth. Whoo!!! (Hmm…maybe that one should have gone on the first sub-list?)
Looking forward:
I think the biggest thing I want to concentrate living in a way that makes me happy, even if that means unhappiness along the way. I’ve been reading The Happiness Project for a long time now, and even though I’m not ready to actually start my own Happiness Project, as she suggests, but I think it’s officially on my radar - it’s a Happiness Blueprint, perhaps? I think I’ll be writing more in the next few days about what I’m hoping/planning to do to boost and maintain the level of happy that I want.
In the meantime, you have a Happy New Year, okay?
I hate it when experiments fail. Even though, by definition, that’s what happens with experiments more often than not.
I’ve made a few batches of No-Bake Cookies this month, and I plan to make some for our Christmas party. I also thought I’d like to try to find some recipes that use rice, since that’s more plentiful and cheaper than wheat flour. Not rice flour, but rice. Cooked rice. Do you see where I’m going?
Cooked rice is a softish grain that still has some tooth to it, like oatmeal. Alas, it doesn’t seem to work as a replacement for oatmeal in No Bakes. I put it 6 cups of cooked rice (twice the amount of oatmeal called for!), and either I really screwed up when I was cooking the chocolate and drastically undercooked it, or there’s some thickening property of oatmeal I hadn’t considered. Considering it now, I guess oatmeal does thicken when cooked like there’s some starch there, unlike rice, which is all distinct little granules, huh? Dur. So, now I’ve got a bunch of chocolate and rice puddles hanging out on parchment paper. Maybe I’ll try scraping it all back together and incorporating something that might help bind it. Like, I dunno, oatmeal. Or maybe I’ll dump in some hot cocoa mix - that might be interesting, right? I mean, as they are now, I’ve pretty much written the cookies off.
Don’t worry though, if you’re planning to come over - I’ve got a new canister of oatmeal, so I can make a standard batch that should be fine. I got a lot of chocolate chips today at Costco, too (seriously, an embarassingly large amount of chocolate chips), so we’ll have all sorts of variations on chocolate chip cookies. I got the goods to make brownies, too, and assorted other spendid sugary, high-fat, yummy treats.
Also? I still have lots of rice to play with. How’s rice pudding sound? Oooh, or maybe I’ll try puffing rice (I’ve read it’s similar to making popcorn) and make some rice krispy treats!
Well, maybe not the last one. Another batch of brownies would probably by a good deal easier and more likely to taste good.
While our friends and family at home are finishing up their power-free stints courtesy of one absolutely wicked ice storm,
we’re missing the winter weather, (well, I am,) because it’s between 60 and 80 F on any given day here. Granted, with 100% humidity virtually 100% of the time, anything below maybe 68-70 is a little cold, especially on a scooter. Still, most days it feels like a crisp mid-spring or early-fall day, which makes holiday spirit a bit difficult to muster at times.
So we’re manufacturing it! We made a tree on the wall entirely out of lights and tape, (pictured at the top in glorious low-res animated .gif!,) and though neither of us are fans of blinking Christmas lights, they’re stuck on blink because they don’t work without the blinker bulb at the end, and didn’t come with non-blinker replacements. No biggie, really, we’re just glad to be starting our decoration.
We’re having a party for Christmas, we’ve invited all(?) of our friends in Taiwan (unless we’ve missed anyone, in which case, if you read this and didn’t recieve an invitation, please feel free to drop in) and we’re going to eat cookies and stuffing and basically all of a Christmas dinner minus the main courses, because our oven is actually a toaster oven (no one bakes here) and it just isn’t quite big enough for a turkey. We’re planning to do a small gift exchange, and to watch lots of classic Christmas specials and movies, and to just enjoy each others’ company and be family to each other. We and most of our friends here have come to think of each other as surrogate family, especially those at Hess, because we just need it here. We have some friends who are quite well travelled and have spent holidays alone abroad before and not been at all bothered by it, and are just so bummed by the conditions at this school that they feel they really need it this year. That’s not happy, change of subject!
So we’re cleaning house/watching TV right now, off and on, and Lisbeth’s making some cookies, too. We’re pretty stoked to see everyone, and to have people to spend Christmas with. It’s always been one of my favorite times of year, partially for the complete and total unpredictability of it (my family has an unofficial tradition of celebrating Christmas differently every year) and partially because it’s just great to see people you love.
Merry Christmas to all of you at home, all of our family and friends. We’ll miss you all this holiday, and we hope we can see every one of you in the months following our return home, or in the month during which we visit home, if we decide to stay here more than one year, which quite frankly is still undecided for us at this point. Despite some negative experiences we’ve already whined and moaned about here, and quite a few more we haven’t discussed here, we’re really enjoying this country, and (probably shouldn’t post this next statement where my employers might see it) though there is absolutely zero chance at this point, particularly after an event this past week that I won’t get into at the moment, that anything on Earth could persuade us to sign on for a second year with Hess, if we can find employment at some other place next year, there is every possibility we’ll stay here a while longer.
Sorry there was so much un-Christmas-y stuff in there, but there are a few days left until Christmas. I promise I’ll post at least one all-cheer-no-gripe post before it passes.
PS: The photo set of the ice storm was shot and posted by Jon Brisbin. He’s a great guy I know from writing (and a few other English related) classes at Pitt State. I don’t know if I’ve linked him before on here, but I think I should go ahead and name-drop him now while he still knows me, because I’m about as sure as I can be that within the foreseeable future you’ll be able to purchase novels with his name on the cover. Pop on over to his blog, he’s full of interesting thoughts, and had some great stuff about the recent ice storm, elements that photos and even television news coverage (I got to see NBC’s coverage because I discovered this week they’re video podcasting the Nightly News now) can’t express. And when you see this, Jon, you’ll be glad to know that though Lisbeth and I have considered ourselves to be an OS-agnostic household, we recently picked up a MacBook, and we’re total converts now. We have Windows, Linux, and OSX in the house, and now anything other than OSX borders on infuriating an awful lot of the time. Never would have guessed I’d be as thoroughly sold as I am as quickly as I was.