Turkey Bowl Champs

jarred returned saturday night a champion. saturday morning the acc routed the sec 43-6 in the annual turkey bowl. congratulations especially to jarred, harrison and daniel, some of our neighbors here, who contributed to the win! go acc!

storage

this is our coffee table in our living room:


and since apartments here don't have closets, it also doubles as our christmas storage. which means that over the next 48 hours every christmas decoration we own, including the tree itself, is going to come out of this trunk to be put up around our house. it's pretty unbelievable.

next up: pictures of a decorated apartment!

Max is 1!

Hard to believe that this little thing...

Has turned into this...
over the past 11 months.

When we got Max last December the vet here estimated he was almost a month old, and when we did the math, his birthday came up around November 25th. The same as my sister-in-law Jada's. And while her birthday is way more important (HAPPY BIRTHDAY JADA!), we did want to recognize Max with a couple presents. Although upon inspection, these presents are really for us.

He got saddle bags we found at the dog market. Not only can he now make himself useful by carrying his frisbee and other stuff for us, but load these things down with a water bottle on each side and our out-of-control crazy pup becomes a pretty good walker. And as a bonus he gets worn out quicker. Winners: Jarred and Shelley
And a shock collar. Don't call PETA quite yet. We don't really hurt the little fella, just a noise, vibrate, or small shock when he gets on the counters, into the trash cans, chews his paws, jumps on guests, or pulls on his leash. We have only had this thing that we ordered off the asian ebay for about 48 hours and he is still getting used to it, but it has been awesome and I am so thankful for it. And again the winners in this gift are: Jarred and Shelley.

Happy Birthday, Max. You make our life even more of an adventure...

the TURKEY BOWL

for months now Jarred has been talking about the Turkey Bowl. every year, a bunch of expat guys we know here all go to one city to play a really big football game the Saturday after Thanksgiving, aptly named the Turkey Bowl. Jarred, along with some other guys, tried really hard this year to get the game moved to the city near us. alas, it was to no avail.

so i surprised my husband with a plane ticket to the game. he heads out this afternoon for 30 hours away to get his fill of football for the year. and this is not just any pick-up football game. it's acc vs. sec, with a trophy and bragging rights for a year to the winning team. it's flag football, but full contact on the line with no pads. and thank you to harrison, our new friend and neighbor here this year who was a college football center, jarred this year has a newfound love for playing on the defensive line. i may be a little glad not to be seeing that in person. a couple weeks ago jarred went out to do wind sprints to start getting ready for the game. then all the guys in our city got together to practice and play. last week he got new cleats since his baseball ones are in the states. the countdown until Saturday morning is down to hours.... GO JARRED and GO ACC!

so what will i be doing while he's away?
well getting out our Christmas decorations so we can put up our tree on Sunday!

caramel apples

September through November of this year have been Jarred's and my weakest performances as bloggers. We have just been so busy and when we have had time to relax we have just wanted to crash and not think about typing, but no fears, if you haven't noticed yet, I am in the process of trying to catch you up on our lives pretty well....

I have heard from a few friends over the past year that if you heat a can of sweetened condensed milk long enough it turns into caramel. Intriguing, no? And since we can't get caramel here I thought it was worth the try. So Wednesday I took it upon myself to put this supposed theory to the test. The only caution I found online was that sometimes the metal cans explode. Yes, explode. And this was enough to make Jarred think I had gone insane for even wanting to try it. They also said don't use cans that have a pop top, but that's all I could find, so I went for it anyways. I loaded up our crockpot anyways with a can of sweetened condensed milk with the label removed on a plate and water all the way to the top, being sure to cover the can.

And ELEVEN hours later.... we had CARAMEL. And what is there to do with a bowl of caramel in the fall except to make CARAMEL APPLES! YUM!

Thanksgiving Tradition

For at least the past 2 years it has been a tradition for our friends and us on Thanksgiving night to officially kick off the Christmas season by watching this:

And so we all headed over to the boys where Daniel has installed an HD projector turning their living room into a bona fide movie theater complete with an approximately 15x5 foot screen on their wall. And we announced that Christmas has begun.
I think that America is kind of the same with Christmas shopping starting on black Friday, but the day after Thanksgiving is officially Christmas season here. Yesterday as Jarred and I were cooking for Thanksgiving dinner, I turned on his ipod and while searching for some music for us to listen to told him that it was the last day that Christmas music would not be listened to in our house. Yes, starting today through December 25 we will listen to Christmas music everday. Thank you Will Ferrell for kicking off Christmas!

Thanksgiving Pictures

Our wonderful friends here!
The boys: Harrison, Daniel, Jarred, and Josh
The girls: Grace, Lindsey, me, and Danielle

The preparations: All of us at Josh and Danielle's getting ready to eat. Danielle made the turkey (that Josh is carving) and it was awesome. And on the right in the back is Grace's boyfriend Michael who is visiting from Chapel Hill for a week!

The feast: every special Thanksgiving tradition for 8 different people creates quite a spread.

Our 3 pies: The first time I have eaten pecan pie in Asia.

And the best pie: Because my stud of a husband made this delicious apple pie himself.

Let's just say we were all expecting there to be way more leftovers than there actually were!
Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving!

So far today we have made a few side dishes, dressed up and gone out to take our Christmas picture, sung O Come, Thankful People, Come, stuffed ourselves full of turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, corn pudding, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rolls, and green bean casserole, and multiple pies, and walked around the lake with our friends and max. We love Thanksgiving so much, even across the world in Asia where no one around us really knows what is up with the Americans today. And our sweet American friends here are the best company as we all celebrate away from our families. We'll post pictures soon of Thanksgiving 2010 (which also happens to be Max's 1st birthday as far as we can guess), but we just want to wish all of you, especially our families celebrating in Michigan and Pennsylvania a very Happy Thanksgiving. We love you all and hope you enjoy a special day set apart to thank you to the one who gives us so much. We love you! Happy Thanksgiving!
Love,
Jarred and Shelley

the abc's of fall

i looked at my sister's amazon wishlist the other and it is mostly compiled of a bajillion baby things. not unusual for the mother of an infant, i know. but what is surprising is that america now has ABC everything you could imagine. hooked on phonics apparently started a craze of teaching 1 year olds to read. and so i thought, why not have an ABCs of our fall since we have that many things to blog about.

A-adopting- we currently know a number of people in the adoption process. they live in multiple different countries and are adopting from multiple different countries. and 2 families we know have gone to pick up their little girls in the past week! we both think adoption is incredible and we are so excited for these families.

B- basketball- a few weeks ago my teacher texted me to ask me if i wanted to play in the school basketball tournament between all the different departments. i thought i had gotten out of it when i told her i was going to be out of town that saturday, but low and behold my friend's teacher came into my class the next day to explain to me that it was a 2 week tournament and they really needed me on the girls team and jarred on the boys team. we were stuck. so i conceeded and signed us up. that sunday we got back from being out of town just in time for the boys game. jarred didn't want to go, but i talked (nagged) him into it since i had signed him up. and i just went along and brought max to hang out and watch. but when we showed up i was immediately informed that the girls were playing too and their game had already started. a kid grabbed max and said he would watch him, a girl on the bench took her jersey off and handed it to me, and i was immediately subbed in. the first time i ever felt indigenous in this culture was when i wore a huge rain jacket on my scooter that covered not only me but the scooter as well. the second time was when i played an actual, reffed basketball game wearing corduroys and no one but jarred and me thought it was absurd. that game we got stomped. i am talking like 25 to 5 or something like that. only one other girl on my team had ever touched a basketball. so for the next game i thought i would try to come up with a plan. zone defense was part one of the plan. it took forever before the game to teach them and it only slightly helped. it was also a problem that never in any of my classes have i had a lesson on offense, defense, dribble, shoot, etc. so we'll just say a gained a lot of vocabulary that day and did a lot of moving people around to show them physically what to do. part 2 of my plan was a pick-and-roll. we'll just say that that part of the plan crashed and burned before the game ever started. and we got stomped again. nonetheless, i did get asked by the head coach of the university team if i had a student card and could play on the team. the best part of talking to her was when she asked me how long i had played basketball and i told her i played in high school but hadn't played in a number of years. i think she chose to assume i had misspoken than reevaluate her thought that i was 19 years old.

C- cookies- one of danielle's and my favorite cooking blogs is ourbestbites.com and they have the most amazing chewy chocolate chip cookie recipe. i have made multiple batches in the past couple weeks, enough that i had to start baking only half the dough and freezing the rest because all the cookies would get eaten so fast in our house and we don't need that. and i only had one egg the other day and learned that you can substitute a banana (or half) for an egg (or yoke). fascinating. and jarred had no idea. almost as good as when i fooled him with tofu instead of ricotta in lasagna.

D- decorations- so we don't really have fall here. the weather kind of goes from summer to winter with a few random fall-ish days in between. so i do my best to put up some fall decorations to make it seem in our house at least like it is my favorite season of the year. jarred complained when i put them out the last week of september since it was still 80 degrees out, but i think he likes them now. just in time for christmas decorations to go up.
E-examination- last week jarred took an exam for a grad level class he is in the process of taking. i am pretty sure he did really well. he read his essays to me afterwards and at least i thought they were great. now to writing that 10 page paper...

F- facial hair-2 weeks ago jarred started growing a beard. he is playing in a big football game in a few weeks and all the guys grow out their facial hair. i didn't think jarred was planning on doing it but when he found out i didn't care he stopped shaving he was all in. just in time for our christmas picture. i never thought i would be googling how to groom a beard, but the other night we did. i am curious as to if he'll keep it or not.

G- gillian grace- was a stegasaurus for halloween. i am so glad i live in asia and don't have to celebrate that stupid holiday (although i have to celebrate ones about the moon and dragon boats, so i don't know that i really win here), but this is one cute dinosaur niece.
H-How People Grow- right now i have to read this book and i am glad that i do bc i would probably never pick such a deep, psychological book on my own. but it is so good and challenging and i highly recommend it. seriously, i think every adult should read this book because i think the current generation is one that is very good at not dealing with issues that each of us has and not fully becoming what we are intended to be. it's by henry cloud and john townsend. check it out.

I- igoogle- jarred recently set up an igoogle page as his homepage and he is OBSESSED with it. i mean, it does seem pretty incredible to have everything you want to read or know right there on one page, but it seems to have changed his life.

J- jeanette. my sister's best friend from college, who has practically become a part of our family over the past 10 years came to visit 2 weeks ago. she is awesome and was such a fun guest on her own accord in addition to bringing us pounds and pounds of goodies. the right kind of visitor. she only failed in one request- kidnapping my niece and bringing her too. but she brought me a picture of gillian in her stegasaurus outfit and that sufficed.

K- kleins- because it is 27 DAYS until my parents and little sister get here. i am excited beyond belief. jarred i think bought earplugs.

L- Lord of the Rings- these are some of my husband's favorite movies and i have never seen them all. a few years ago i watched the first one with him and some friends, but never finished the trilogy. and apparently, according to real l of r fans at least, you can't wait the second 2 years later without rewatching the first one. so in an attempt to love my husband very well, i told him i would watch ALL 3 with him before christmas. i bet in a few weeks i will blow your minds with my lord of the rings trilogy. i just wish gollum wasn't so gross.

M- ma yo yo, better known as yo yo ma to we Americans (in East Asia you put the last name first). jarred has downloaded a lot of his music, and then expressed a recent interest in learning the cello. this may sound out there to many of you, but my husband is actually very musically talented. he played the saxophone all through school and excelled at it. however, after high school, there were not many opportunities for him to continue since he wasn't a music major. either way, if he can find a teacher and a cheap cello, he has plans to start learning! i am excited for this.

N-nikon d90- after almost 2 years of talking and planning for getting a digital slr camera, we finally decided on which one we wanted, our requested christmas present from many family members. it is simple enough for me to use and be happy with, and complex enough for jarred to learn the ins-and-outs of and use to its max capability. future pictures should be even better.

O- oranges- my favorite asian fruit, real mandarin oranges are out in full force at the market. they are amazing, and this year my parents will get to try them after hearing me rave about them for years. yum.

P- pumpkin. um, it is fall. and this year the best thing about pumpkin is that of the 2 new pumpkin creations i have made this fall jarred has loved BOTH of them. no more bashing my pumpkin roasting and freezing because he loved pumpkin bars with brown sugar icing and cream of pumpkin soup (a cup of whole cream, who wouldn't?). and the other day i made homemade pumpkin spice lattes with danielle, grace, and lindsey! i just might put pumpkin spice in his decaf one day.

Q- quiet nights at home with jarred have been few and far between lately. but it is fall, so anytime we get one and i ask him what he wants me to make him for dinner, he answers "something hearty. its fall." i didn't know what "hearty" food was before his requests. now i know. hearty qualifies as anything with large quantities of meat, potatoes, and carrots. greens on the side are acceptable.

R-rustic tart- a couple weeks ago jarred made this incredible pear and cranberry rustic tart from simplyrecipes.com. i guess him having an igoogle page pays off for me too! i heavily suggest making this delicious little dessert. and by this point you can probably tell which one of us has the knack for making an incredible pie crust. he gets it from his mom.
S- Sundays- jarred and i have been leading the toddlers this month at the service we go to and it has been great. they are cute and old enough at 2 to 4 that they don't cry all that much being away from their parents for an hour and a half. and jarred is an awesome teacher. our last week is this week, though, and i don't think we will overly broken up over it. the best part: at 12:10 their parents come back and pick them up.

T- travel- i feel like jarred and i have been all over the place in the last 2 months. one of our fav trips took us to another city here where one of our neighbors from last year now lives and we had an absolute blast getting to see him. we also got to go to the h&m (my favorite store in the world) on the second day it was open. i wouldn't recommend that in a city metrapolis of 31 million people. despite not being able to breath, i still loved it.

U- UGGs. yes i am well aware that these were popular in the states like 3 years ago. but i just bought leggings and it is cold here. not only that, but shopping taobao (the asian ebay) is one of our new favorite things) and i ordered them for like 17 bucks. ok so they probably are real, but who cares? i live in asia.

V- vacation- last month we booked our vacation for this year in koh lanta. just about the time the cold weather and no heat here gets unbearable and classes are over for the semester, we get to go to this magical place in thailand and drink watermelon shakes, play beach volleyball, and lay in the sun and read. our little heaven on earth.
W- the wire- our friend daniel suggested this show to us and i will not recommend it to others bc the language is less than desirable, but that aside, it is an incredible show. i like it despite the language bc it is so realistic and i want to enter into that and actually know about it and not pretend like it doesn't exist a few blocks away from the suburbs in most of our cities. it does, nonetheless, make me so thankful i live in asia and not in america, especially not in the projects in baltimore. but it is such a good commentary on urban america and the drug trade. i have a personal soap box on the drug trade and the screwed up judicial system that continually punishes the dealers and not the users, but fails in that anyways because they only nail low-levels and not the people actually in charge. there are lots of problems, and the show shows a lot of sides. i had been trying to convince jarred to live in an inner-city whenever we move back to the states, but i don't know if i'm ready for that. we'll see. i'm definitely not ready to ever be a cop. or a drug dealer.

X- eXchange rate- when we moved here it was 8:1, last year it was 6.8, this week it is 6.65. ugh. let's just say we aren't personally in favor of congress pressuring our country over here to let its currency fall more.

Y- yundonghui- means sports day- kind of like an american field day. although in america we only have field days for elementary school children, here in asia they have them for college students too. and our school's is today, the day after thanksgiving. since jarred, grace, and daniel are all leaving town, they got out of it. i told the school that i didn't want to participate. they signed me up anyway, for 3 races. they wanted me to run the 100, the 200, and the 400, and they wanted me to show up at 8:30 am to prepare for the opening ceremony. students prepare for weeks for these races. the day after thanksgiving for me? not gonna happen. so i jarred called the school and told them i couldn't participate. they were astonished! what could be more important than the sports meeting? only here in east asia are college students forced to participate in children's events. as my friend josh says, no one makes forced fun more miserable than east asia.

Z- zap- is what max's new shock collar does to him when he's bad. it is awesome.

Fall and foodies

It is autumn again here, and we have been so busy eating pumpkin spice that we haven't had time to blog. Sometimes we put it in lattes, sometimes in pies, sometimes I just find myself eating entire bowls of pumpkin spice for breakfast! (A few weeks ago, the coffee shop in town gave away free drinks if you said "A touch of pumpkin" to the cashier. I made my wife say it. I just couldn't do it. Its kind of like ordering the "Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity" at Ihop. Its by far the best deal on the menu, and you get the most food, but most guys will pass it up to keep from having to say it. I confess I totally ripped that example off of Tim Hawkins.)

Actually, in an effort to expand my culinary tastes this year, I have decided to take on some of these pumpkin delicacies that Shelley cranks out of the kitchen day after day. I started with pumpkin bars. I actually enjoyed them. Thursday night, Shelley made pumpkin soup, which was also delicious. Before you know it, it'll be in my latte.

I guess with all this pumpkin, Shelley and I officially can call ourselves "foodies." I heard that a foodie is the new thing to be in America now, so in order to stay updated to our home culture, we will also be foodies. Based on all the people I have heard calling themselves foodies lately, I have figured out that a foodie is typically: middle class, likes good food, has watched the Food Network before and can name a chef off of the food network. Since Shelley and I fall into those 3 categories, I am officially declaring us "foodies." I will give you some examples of our foodie-ness:

1. The other day set up an igoogle page and there was a food blog automatically placed on the page. I did not remove it when I customized my igoogle page.

2. Mario Batali... BAM!!!

3. Regular Doritos... oh no... we only do Cool Ranch Doritos in our house. We're kind of foodies (I think this is how you are supposed to say it)

4. Last week I only ate American food 5 times, and I was offered tofu 6 times (ok, so it was a choice at the cafeteria, but still, I'm a kind of a foodie, so I like to eat at interesting places that most people wouldn't understand.)

5. My wife has an allrecipes recipe box.

6. Two words: pumpkin... bars... we don't do brownies anymore. We're kind of foodies.

7. One time I saw an Epicurious magazine, or Epi Mag as we foodies call it (I don't know where you buy Siberian quail, or what ginko root stuffed truffles are, but I don't have to know, I just have to throw it out in conversation to keep my foodie status)

Thats right. Totally foodies.

It feels so good to know that even though we are a world away, we can still keep up with America by being so culturally counter-cultural. It is refreshing to know that we enjoy good food. It is sad that most people don't understand what it is like to enjoy good food. But then again, if they did, being a foodie wouldn't be so special.


This blog posted from my super cool Apple product

the national team

last friday night jarred and i went with some of our good friends here to see the men's national soccer team here play against syria. we didn't really know what to expect, but we were pretty sure there wouldn't be popcorn and nachos waiting for us. we have been in the middle of a week-long downpour so the field was more like a shallow swimming pool, making for some pretty ugly soccer, but we were thankfully dry since the stadium seats were covered. the night ended up being really awesome because we rarely do cool things here like go to a huge soccer game with thousands of other people in a stadium in the big city that we didn't even know existed. it was also awesome because the south african vuvuzuelas have invaded this country as well. i am pretty tempted to think that all of south africa's were exported from here. and as if those things weren't bad enough through the tv at the world cup, they are way worse in person. especially when your friends buy them! and then the 4 guys with us (my husband included) deemed it their responsibility to introduce the people of this country to the art of celebrating a goal by taking off your shirt (or all 3 layers if it is really cold) and waving it around your head. as if we didn't already stick out enough, people all around turned to look at the foreigners going crazy with their shirts off. cameras started flashing, aimed at our boys and not at the field. thankfully they were cheering for the home team (although it did make us a little nervous to cheer against syria). the night was great, even if there were zero concessions, no mascots, and no band or cheerleaders. actually come to think of it, i think it was better without cheerleaders. much better. it did make us miss football season in america, although it was a decent substitution. the fun things we get to do living here!

i didn't have my camera, but check out the picture below i yanked from josh and danielle's blog:

coffee on the porch

this year jarred's and my schedules aren't quite as matching as they were last year. with a change in a lot of things we have been scrambling a bit more to pencil in things like phone calls to america and quality time with each other. a couple weeks ago we sat down for a bit and looked at each of our schedules to try to figure out our mutual free times. and when we finished we had instituted a new weekly event in our schedule: coffee on the porch.
once or twice this summer we both grabbed a cup of coffee and headed to our porch to chat with each other and read. and so when we were looking for time in our week to get quality time together and realized we have most saturday mornings free, we wrote in coffee on the porch.
so the past number of saturday mornings we have been sitting on our porch together in what is becoming brisk morning air nursing our cups of joe and hanging out. and it has become our new favorite time of the week.

fun washing dishes

tonight jarred and i had a kitchen starting to pile up with dishes and we planned into our schedule doing the inevitable: actually washing them. remember, no mechanical dishwashers here.

and when i mentioned washing dishes tonight my husband replied with 2 words: bob segar.
not that he EVER listens to bob segar, mind you. but if you have ever walked up to the klein house in norfolk about 9 pm on a weeknight you might have heard bob segar blaring from the kitchen. and that means that my dad is doing dishes. if it lasts, it means the floor is getting mopped too.

so in our recreation of pamela place (since it is a really fun place and we haven't been there in awhile), we pulled up my itunes, hooked the computer up to speakers, and blasted some classic rock as we got to work.

our playlist:
katmandu- bob segar
devil with the blue dress on - mitch rider
bad moon rising- ccr
fortunate son- ccr
born in the usa- bruce springsteen
glory days- bruce springsteen
rock and roll never forgets- bob segar
mony mony- billy idol
a day in the life- the beatles
roam- the b52s
walk this way- aerosmith
wheel in the sky- journey
kashmir- led zepplin
don't stop til you get enough- michael jackson (ok, so we veered a little...)
reelin' in the years- steely dan
take the money and run- steve miller band

and we had an awesome combination of dish-washing and dance-partying in our kitchen for the next hour. thankfully, i got to dry which is way more conducive to dancing. max got scared and left the room.

i thought i would serenade jarred with arabian nights from the aladdin soundtrack which he dubbed torture and retaliated by making me suffer through one minute and 19 seconds of no rain by blind melon. why do have either of those on my itunes? and bubba sparxx miss new booty somehow made it into the rock genre too so i gave him a whirl. jarred told me i needed to start treating my itunes like an email inbox and going on a deleting binge every so often. maybe a good idea.

i definitely have the most fun husband ever! only he could make washing dishes so fun. our night left us wishing this guy was our neighbor. [sorry no sound, it's way better with sound] and speaking of neighbors, hopefully ours don't hate us.

rock on.

guys' weekend

Shelley is out of town with friends for a retreat this weekend, so Max and I are on our own here at the house. So with nothing to do this morning, I decided that we would go for a hike in the mountains nearby our complex out where we live. I look at these mountains every day, and have always wondered what was beyond them, so we were up and at 'em early to beat the sun. The hike was really peaceful, and I think Max really enjoyed being off the leash for a while. I can't believe how beautiful the land is beyond the mountains. I could literally see our apartments from the mountain top, and had no idea that this much beauty was this close. If you face towards our apartments on one side of the mountain, this is what you see:

All of that was farmland only 4 years ago. Now it consists of 8 university campuses and 5 new apartment complexes with multiple 6 lane roads and a subway under construction. I literally live in the game Sim City where you build an entire city on your computer. It isn't a gradual development into a city. They are literally building an entire brand new city in the course of 5 years. What took Charlotte 50-60 years to develop, the government here is doing in 5. It is unbelievable the pace of construction, but that also makes for a lot of noisy dumptrucks and consistently changing closed down section of roads. The amazing thing is when you turn around in the same spot on the mountain top 180 degrees, you get this view:
That is miles of pristine farmland. Those terraces were probably cut in the land hundreds of years ago and are still being farmed today. This was the part that Maximus loved in particular, all of this open land to run on. I stopped under a tree to do some reading and listen to some music while he ran non-stopped for a solid hour. It was a great way to tire him out. The whole time we were on the trail Max and I only ran into one lone friendly farmer and his dog on the way to the well to get some water for the day. Here is a picture of the trail:

And here is one happy pup.
I am still not sure what kind of dog Maximus is. He doesn't love the water like a retriever, but he does love open grass fields, particularly sniffing out birds and chasing a frisbee. He looks nothing like a bird dog. He can run wide open at what I think is 18mph for 5 minutes nonstopped (I clocked this because he likes to race me on the electric scooter, but I'm not sure if my electric scooter speedometer is right or not. I have been going faster than Shelley before and my scooter says I'm doing 34 kmh while hers says she is doing 50kmh. Somebody's is way off.). They say that mutts make the best dogs. Maybe Pedigree puts steroids in their puppy chow. Who knows? Either way, he has the energy of a 24 pack of Red Bull 100% of the time he is not asleep.

All in all this was a great guys' morning getaway, and something I will definitely take more advantage of in the future!

The Middle of Autumn

This past week marked the arrival of the annual Mid-Autumn holiday here in East Asia, the rough (I mean very rough) equivalent to our Thanksgiving day in America. This is Shelley and my 4th Mid-Autumn holiday, and by now we have learned the ins and outs of celebrating this holiday. However, even in the midst of our Mid-Autumn experiences, there are still some things that remain a mystery:

1. Not once has this holiday fallen in the middle of autumn unless autumn starts in July. It is late September, people in America just stopped going to the beach. I am still mourning the loss of summer and they are wanting me to celebrate the arrival of autumn. I think the pumpkin spice conglomerates are behind this somewhere.
2. Making up class. This does not only apply to this holiday, but to every holiday. The government determines which days everyone is allowed off from work or school to travel around these holidays. You get the actual DAY off, but you get to take a few more days of vacation around that day. However, you then have to make up the work or school missed for the vacation days over the weekend. Why they don't just move the vacation days to the weekend when people would already be off of school and work is beyond me. Therefore, no one goes to class on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, but then they have to go to class on Saturday and Sunday to make up Wednesday and Friday. Thus, you don't actually get a holiday. It is screwy, and no matter how much I try to assimilate to this culture, this one I will never get.
   
3. Where does this holiday originate from? Nobody knows. Last year, I read 2 stories- one about some pagan goddess who is exiles herself to the moon, and another about a rabbit who sacrificed himself in a fire so some pagan god could have a meal so the god rewarded him by putting him on the moon. My teacher told me that neither of these are true, and she didn't even know where this festival comes from. Every other culture celebrates a festival around this time because that is when the harvest comes in, but apparently here, it has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with... anything. "It is just our tradition" one student told me.
   
4. How in the world this holiday started the tradition of eating these:
   

That is a moon cake. Not a moonpie mind you, but a moon cake. A holiday that celebrates by eating lots of moon pies would be like Christmas come mid-autumn, but be not fooled. This is nothing like a moon pie. The moon cake originated... well, much like the holiday itself, no one seems to know where the moon cake originated either. These babies come in 2 flavors- salty and sweet. If someone asks you your preference, you want to go sweet here. Salty means a cake with egg, tofu, or ham in the middle. Sweet means a fruit paste that is kind of like a fig newton, only worse. It doesn't matter which flavor is advertised on the package, the fruit paste is all the same, like a fig newton, only worse. With enough water or grain alcohol, you can choke down a sweet mooncake, you can only choke back up a salty one. When you hold a moon cake for the first time, you discover that it is a lot heavier than it looks. That is because each of these handheld cakes packs a 700+ calorie punch. Take that Little Debbie. Typically, they come wrapped in a decorative packaging like above. However, some of the cheaper versions come wrapped in wax paper, kind of like a sausage biscuit from Hardees, only half the size and twice the calories. The ones in wax paper are usually dripping in grease. Shelley received one last week, and she couldn't put it in her bag to take it elsewhere to regift it because it was so greasy. In an effort to regift it, she decided to leave it on top of a trashcan in hopes that someone would come along and take it to regift elsewhere. But what about the slim chance that the person who regifted it to her came by that trashcan? Certainly she would discover that the foreigner didn't love her regift, and leaving it on a trashcan is not an acceptable way to regift yourself, thus, her friend would be heartbroken. So, Shelley was forced to do the unthinkable, throw it in the trash

When you unwrap them, they look harmless:
But break one open, and you see where the weight comes from:

That's a lot of "strawberry paste."

When you are a foreigner in this land, you are sure to receive a ton of mooncakes from the natives. Don't be fooled. They aren't seeking to bless you. They are usually just re gifting them. there is no shame in regifting here. The other day a friend invited me to his dorm room. Upon arriving, he discovered that the school left him 3 mooncakes on his desk while he was away. He immediately gave them to me, a classic regift. Once you get experienced enough in this culture, you lose your inhibitions and guilty feelings and learn how to regift yourself. My wife is very experienced at this, and managed to regift 100 percent of her mooncake take last year. Impressive.

This year, we spent the holiday with friends, regifting them many mooncakes and eating none ourselves with a smile on our face. However, when we arrived at home after dinner, we discovered that we had one mooncake remaining. FAILURE! Or not so much... only because we found one who loves mooncakes and who will never regift one:



Happy Mid-Autumn Holiday Maximus. And happy Mid-Autumn day to all of you. Now we have to get ready go to class.

recents

1. a new year= a new teacher. and our teacher is awesome. she is nice, sweet, kind. younger than us, strange enough. but she awesome and we love class with her. that is the good news. the bad news (maybe?) is that i don't foresee jarred and her getting in fights in class over whether or not you can hike up a mountain when it is cloudy, whether all or only some pandas are envoys, and whether or not a teacher should address her self in the first person. but less funny stories should mean more enjoyable class time for my husband.

2. baking. last weekend i tried out my new cake decorating stuff. those things are so fun! we had a cookout with some old and new friends. and i made these incredible key lime cupcakes with key lime buttercream icing. unbelievable. i definitely recommend them. check out this recipe minus all the coconut stuff and this icing. yum. the gooey-ness in the middle is delicious. i am having technical difficulties getting a pic of the final cupcakes up, but i'll keep trying.

and this is some of us at the cookout:

3. lamps. last weekend i also took 2 of our old lamps in our living room that were just looking kind of ratty and covered them with some fun and funky bright red fabric. not sure where i got the idea, but i got the how-to's here. howcast.com is my new favorite website i think. it seriously has the how-to video for practically anything you can think about. check out the before and afters:

a domestic birthday

3 of my birthday presents have given me high aspirations for domestic development for the coming year.

1. my grandpa gave me money for this sewing machine.

a year ago i said that if i had money to spend on being creative, i said i would buy a sewing machine. my mom is seamstress galore and her mother was seamstress galore and so i figure i must have inherited at least some of those genes somewhere. i am telling myself they just haven't been developed yet. it took me approximately 10 hours to get the machine set up to sew. it quite possibly tested my patience more than anything i have ever done. and i only cried twice in the process because it was making me so angry trying to figure what the heck was going on between the poorly translated user's manual and a bajillion strange looking knobs on my machine. at that point i also think i was cursing norfolk collegiate for not having a home ec class and forcing me to learn to sew anything at any point in my 13 years there. and then i went a week ago and bought fabric for some first projects including placemats and a tabecloth. we're starting simple here, folks. and my goal is to do them by christmas. then my mom will be here and can hopefully fix them along with all the rest of the problems i will probably be having. i tried watching some youtube videos but jarred said that if sewing made me talk like the people making the videos then he was going to throw the machine out the window. i'll stick to the user's manual. who knows, maybe a quarter century from now i could sew my daughter's wedding dress too?! but right now i'll just work on those placemats.

2. my in-laws bought me a cake decorating set.

my mother-in-law made awesome cakes for jarred's birthdays growing up, so i hope that by the time i have kids that are old enough to request a hamburger birthday cake 5 years in a row i will be able to deliver. and between the accompanying cake-decorating direction book and a practically-professional, cake-decorating friend down the street, i should get lots of opportunities to learn and practice this year.

3. and my parents bought me a bread machine.

granted, my first loaf turned out absolutely awful. we'll just call that a practice round. this week i will be making some adjustments and trying again with an asian-proven, altitude-adjusted recipe. bread here is just not good in my book. and jarred loves a homemade recipe i make for bread. however, i, on the other hand, do not love the all-day process of kneading and letting rise, punching down and letting rise, etc. that homemade bread requires. so...the solution: a bread machine. what sounds better than dumping in a bunch of things, pressing a couple buttons, and coming back a few hours later to delicious bread? well, that's if i can get it working a bit better. check back for how it goes. the major problem: the manual has no english. this could be a process. i am pretty sure, though, that the idea of waking up to fresh bread or having a sandwich on normal-tasting bread is so motivating that i cannot be stopped.

here is to 26- the year of honing my domestication skills.

escaped

every time jarred and i leave our house we put maximus in our guest bathroom along with his cage and water. about 2 months ago he started scratching at the bottom of the plastic $15 door that our landlord put in. and being the plastic $15 door that it is, he has slowly been scratching more and more of the bottom of the door off.

and then the other night as we were walking up the 5 flights to our apartment, we heard barking. we opened our front door to this:

it was really endearing to have our sweet little puppy greet us at the front door... only we had left him in the bathroom. and that means that what presumably happened is this:

yes, our 9-month-old puppy tunneled his way out of the bathroom. luckily he hasn't destroyed anything else in the house...yet. unlucky that now we have to replace 2 bathroom doors in our house (remember the lock breaking with me on the inside and jarred kicking the door in? yeah, that one still hasn't been replaced.) which has been a fiasco in itself.

Book review

I love reading. I learned to read at age 3, and ever since then I have always loved reading. Books, magazines, fiction, non-fiction, blogs, airline safety instructions, I read all of them (my wife knows that under no circumstances will I help her with her oxygen mask on a plane until mine is first properly working).

There are very few books I don't enjoy reading, or can't finish. However, as of late, I have had a rare encounter with one. It is a 500 page biography of Augustine of Hippo. Usually, if I encounter a book that I don't like, I try to bull through it and finish it anyways, or I put it back on the shelf and hope that it will be of more interest to me later on in life. I have a copy of James Joyce's Ulysses that has been on my shelf for 2 years now. I love Joyce. He was an incredibly descriptive novelist. But 2 pages into this book, and I knew I couldn't do it. So I look at it longingly each day hoping that some day I will gain the desire to try again. It hasn't happened yet. Well, this biography is another book like that. The only problem is, it is required reading for a class I am about to take, so not only do I have to bull through it, I have to know what it says. Therefore, what usually takes me a week to a week and a half to read has taken me a month and I'm halfway done. The book is written by Peter Brown who is the foremost English authority on Augustine in the world (according to his book). He graduated from Cambridge and now teaches at Princeton. He writes like someone who has graduated from Cambridge and now teaches at Princeton. To read this book, not only do you need an unusually large interest in Augustine, but you need to have a working knowledge of Latin and an geographic mastery of Imperial Roman Africa, of which I have neither. Right now I am on a read one chapter and then nap for 30 minute routine. I have never had a book put me to sleep like this one. 3 pages in and I am drowsy, by the time I get through the chapter you could do outpatient surgery on me and I wouldn't know. Then I wake up 30 minutes later and plow through the next chapter, only to fall back asleep for 30 minutes. I hate cliff notes, but I would seriously buy them and read them instead of this book. I'm not sure even Cliff could summarize what this guy is saying.

To make matters worse, this book is interrupting a current list of books that I promised my wife I would finish before I purchased any other books. I am on a book buying freeze, and I can't continue on with that list until I clear this giant roadblock since it is required reading for a class. What is ahead of me you may ask? A Tim Keller book, a biography on Bear Grylls, given to me by a great friend for an airplane ride that I fell asleep too long on, a John Stott book, a book debating Calvinism, and a book on marriage that I haven't decided on yet. All better options than stupid Peter Brown and his attempt to make one of the greatest theologians in the history of the world boring. If I was Augustine, I would be angry at Peter Brown for ruining my life. That isn't an exaggeration... when you write a bad biography, you are literally ruining the subject's life. So, Augustine's life has been ruined, 1600 years post-humously, by Peter Brown, the foremost English expert on his life. Great man... ruined. Thanks Peter Brown for ruining Augustine's life, and for limiting my book purchasing to Amazon wish-listing. I hope you and your colleagues in the Ivy are enjoying smoking your pipes and ruining the lives of great men.

farmer jarred

about 6 months ago jarred ordered a bunch of seeds off of the asian ebay so that he could begin growing them in pots on our porch. about a month into the process max dug out all of our basil seeds, followed then by our lavender and rosemary seeds dying. however, the tomato seeds turned into seedlings, we transplanted them, and they have kept growing. and yesterday we harvested our first 2 cherry tomatoes! here is proud farmer jarred with his farmer dog (who kept trying to eat them as i took pictures) with his prize organic tomatoes :) too bad they are a little small for tomato sandwiches.

new friends

friday night we got some new neighbors. that's right, more white faces out here. in fact, sort of doubling the number we had before. check out this beautiful pic of them after traveling for 24 hours. i'm sure you'll hear a lot about them over the coming months.

welcome to the land of squatties and split-bottom pants, new friends.

and to add to the excitement, our good friend chad who lived in asia years ago has moved back for awhile. we can't wait to hang out with him and his new wife!

car accident

A few nights ago Shelley and I were taking Maximus on a walk, and we came across a car accident in our complex. Both cars were there, and the emergency lights on both were flashing, but no one was in the car. In fact, no one else was even around. We thought it was interesting, especially since it seemed to be blocking the road.

The next morning I took Max out for a walk only to walk outside to the same car accident, still no people:

At noon the next day, well over 14 hours since we first saw these 2 cars, and they were still there, no people, no one to move them.
It appears that one guy was driving in East Asia and one guy was driving in England and when you make a legal right turn into a guy who is driving on the left hand side of the road your Mitsubishi SUV tends to plow into the front of his car.

What is a mystery is how countless people have walked by and no one seems to know what happened, or who owns these 2 cars. The next afternoon I called the HOA here, and they hadn't even heard that there had been a wreck in the complex.

This is why I still haven't used my drivers license.