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.

really?

a couple weeks ago we were discussing the fact that our city doesn't have one foreign hotel in it. the big city near us isn't the most major one over here by any means, but we still know of even smaller cities that have western hotel chains- and along with those usually come western restaurants or at least a western breakfast buffet. yes, delicious. but, alas, the city near us has none.

that same week jarred and i went to a sort-of deserted park to have a picnic and throw the frisbee for max. it is really close to us but takes awhile to get there because of all of the construction going on out here. and it is sort-of deserted because the government built this brand-new ginormous government complex out here and then once it was done decided not to move out here. we have heard a plethora of rumors as to why including that the mayor came to look at the buildings after they were completed and didn't think they were grand enough. but in my opinion they are some of the most beautiful architecture i have seen here. anyways, we were at this park and it is right next to this complex where they have been building a hotel for the entire year we have lived out here. and then i looked up and saw a howard johnson sign on top of the hotel. i immediately thought that the people building this hotel had just ripped off the american hotel chain name and put a huge sign on top of this hotel. and for me to think this is not that off-base given the fact that there is a fake version of practically everything here... clothes, phones, computers, cameras, seriously everything. and since the city near us has no foreign hotels and we live in the middle of nowhere right now, an actual howard johnson would make zero sense.

but then again, a lot of things here make zero sense to me. and as it turns out, this hotel:

right across the main road from us is a real howard johnson! we looked it up on the hojo website and everything. over the next 5 years or so the entire area out by us is supposed to explode with businesses, apartments, and (above all) people, and i guess howard johnson wanted to get in on the front end by opening this september. but what that picture doesn't show is that everything else around this hotel is muddy construction and villages, well, plus the empty government buildings.

and as you can tell, this hotel is pretty nice. another ironic thing about this place is that cheap-o places in america strike up a new image in asia and become super nice establishments. for example, pizza hut is one of the nicest restaurants in the big city near us. and it is really expensive comparatively. no $4.99 lunch buffet here. and so i have never thought of howard johnson as a luxury hotel, but it sure seems like that is what is will be. strange.

we are just hoping they have a western breakfast :)