Annie's Adventures

the ups and downs

2011-09-05T10:18:00.001-07:00

Has it really only been one week since Hurricane Irene crossed into Vermont, devastating our little state? I can't believe how quickly the tides turned on my own life. There I was, expecting a full fall harvest from my garden, only to discover it all for naught under the epic deluge of the Winooski. While most of the plants survived, and thankfully, so did Mark's hand-crafted bean structures (those deserve their own picture post), I have been made aware that they could be incredibly toxic because of all of the sewage, leaking propane tanks, etc... that made their way down renegade streams and into the river. So I've felt a lot of emotional ups and downs over the last week...

Cue graduate school.

This semester, I am starting my master of education in Interdisciplinary Studies - meaning, I decide which courses I think are relevant out of all of the College of Education and Social Services offerings, and take only those that I choose. Lovely, right? Especially because I think of myself first as a student of life, always taking every opportunity to find a learning experience in whatever nature, people, or myself throws in my path. Or on top of my garden.

So I'm beginning with a class on Religion and Spirituality, where I can both learn to have moral and religious conversations in the most politically correct and attentive way possible, and so that I can embrace the spiritual side of myself with a conscious effort that has sort of been neglected since I've been flying by the seat of my pants in Vermont. The class is mainly readings, and here is the first book of the semester:

This is exactly what I need right now, positivity and thinking outside of myself. Especially given my feeling of anxiety and sadness over my garden, and not knowing what I should do with all of that time. And then I opened my book to the chapter entitled "Humility" today--and I think it perfectly details the way I've been feeling as I reflect on the destruction of my garden and the terrible loss of possessions, homes, and life that have occurred due to the storms last weekend. I hope to develop my sense of humility into something productive going forward, and I will start just the same way my garden is beginning anew. Plant a new seed, care for it daily, and always reach for the light. :)

futility

2011-08-30T04:26:00.000-07:00

This road of water (some would call it a river) has swallowed my garden and countless others, several community farms, a flower patch, and even the home of some adorable chickens, completely whole.

The flooding from Irene has hit Vermont harder than we expected. While I can say with great thanks to the universe that all I lost was my garden and not my home, it still feels like I have lost a pet or some piece of my family to this disaster. When I went to the garden at 8 am yesterday, there was no water on this road yet, and I thought we had managed to escape the worst of it. So I left our beautiful hand-made trellises, the many ripe tomatoes and edamame that had been fattening up for weeks. I left the butternut squash and pumpkins to pick for later, and waved goodbye to the pea, radish, and bean sprouts to enjoy the beautiful sunny blue day.

Driving out of the Intervale, I saw the water coming in. Now there is nothing to be done as it is under 3 feet of water. Let's hope and pray that something makes it through, without a ridiculous coating of mud or a camper landing on it. :( Sadness...

smiles on my toes

2011-08-28T14:01:00.000-07:00

These Keds put smiles on my toes. Back in March, I begged my coworker and friend Jody to draw octopuses on these rather bright pink Keds that I picked up on a whim. I imagined black Sharpie-sketches, and about mid-July, he gifted me with these absolute works of art. They blew me away, and make me smile and skip whenever I get the privilege of wearing them!

Unfortunately, today is NOT one of those days, as Hurricane Irene stretches her rage out to Vermont. We've had rain since somewhere in the middle of the night, and even though I have octopuses on these shoes, I hate to admit that they don't know how to swim. I'll leave that for the trout and salmon and those people brave enough to go outside on a day like this. As for me, I'm enjoying the fact that I don't have to make any excuses to sit at home and use garden tomatoes in fresh soup (a recipe from Former Chef) and start planning some embroidery projects. !:)!

PS--Jody makes real art, not just shoe art, too. You can see his work at his Etsy shop, Scribble Factory, and buy some if it's up your alley. In return for my shoes, I'm gifting him with garden produce and home-made salsa every chance I get. Thankfully, he thinks it's a fair trade.

Earth to Matilda... hello Matilda?

2011-08-24T19:15:00.000-07:00

Haven't blogged in awhile, wondering if you are still out there in the ether...

I just need to pop in because I want to start this up again. Mostly, I need a happy place to filter the events of my life, and to reflect on the changes occurring that I'm mostly responsible for, but entirely incapable of controlling. Starting next week, I'll be a grad student at UVM in Interdisciplinary Studies. And I have no idea if I'll have a job or an internship or some melding of the two, but I can only hope for some tuition assistance or financial aid or at least time to get back to baking and gardening.

Speaking of, I need to make some picture time for the garden. There is ZERO documentation of this year's fruits, and thankfully, we've managed to eke out many meals of the bounty. Despite blossom end rot on tomatoes, 75% of my home-grown squash eaten at the stalk by triangle devil beetles, and plenty of bean bugs. It's still more than enough for the pair of us in my home, and happily extras for Annie and the crew to enjoy some supplemental feasting. And a gift of tomatoes and basil and husk cherries to friends who might deserve some farm-share-love for the kindnesses they show me. :) I cannot express how much I love to share my garden food...I hope people feel it in return.

So to affirm the positive vibes that people have given me in the last week, and to appreciate the love I have discovered in an entirely new life, even if it falls on New England cold-hard-crusty-earthquake-enhancing-hearts (errr, crusts), I love where I find myself, and will keep on reflecting as I begin a new chapter in growing up, falling deeper in love, and exploring my intellectual capacity. :)

recession? NOT ANYMORE!

2010-03-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

Words... I am struggling with them at the moment. I've had a busy and hugely eventful last few weeks! First, I was sort of whipped around with confusion starting a new job (with a 40-hour training week spent trying SO hard to focus, when I just wanted to play outside in the last snowstorm of the year!)...and then interviewing for a job, being told I was wanted, and then nevermind it wasn't working out...and then getting the same job just at a different location. CRAZY. So, then I had to quit the new job and then I had a birthday and then...oh gosh, I don't know. It's just been wild here! BUT, yes, I start my new new (final new, hopefully for at least three years!) job as a bank teller--LOVE the idea of permanency and stability and being paid a living wage, not to mention the intellectual challenges of counting all that money and calculating interest!--on Monday, and I am SO completely looking forward to it that I can't stop using UPPER CASES and EXCLAMATION POINTS and ellipses...

You get the idea. The birthday I had was splendid, one friend cooked me dinner the night before and we bonded majorly over our love for painting and scandalous Rumi poetry...on my actual birth date, I did some yoga and relaxed, while Mark had these MOST beautiful flowers delivered my way. Daffodils are my favorite!! Then we had lunch at an amazing local bakery, napped, and got fed the tastiest dinner of my last long time at my wonderful friend Annie's house. Her cooking is always perfect, that's why I'm always happy to go to her place and play with her and her daughter and "help" with dinner (by bringing all the veggies I can find in my fridge!)... And then Annie busted out an ice cream pie, which oh baby baby--even her husband couldn't stop eating it, and I don't think I've EVER seen him gorge on something sugary. I think he ate half of it, which was good, because I stuffed myself on the canneloni for dinner and didn't leave enough room for all that ice cream goodness!

Then we went to collect maple syrup at one of Mark's professors neighborhoods on Saturday. Annie has posted a much more interesting and photographically talented version of the occasion, so I'll just link you to her awesomeness. And they really do call me Annie 2.0.

I hope your weeks have been nearly half as fun and eventful, and if not, that you have had a sampling of the wonderful sunshine we've also been enjoying too! It's at least 50 degrees here today, and I. LOVE. SUN.

why I'm a slow blogger...and the tortoise won the race.

2010-03-01T18:33:00.000-08:00

Because I attended an inspirational White Coat ceremony for my beloved husband, I was too busy to blog last week. GO MARK and the whole UVM COM 2013! This was a great chance to hang out with lots of people and their parents (and become absolutely OVERWHELMED by small-talk to the point of tears--please don't ask).

And because I go to all of his numerous sporting events, which in the past week alone have included a broomball game (see above-yep, that's Mark in the sweet tight blue shirt) at 10:50 pm, 2 basketball games (which I didn't go to, sorry, I had work to attend), and 5 hours of ultimate frisbee tournamenting on Friday night. Wish I could share the ~~drudgery~~fun that was (Mark enjoyed it at least)...but, you can't know unless you were there. Let's just say, 5 hours of anything usually isn't a good thing (unless it's a LOTR extended-edition viewing, and then, by Thorin's beard, I'm entertained!~)

And finally, I haven't been blogging because at one point, I was doing all of these different crafts (so I could blog about them, naturally). Since I've completed a handful, and have several more I need some motivation on, I'll finally start showing them to you. First up, is this wonderful sweater for my teapot, The Butler. He makes Jeeves shiver with jealousy, don't you think? It was my very first knitting project since the two dish cloths I was forced to attempt at some young women's meetings at church back in 9th grade... ugh, now I shiver just thinking about how much more I wanted to be outside playing soccer than stuck knitting since some lady insisted it was a good skill for me to know to be a good wife someday... and I've made a 180 into thinking it's hip, cool, and like I'm left out without it, even! Oh boy. But I did this cute tea cozy with some fancy wool yoinked from my friend's stash, and it was all a basic cable stitch (because you know I knitted one giant piece of basic knit and thought I had that mastered, even though I just ripped it all apart to re-use the yarn for this!).

Now, I need a new sweet project. And I need to tell you that snowboarding at Smuggler's Notch on Saturday made me SO STINKING happy. First time since before heading out to Egypt over a year ago, and it *mostly* all came back to me. I never even slammed my face, despite riding pure moguls and tree runs all day. HOORAY, can't wait to go up again! (and yes, I wrote about snowboarding because Mark told me to, but mostly because I forget the fun things and start thinking about baking bread and knitting and such as soon as I get on my blog...LAME)

SO, I won't make any more promises on frequency, but I will guarantee that my blog will haunt me about my need to write one way or another. And your comment will only help... ;) love you all, as always! ps--you also need to see Shutter Island, that is, if you want the greatest mind-trip of your life and if you want to use 2 hours to convince yourself that you will never feel sane again. Now THAT is fun!

Camel's Hump!

2010-01-30T11:03:00.000-08:00

Hey ya'll! Been a long time again since I posted, but that's cuz I had to make sure there was something fun to write about. Right. :) Still applying for jobs left and right, while also enjoying my time at J.Crew consistently. I've gotten so many great pieces of clothing on sale in the last month...it's dangerously fun. Got a KILLER pair of shoes yesterday for $12.50!!!

Anyway, what I HAVE done besides shopping while working is finally get a bit of legitimate snowshoeing in. We hiked the 2nd highest peak in Vermont last weekend with some friends from the med school, Alex and Kathryn. 8 miles total, just over 3000 ft. at the peak, and let's just say that I have never been in such a fantastic winter wonderland! Proof is in the pictures:

I like to call these "Dr. Suess trees" because of the tops--which you can barely see, but they're leaning over like the mountaintop in The Grinch. Pretty sweet. :)

Have you ever SEEN so much snowy-iceness? This one on the right looked like a feather head-dress on top of the tree. All wind-blown and stoic, right below the peak of the mountain. SO cool!

Of course, it looks freezing cold, but we lucked out and headed up on a "warm" day--I think the high was 30 degrees. Sunny. Relatively cloudless (except for the fog blowing in and out on the mountain side). Fun times! Mark and I can't wait to hike a few more mountains out here while there's snow on everything. Our next plan is to do Mt. Mansfield, the highest peak in Vermont, and we had planned to do it today but guess what the temperature is? Oh, yeah, 6 degrees at the moment! NOT going out in that, even if it is sunny. My nose freezes in the 10 feet between my house and the car, I'm not brave enough for these temps. It was like -10 this morning, too...sheesh.

Anywho, I'll be posting more soon, promise. I've got some cute Valentine crafts in the works, and I'm also going to head right on over to my friend Annie's house as SOON as I'm done with this post, cuz it's time for me to finish sewing up my very first throw-pillow for my very first married-life-apartment! whoot. :) I hope you all are doing SPLENDIDLY, and are getting outside to enjoy the winter a little bit too. Tata!

belated Christmas fun

2010-01-11T08:21:00.000-08:00

woooosh!

2010-01-11T08:17:00.000-08:00

WHOA time flies by...hope you all had lovely Christmases and New Years! Ours can hardly be rivaled since I was able to share all three extended-edition Lord of the Rings with my dear sweet husband for his first time over the break. Needless to say, he was blown away by their majesty and is already begging me to watch them all again with him. hehe...he had always been a skeptic during our dating-relationship of my passion for LotR (we've been together 5 years and I let him get away with this!!!) and refused to see them. Somehow, I turned him and now his life is better. Yay! He keeps talking about the Ents and how he really wishes he could make friends with the trees. I hope he can be happy in the real world. :)

Anywho, other things I've been doing:

-Starting one knitting project over and over, discovering I'm completely knitting-disabled. I leave holes and drop stitches and it drives me CRAZY that I can't just go back and rip it out easily! Instead, I tear it all apart and start over only to find...a hole. Wish me luck on ever finishing one project made of yarn!

-Baking. French bread, Italian loafs, more more and more banana bread...oh baby, searching for jobs just can't compete with the smell of freshly baked bread!

-Snowshoeing. We went yesterday with our friends to a local park, and somehow we went running off into the woods and one of my feet crashed through the ice into a very small puddle. I stayed warm and it was pleasant for awhile, then my toes starting falling asleep and all I can say is YAY for warm houses and hot chocolate!

-Reading. Book club books for the last two months have been STELLAR. First, "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell--really interesting format, and a very successful science-fiction chapter made it a GREAT read. Although, it didn't really make me discover anything new about humanity or myself, which I always yearn for in a book. Did make me want to slam the character's head into a wall a few times--which is a powerful emotional response, but not always the one I'm looking for in a book. I feel that way about myself enough! Now, for this month, I'm reading "Love Medicine" by Louise Erdrich and I'm not far enough into it to give any critiques, but it is BEAUTIFULLY written and feels so poetic while being completely readable. Also, it's about Native Americans, and it's really wonderful to read something so literary about a population we tend to ignore/neglect as legitimate minorities. Looking forward to reading more of this and future books by this author!

-Sweeping the deep dark corners of our house. Finding many things there that I'm afraid to mention for fear of scorn and ridicule...and some dirty socks. (That ALL belong to Mark. I put mine straight in the hamper, thank you very mucho)

-DIGGING SNOW. Illustration to prove my point of almost three-feet in one night:

And then there was the cute Charley-dog in the snow--see, it's as tall as him!:

Also, had lots of fun with friends and children in the last week or so. I'm working much less now that the retail season is waning, and enjoying getting back to socializing. Will post more soon as life slows down and gives me interesting topics! I hope you are all doing WONDERFUL and look forward to hearing from you as well.

Oh, and I'm thinking I want to make some Valentine cross-stitch cards...anybody want one?

Go Cougs!

2009-12-22T20:30:00.000-08:00

EEK did I just say Go Cougars?! OK...they're kicking some serious butt against that darn BCS team...And did you see Oregon State's lovely 6-yard punt? (Don't worry, check ESPN.com in about 2 hours and I'm sure you'll spot some little diddy) Wind is a beautiful thing. The Cougars are doing so well, I just hope the Utes play equally amazing tomorrow! And, YAY, I get to watch the last half (thank you working till 10pm...grrr) I seem to have been scheduled the most horrendous hours lately. Got off around midnight Monday, worked at 9 am this morning, work tomorrow night and early (all day, really) Christmas Eve. BUT, then I have a day off!

We will post pictures of our tree, decorations, and many presents (it's easy to get lots when you're buying many inexpensive little joys). THANKS for everything we have received so far! Our friends and family have sent some great cards. (Aponi, Angie, Peter, Grandpa and his wife, and now Mark's parents package arrived--thanks!)...oh boy we'll be busy enjoying all of this.

We also saw The Princess and the Frog today, and can I just say it's about time we had a real Disney princess from America? The bayou is the best setting, too! Also, my favorite characters were once again the trusty sidekicks and supporting stars...Raymond is a real standout, that little firefly is probably up there in my favorite Disney characters of all time! (Ahh, but then there was Wall-E AND the cockroach! THAT'S the best Disney ever...loooove it) And the songs are all really fun and great, don't seem too out of place, and yet are not too memorable either, unfortunately. Go see this, you will definitely be happy at the end and walk away feeling joyous and great about life! We're beginning to appreciate films that do that for us more and more, although dramas and sci-fi have their place (like The Road and Avatar which we are TOTALLY going to go see this weekend).

Tata! LOVE ya'll

a catch-up

2009-12-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

Hello all again! Thanks for all the lovely comments, whoo hoo being vegetarian is popular (to talk about, at least). But, just want to make clear that I am not going vegan ANY time EVER because I like cheese. No, I LOVE, NEED cheese. And eggs are pretty good (quiche, frittata, breakfast burritos!!!) and I'm keeping those too. And ice cream. OOOH baby and butter...yay!

Meanwhile...Mark is just one week away from being done with his anatomy course (thus, finishing with his cadaver and having pretty stinky hands most nights). We're sticking it out in Vermont over Christmas break and are so excited to have time together! Snowshoeing a few of the local peaks is high on our to-do list, as well as getting a little time to cook some more amazing food together, see some movies (AVATAR! can't wait!) and open some presents.

Can't say there's a whole lot new going on this week. Can you believe that I'm sick again? Yeah, surprise, now I'm waking up every night coughing and therefore feel exhausted all day. We have several holiday parties we've gone to and are going to this weekend so these late nights aren't helping any. Wish me luck to make it through one more week before I can relax with Mark a little more around the house to help me with things!

Oh, and one last thing--hooray we got some snow finally! I've been begging for it for the last few weeks and we got a decent six inches or so Monday-Tuesday. It finally feels like Christmas is around the corner! Love you all :)

sewing surprises and holiday cheer

2009-12-03T11:18:00.000-08:00

Hello again and Happy belated Thanksgiving! What a crazy busy weekend, whatever happened to holidays being relaxing times? At least we took a few moments to be grateful amongst all of our play. First of all, I received a beautiful little ornament from Finland from the Yahoo Groups ornament exchange I was participating in. It's simple, sleek, and festive, and thus, I love it! Here's the pictures of each side, and I am just so happy over this. Thanks Srinity!

Now that we've set up our tree, it's actually hanging on top as our "star" at the moment--we have a SERIOUS lack of ornaments, and I'm not showing any pictures until we remedy this with a few more paper snowflakes and sparkles. :)

As far as the holiday went, our best best friend Jared (living in Utah) came out East here to visit his family in New Hampshire, and we got to go along for the ride. Mark and I spent Wednesday painting a table we found on the side of the road a few months back:

After doing this for a few hours and realizing the paint wouldn't exactly dry quickly enough to paint a second coat, we hopped in the car and drove out to Jared's family's place. Wednesday night we had delicious calzones with his mother and brothers, and got to enjoy just hanging out with good friends (Jeremiah came along for the fun, too!). At one point, Mark and Jared started kayaking down the grassy mountainside his mother lives on...that was interesting! haha. They always get into the craziest adventures when they are together, no-one understands it but I think we're all quite happy to be a part of it too!

Thursday we went up to Jared's dad's house and got to relax there, the men played some football, and I missed my family so so so much. It hadn't hit me till a holiday came, and then it was just unbearable--thank goodness for phone calls to make the distance a little shorter! For dinner that night, we had homemade lasagna (homemade noodles! Oh WOW) and eggplant parmigiana and bread and tastiness...lovely. I had to leave early though because I got to work the 5 AM shift on Black Friday! YIKES, early, but not too busy and it was fun. Drove BACK to Jared's Friday afternoon, made it in time for an awesome turkey dinner. The highlight for me were the mashed potatoes, that is the one thing I've attempted out here that I just can't seem to get right (texture, flavor, whatever can go wrong DOES when I try to do this! I'm sticking with roasted/baked potatoes and letting the mashing be done by my teeth). Anyway, everyone else said the turkey was incredible, but meat just isn't doing much for me. Hence, now, I am a vegetarian! Haha, we've been working on this for awhile, but it's official now--no more meat for me. I'm planning on observing this lifestyle change indefinitely, until I feel so inclined that it is a need to eat some meat again. It just doesn't make sense economically, emotionally, or ecologically to consume animals when I like the taste of vegetables more anyway. Yanno?

Anyway I am SO off-track here, it's ridiculous. Let's just say we had a good, long weekend, I've now had three days off of work to completely forget whatever it was I did last week, and hopefully I'll get back into blogging more normally without vacations to get in the way for awhile. And then I can focus, and not write such long posts that ramble into oblivion...love ya'll!

How to keep busy!

2009-11-16T17:32:00.000-08:00

Ohhh boy this is hard to type tonight (I burned my fingers on a hot pan from all of the fun that will soon follow), but I must update you on the many things I've done to keep myself busy and creative...first of all, food is high up on my indulgent-creative list. Mark and I have always been wondering how on earth to do homemade falafel, so we finally looked it up on my favorite recipe site--allrecipes.com--and of course it was so easy and we had all of the ingredients! So, thank you Jeanie's Falafel for this tasty, successful recipe! My only complaint is that I didn't have cilantro, which I think would add a lot, and I wish I had a food processor to get everything small (onions, heh) enough to hold together perfectly like the falafel in the MidEast.

Oh, and I can maybe complain about the stomach aches Mark and I both had all evening and night because this made enough for four people and we finished all but two of them--that's a lot of fried food! It made me so uncomfortable I slept on the couch...next time, we'll invite people over for Falafel Fun Day!

Meanwhile, I've also been DYING to attempt some hard-crust bread. I found recipes on Martha's site a couple months ago (they're under baking and breads) and the whole 16-step recipe was...frightening...BUT, I finally thought to make the starter last night, and so was able to work on the dough this afternoon. BEAUTIFUL FRENCH BAGUETTES (after starting the pounding/kneading/rising process at 3 PM, I finally had this to show around 8:15):

THEY TASTE SO GOOD, although I didn't have all of the fancy baking stones and things Martha called for, it turned out just fine placing the loaves on aluminum on a normal baking sheet. The key was a skillet with steaming water underneath...oh yum yum yum. We've already eaten the one we started digging into, I'll save one for tomorrow's breakfast, and freeze another for eating later in the week.

AND FINALLY, I've been working on starting lots of new crafty projects. Today I re-learned to basic knit with a couple girls from my knitting group. That will be a great rainy-day project to continue on...There are several Christmas ornaments in the works to cut out and sew up with my friend Annie. Also finally finished up Nintendo-Santa for an online ornament exchange, and I got an extra little something to go with the ornament in the package headed off to Finland tomorrow. YAY! This is my first cross stitch that I actually finished in a way besides just framing it or hanging it...it's so exciting. I imagine there will be many more to come, and since I have Wednesday off of work I think I'll try to stitch up something quick and simple to try making another one, which hopefully I can put on my tree next weekend!

Anyway, here's the finished SANTA (officially un-Nintendo now with all of his outline stitching done and all of his sparkly threads sewn in):

And here's the cute little package all wrapped up and ready to go. I couldn't resist throwing in an extra little stitch I had lying around, with a little personalization for our exchange... ;)

spooky

2009-11-13T06:29:00.001-08:00

Incase you forgot how to count to 13:

ps--Happy Friday the 13th! Maybe I should go hit up the cemetery again...mwahahahaha

Oh the distractions!

2009-11-13T06:14:00.000-08:00

I got on to Google Reader yesterday fully intending to write up a post (I even took a photo, which you will see later!), and after I saw someone write about some yummy homemade lotion I think I lost track of the time and had to scuttle off to work feeling like I let the internet down. Haha, not so bad as that, I'm sure, but then I get on again today about an hour ago and think I'm going to immediately write a post. Just check email first...and whaaaaT? Sarah Palin's autobiography is coming out next week and the AP has written a *slightly* scathing book review that is only begging for Tina Fey to stand up and defend her "Moose-huntin' Hockey-mommin' Backwoodsways!" I just wish it were more harsh, but I'll watch the Colbert Report for the real truth... What I love the most is that Ms. Palin is completely trying to play the victim over every campaign mishap and such--one year and a flat-out loss later, she STILL can't own up to anything or at least act like it maybe wasn't the worst thing for her career (because, honestly, who knew who Sarah Palin was before the election??) to go ahead and be a running mate for the scoundrelly old hootenanner.

I digress....

Here's what the sun looked like yesterday morning, shining through the leaves of one of my very very very few plants (heck, it's just leaves stuck in a jar folks, I'm not kidding any one that it's a plant!):

It sits in the windowsill because I'm afraid I'll kill it if it doesn't have constant sunlight. And by constant, I actually only mean the measly 10 hours that we're getting each day here in VT. I've never had a house plant before, and the one we sort of had to cover the ugly bulge in our house up at college never seemed too happy! Although he wasn't in the sunlight... Do any of you love to keep house plants, and have you found that they actually need to be in the sun all of the time, or can I just move them to the window once a week for their does of Vitamin D or S (for solar...hehehe)?

Ummm, otherwise, I finished stitching my cute Nintendo-Santa and I'll be out taking a picture of that today before I ship it off to it's exchange-home in Finland! hooray. This afternoon I'll be doing some crafting with my friend Annie again, and then we've got a dinner dumpling party to attend. Yay for social life! Work will take over my life for the weekend, but I hope to find some more time to stitch, seeing as I spent an hour in the (aforementioned on this blog) cemetery sitting next to a grave working on a major major Christmas project that never seems to end. This one will be a gift for someone very special, so unfortunately I cannot post pictures...but just imagine me being a creep who likes to hang out in cemeteries all of a sudden. It's a new thing, but I guess I enjoy that I don't have to pay for parking and usually there aren't too many people wandering by thinking about what a creep I am sewing over a dead person...umm...I'll go now when I'm totally not on top. :) LOVE YOU ALL!

I wish I carried my camera everywhere...

2009-11-09T06:12:00.000-08:00

Whoa I let a long time slip by there before posting again--so sorry, I will make amends for it this week I am sure. :) First off, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my wonderful father who I am pretty sure doesn't read this. He is the best, and I truly truly mean that. No other father could have been more loving and persistent and caring and generous than him, and I wish I could be with him to celebrate his day.

So this weekend was absolutely beautiful here in Vermont! OK, well, Saturday was dreary, but I worked all day so it didn't matter. However, Mark and I woke up late yesterday to some sunshine and warmth--we're talking 52 degrees baby! Couldn't have asked for anything better, and we decided to take that opportunity to ride our bikes into town to the aquarium/children's museum. We enjoyed that with a friend and her 5-year old, which was adorable to see her get excited about all of the turtles and frogs. It just made Mark and I ache for some more scuba diving, but that will come. After the aquarium, we rode our bikes up the Champlain Bikeway along the shores of the lake, then into a bay a few miles north of our house and back down past all of the local farms that are all tilled and prepped for winter. We did about a 15-mile ride, and it was just relaxing and so nice to have sun on our faces again. Unfortunately, I think that will be one of the last nice days we have, as Vermont winters are supposedly the worst. Today is looking good again though, so I'll be riding my bike into work! Sorry but I forgot my camera for yesterday's ride, so you'll just have to trust that we saw a river otter when we stopped to eat lunch and that there were still patches of autumn-colored trees hanging onto their leaves that were to die for. :) YAY!

Will post more later, but must get off to work now. Have a lovely Monday and Happy Birthday DAD!

'Appy 'Alloween!

2009-11-01T11:07:00.001-08:00

I know it's coming the day after, but I hope you all had a HAPPY, SCARY, FREAKY FUN HALLOWEEN! Mark and I studied and worked all day long, but we went out to a party with tons of his medical classmates and we had a blast. We saw some friends we didn't expect to find there, and everybody looked so awesome in their costumes! Ours were only decided on Friday night, 10:00 at Wally world...We were clueless what to be, so we just went out for inspiration and saw some berets, and then I joked we could wear the hats and tape toast to our shirts and be French Toast...and THEN it morphed into a FRENCH KISS:

We realized after putting our makeup on (and not having any rocker clothes to wear) that we, especially Mark, looked more like mimes than the frightening band, but oh well. :)

This week has been super busy for me--turns out I got to work every day but Thursday, and I tutored on that day, so I'm finally living a more busy life! And I love it. I'm scheduled a ton over the next week, as well, and we're busting out our new holiday collection and I'm quite looking forward to dressing people in sequins and sparkles.

Mark honored (which means he was in the top 10% of the class) his latest human anatomy course section, so he's doing fantastic. What a smart smart cookie I love...

And well, I hope you all had a fun Halloween again! My sister sent me the cutest picture of my ADORABLE 2-1/2 year old nephew dressed as a Texas Roadhouse University of Utah-loving cook (oh wait, that's what his dad sort of is in real life!), and it is SO cute cuz he had on his dad's hat and his dad's big apron. AHHH children on Halloween are too fun, I hope I get to be there for his next one or at least some more eventually! :)

Back to reality

2009-10-22T11:56:00.000-07:00

Howdy everybody! I'm back from the depths of disease and feeling quite happy to have survived it all. You know I was getting better a week ago, but somehow I failed to heal completely for awhile. I still have a bit of a cough, but it's nice to feel energetic and want to get out of the house again!

And OH BOY don't we know I've been dying to have a life now... For reasons somewhat inexplicable, but based on hope and chance, I decided to turn down the Banana Republic job so that I could be available for a job at JCrew. And, with some good karma holding out for me (I think it's because the energy that runs the universe feels bad it won't give me an interview at a "real" job), I was notified yesterday that JCrew will have me. YAY! I like their clothes slightly better, but the best is they allow employees to wear jeans and will pay me $.25 an hour more than BR, so it's all-around better at the moment. I am so excited to start working, sheesh I look forward to meeting more people and getting a paycheck (however small) and not feeling guilty for buying a bag of chocolate pretzels at the store! haha... I start tomorrow, and this time, I'm actually going to keep the job. Now, just wish me some luck in finding another part-time or a good full-time job to round out the funding for me and the med student.

Meanwhile, in my profuse free time, I have started this little creation:

OH isn't he cute? OK, maybe cute isn't the word, and Mark still calls every cross stitch I make "Nintendo-this"/"Nintendo-that" (because of the square-pixelation of it all). That BOO! sign was "Nintendo-Halloween" and now this is "Nintendo-Santa", but I say he's a pretty fancy Nintendo character. And personally, I'd be pretty frightened facing him as boss on level 5 and figuring out how to kill Santa. Sad sad sad... Anyway, it's for a Christmas ornament exchange I signed up for online, and I can't wait to finish it and send it off to the other side of the world for someone else's enjoyment! I'll be getting a surprise ornament in return, yay...

I'll post pictures when he is finished, hopefully by this weekend, and then I'll have to figure out how to sew him into an ornament or something. That's the really scary part, I'm not so good with the sewing thing anymore, nor do I have any Christmas fabric to back him with. oh well!

SO, that's my life. MAN do I appreciate all of the love I have received while having the swine flu! It's nice to keep this blog going just so I get messages reminding me of the life I have always waiting for me back in Utah. I love to hear from you all, and I'm sorry if I didn't respond--it really was a rough couple of weeks there. Oooh, and to update you all on Mark a little (since some of you care)--he's taking his first anatomy test tomorrow, and so he's super super busy and really enjoying all of the studying he's doing. I went in to his school to be a practice patient for him and some friends the other day, which was super fun because they got to check if all of my neurological reflexes are good. I was a med student guinea pig. They're learning so much so quickly, it's overwhelming, but he is really going to be an amazing doctor! He's very concise and clear when he speaks to people about procedures and problems, and I think that sets him apart. Plus, he knows how to throw some humor in there and lighten the room when things start to get awkward or tough...I'm so happy for him and happy to see him growing so much. You will all be amazed at how much smarter and professional he is! (not that he wasn't smart to begin with)

healing...

2009-10-13T07:33:00.000-07:00

Here's that promised picture of my delicious first loaf of homemade bread EVER! (I've done breadmaker bread before, and quick breads, but never one that required kneading and rising and...oh it was fun) I couldn't resist digging in, so you can kind of see that I cut a slice on the far right side of it...and then remembered I should take a picture. :) I love my Cutco knives too!!! Being able so slice my bread so easily with one of the wonderful, amazing knives that my family got me for my wedding just makes me want to make more and more bread....yum. I used this recipe for Simple Honey Whole Wheat Bread from AllRecipes.com (it's actually about 1/2-whole wheat, 1/2-white, but who cares).

Some good news--I'm getting better! Thankfully I woke up the other morning without a fever and have had three progressively better days. I can tell this runny nose and cough is going to linger though, so I'm just going to keep pumping myself full of orange juice, apple cider (yum yum seasonal goodness!), and hot stews and soups. More good news is that it appears Mark has completely avoided getting sick, so no missed school for him! He's still doing his anatomy lab and dissection, and every day he comes home and asks me to rub his PIP and DIP joints, or touch his tarsus muscle or something ridiculous like that. hehe...it's fun! Things are heating up for him though and I know he's going to be busier and busier, I'm really glad I'll be starting work soon, since I'll need the distraction. :)

That's it for now, love ya'll!

sick AGAIN!?!?!

2009-10-10T17:11:00.001-07:00

OOOOOhhhh yeah, I am out of commission my dear friends and loved ones. Turns out tending friends' children can sometimes be a bad thing, especially when the child is sick, and especially when I forget to practice vigilant hygiene in said sick child's presence. And then, to my dismay, discover the child has swine flu--just as the symptoms begin to show in me. UGH! This is horrible, I've been bed-ridden for three days now, and today I managed to get my butt outside to sit in the sunshine on a hammock for 30 minutes. That's about all I could do.

Mark is being sweet and caring for me, but when I feel this crappy, I always wish I could have more more more. He's trying to stay away from me so he doesn't catch H1N1 like the rest of the world, so I'm having a hard time sleeping with him on the couch instead of in bed with me, and I just notice how long and empty my days are while he's at school. Woe is me...

At least I know now that when the giant zombie epidemic, or andromeda strain, or whatever disease that's going to kill off the human race strikes, I don't need to waste any time avoiding it. I'm definitely going to get it, so I'll just give in and not stress over trying to survive! ;) COME AND TAKE ME ALIEN BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS, I'm yours.

Meanwhile, I got a job! It's only part time, and unfortunately not paying nearly as much as I would have hoped, but I feel like it's time I start working for my own psyche and social life. I start on Sunday at Banana Republic as a sales assistant. Hooray! (ps--looove the clothes, that's a huge plus!)

And that's all...will post pictures of my awesome first home-baked loaf of bread as soon as I can gather the strength to hook my computer up to my camera. Hope the swine flu and every other sickness is sparing you all. Love ya!

Look what I made!

2009-10-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

I've been in quite the festive mood lately, and was desperate to make a crafty project to celebrate Halloween. I busted this little baby out in just two or three days, and now it's sitting on top of the microwave! Found the little frame at Goodwill for $1, and I think it might be fun to paint cobwebs on it...hehehe... ;)

Now, it might be time to start Christmas stitching! I want to try to make a few Christmas gifts this year, since money is tight (not that crafting is ever a cheaper alternative!), and I'm also doing an ornament exchange through a Yahoo! stitching group I'm involved in. I may need all ya'll's help picking a design, since I'm not so good at knowing what is cool or just plain nerdy...so I'll keep you posted. I'm so happy I've finished a stitch tho! Hooray. :) Anybody making their Halloween costumes or prepping for holiday crafts themselves?

Indian Summer in a Graveyard

2009-10-02T14:08:00.000-07:00

Heya! I spent a few hours this afternoon hanging out in a cemetery just across the bridge in Burlington that I've noticed a few times. It stands out because of this rather large monument for Mr. Ethan Allen, Green Mountain Boy & Revolutionary War Hero.

It looks so cheery on a bright sunny day! Check out what's written on his monument/gravestone (don't deny it, the scribe for this must have inspired the first American dictionary! Who else needs a translation?):

OK, if it's a little hard to read, here's what it says: "WIELDING the Pen as well as the Sword, he was the sagacious and intrepid DEFENDER of the New Hampshire Grants, and Master Spirit of the arduous struggle which resulted in the Sovereignty and Independence of this State."

Maybe it's not THAT bad, but I wish I could come up with "sagacious". Gotta use that more often...

Here's another great headstone:

The last word in the first line is "gloom"--love it!!

A nice little creepy looking set of stones. Ooooh...

And these are just some beautiful fall colors from our hike in the Adirondacks last weekend. So many trees are still green, but those that aren't have turned this amazing red. OH yay for autumn!

And check out our awesome new WOK...mwahahahaha now I can make HUGE dinners. We ordered this from Target online with some of our wedding gift money, cuz let's face it, the 10" omelet skillet wasn't cutting it for our awesome curries. But this stainless steel baby is just ... ahhh ... happiness. Time to start getting more creative and making new foods again. If you have any awesome fall recipes, utilizing squash or tomatoes or potatoes or anything tasty, I'd love them! I still don't own any cookbooks, so uh, I need help. Foodnetwork.com and Marthastewart.com only take me so far.

So, that's the roundup of my day! I have some more great pictures of the cemetery I'll share, as well as a little something I stitched up for October decor. YAY, I finally finished some stitching! Silly I'm so excited, but oh well...

Oh, and I've applied for several different jobs in the last few days. One of them in particular I have my heart set on, but I won't talk about it too much until I know because it's just not good to put all of your happiness-eggs in one basket, especially when you're as clumsy and blonde as I am. Let's just say I trip a lot, and it's best to sit tight and wait in peace. :) Hope your Autumns are starting out lovely!

notes from the campground

2009-09-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

We went camping over the weekend. Paradox Lake in the Adirondacks was the destination. The forecast was rain rain rain rain rain rain with a little more of that rain, but it wouldn't stop us...

Mark: Hey guys! I've got a great idea--let's go camping!!
Chris: DUUUUUDE, I'm there! AND I'm going to wear a t-shirt and shorts the whole time even though it's raining and freeezing!!

Krista: Alright now, lift! Push! Pull! FLY! Why am I the only girl who's ever set up a tent before?
*Annie hides near the mushrooms*

Mushroom: And who is this crazy person taking pictures of me instead of helping them set up the tent?
Chris: I'm going to go really really fast because my legs are super long...but I like to sing. And play word games.
Aleksi: Guess what--Annie is good at word games. Weenoot. That's Armenian, maaaaybe.
Mark: Anniiiieeee catch up!
Chris: Let's put her in front cuz she's good at word games and then I won't go quite as really really fast.
Javier: Sometimes I might say something.

Log: Annie, seriously, just stop now. Because I'm going to be the most beautiful picture you've ever taken in your life. The lighting, it's straight out of your wildest fairytale dreams. Cheese!

PS-it rained. :)

what should I do...

2009-09-23T08:55:00.000-07:00

Heya! I'm about to go earn some good money cleaning my landlord's apartment downstairs. I getta do the dusting and the vacuuming and all of the stuff I somewhat enjoy doing anyway, but now I'll get paid a little! So exciting. :)

I'm really in a standstill with applying for jobs. I'm feeling like I just want to do some more school or get some certifications, but can't get any experience to figure this out. Anyone else ever been in this situation? (I guess with my age, most of my friends are probably CURRENTLY in this situation) If so, how did you beat it? I've gotta just force my butt into a workplace, demand some miniscule job where I can prove I'm truly as smart/hardworking/motivated/creative as I say I am. And then...magic would happen. haha! OK, we all feel this rut sometimes, don't we? I guess I should start my whole dreams of crafting a bit, pull something together. Time to talk to my friend, Annie, who has a sewing machine. I'll see if I can start using it and make some stuff to sell on Etsy! (not that I'd be rolling in the dough from that anytime soon, either)

And I've been watching Project Runway and the Rachel Zoe Project, and wow, wouldn't I LOVE to go into the fashion industry (oh, and NOT have to deal with the drama). hehehe, seriously, time to go swiffer-sweep!

demolition city

2009-09-21T17:35:00.000-07:00

Our house, in the middle of the street/
OUR house, where they rip up the concrete/
OUR HOUSE, building the castle a grand moat/
our house, I just really hope it floats...

As you can see, the construction on our street has been FIERCE this week! I was wrenched from my morning makeup routine on Monday because I had to move the car--it was in the construction's way. Every day since, it's gotten progressively worse and worse, and today, the second I stepped out of the shower I was greeted by a big construction brute (ok, he was sweet and waited for me to get an outfit on instead of just my towel!) warning me of the impending doom...

That's right folks, an eight-foot deep MOAT in front of our (and just our) house! Naturally, the nearest parking spots on our street are all on the opposite side of the road, about a 1/4 mile down. It's been nice motivation to ride my bike! hehe...To get out, we had to climb the hill to the left in this above picture, and walk down our neighbor's driveway (who were only just spared the devastation). It's a hilarious trek! It's just like a million things went crazy to keep us from using our driveway this week, because, on top of the construction, our landlord decided to repave our driveway last weekend and we couldn't park there for three or four days. Oh boy. BUT, at least these construction guys manage to fill their huge holes back in with dirt every night, so the cars going by get to roll over the gravel cover, creating mega noise to interrupt our sleeping... It's just funny how extreme this is getting. These guys knocked out the power in the whole town of Winooski for an hour the other day, today the water got shut off for a couple hours, I'm just waiting to see if the roof caves in or something wonderful. Seriously, if I were a real princess living in a real castle, I would insist they build the moat while I'm on vacation! (and install the drawbridge first--and I want a unicorn)

Meanwhile...back in the real world...

It's fall! OK, this isn't the best picture to illustrate this, but I've been watching these beautiful mega flowers (they're not hydrangea, but I can't remember their name that I'm pretty sure starts with an 'O', but they're the bushes that look like Hostess snowballs) go from a pale purple to this awesome autumn blush-wine color for a month now! They're amaaaazing. This is on the UVM campus, and I'm so pleased with the foliage in New England. It's everything I dreamed of, and it's only going to get better.

And there's my cute little fluff-head ruling his school. This is a shot of the upper-central campus, you can just make out the signature clock tower on the right side of the picture peeking above the classic academia buildings. We're having fun, and today we went to a lecture about the foodies vs. the agricultural industrial nation we live in, very informative and a good reminder that I want to plant my own garden and eat local as much as possible. So we came home and had imported pasta and canned sauce...hehehe (ok, the salad was all local and foods from the farmer's market and nearby stands--I LOVE HUSK CHERRIES!)

Allie, I hope Benjamin really likes that big backhoe in the first picture. Love you all!

Mommy is the best!

2009-09-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

Also wanted to give a shout-out for Sunday, the 13th, as that was my beautiful mother's birthday and she is the most fantastical mother I know! HAPPY (belated, on here at least) BIRTHDAY MOM!

AND she had her primary for city council (she's an incumbent) on Tuesday. The few times I've gotten her on the phone in the last month she's just seemed super busy with canvasing the city to speak with voters. I'm impressed she actually walked the city, trying to talk with the people she'd represent. It really means a lot to me when elected officials actually recognize their constituents. I know I voted for my Salt Lake City Councilman over his opponent because he personally called everyone in the area who was a registered voter (and he was a Democrat, while I was registered a Republican! AMAZING!). So, mom, I'm impressed and proud of your style, and VERY happy that you made it through the primaries. Good luck with the race to the finish, I'm supporting you with my good loving feelings from Vermont. :)

sick day

2009-09-18T04:46:00.000-07:00

Don't know where this came from, but yesterday at about noon I was overtaken with The Cold. I get this pretty much every three months, and who knows how long it's going to stay with me...but I got all weak and achey and sort of made it through the last 4 hours of my temporary job which is now over. Boohoo...now thankfully I have all the time in the world to rest and get better, so that's what I'm doin'.

BUT, I never gave a recap of the stellar canoe trip! We ended up not taking our cameras on the boats with us, as it was raining hard all morning. There were a total of three canoes, 8 people, and 2 dogs in our party. We set out on the river at 1:00, encountered a few tree branches (which I kept insisting were alligators because I thought it added some adventure...now I think it was just lame!) and sandy spots, but in general the river was quite cooperative. There is absolutely NO current on the Winooski, so we rowed and rowed and rowed all of the 8.5 miles to the end. My boat was me, Mark, and a girl from his med school class named Anna. She was so much fun to ride with, and apparently she used to row at college so she was the best of all of us! However, I sat in the middle most of the time and Mark rowed in back, and we ended up turning ourselves around several times because of the uneven rowing...hehe...so I think my boat went about 15 miles with all of the weaving and reversing we had to do. :) We played some fun games between the three boats, a little keep away and dog-hopping and a lot of word games. Somehow, the time flew by and we reached the end just before 7:00, right in time for the beautiful sunset! The whole day was overcast and dreary, but it was just so perfect for the dark river and giant trees crowding in on us, that hitting the bright open lake for sunset was like riding into a new world.

Then, after maneuvering three canoes for two cars (required a visit back to the landing site to pick up the last one), we barbequed at my house and went to bed exhausted after a long hard day. Yay!

I guess it's now been several days since then, and I am not really sure what's been going on. Working working for me, but now that's over. Oh yes, our landlord (who lives in the ground floor of our house, and is a very wonderful dude) had his birthday get-together on Tuesday night. We all went to THE pizza restaurant in town, American Flatbread. The place is amazing! They use all local, Vermont-farm-grown ingredients, and bake these flatbread pizzas directly in a hearth oven in the restaurant. It's such a warm, inviting interior, and is by far the most popular place around! It was a Tuesday night and we had to wait over an hour for a table! (Although it was a table for 17...) We got a Greek pizza, and oh boy we were not let down. And for $10, quite good value (especially since they're donating $2 of that to a local charity, as well). Looking forward to many more visits to American Flatbread!

And now it's Friday, and I've got the whole day to sit and eat some soup and hopefully recuperate since apparently my body has had enough. The last two days of work I got to be outside doing a big patio sale for the Bookstore, but I guess even that couldn't stop my sickness cycle...

As always, I love you all! Till next time. ;)

lazy river don't got none on me

2009-09-12T07:18:00.000-07:00

Long time since I posted, sorry. :) We're headed off this morning to do a little canoeing adventure with some other med students. Mark planned this whole trip where we're all going to hop in canoes (I think there are approximately 9 of us, for three canoes) on the Winooski River, just underneath Winooski Falls and the dam at the south end of town. Winooski River is the north border of Burlington, diving it from Winooski. We're hopping into the river on the canoes, and then riding it the 8.5 miles to Lake Champlain. We'll feast on good food, have lots of laughs, and probably get pretty wet in the process. Although the river is quite dirty, so the part where we jump in and dunk each like middle schoolers might have to wait until we reach the lake...The best part is, none of us have any clue how long this is going to take, or if this is going to be successful. You see, the river is quite bendy and apparently gets pretty shallow in places. So we might get stranded. But without these possible hiccups, it wouldn't be an adventure, right?

So anyway, you'll catch me upon my return, hopefully with many ridiculous pictures to accompany my recounting of this journey. Tata! ;)

invincible

2009-09-04T15:56:00.001-07:00

So what's with all of this Michael Jackson in the news? Didn't anybody hear about DJ AM's death by drugs (just after finishing his MTV reality show where he helps therapize families with kids on drugs)? Or Jasmine-the-model's gruesome hacking? Whatever...

I think it's pretty cool he's buried in some superstar catacomb though.
TOTALLY takes me back to Alexandria where all of the wealthy folks were burying themselves with GrecoRome-gyptian carved guardians, paintings, and stuff (Mom that was so fun!!--and all of these pictures are from in Alex, either at the Museum or the Catacombs).
I have to admit, I would absolutely LOVE to go and visit Michael's mausoleum! OR even better, teleport thousands of years into the future and discover it after it's sunk into the ocean (since we know LA will, because of that dang faultline) and realize that MJ was, in fact, Cylon model 7, the missing Daniel... (oooooh Wiki feeds all of my nerdiest cravings)

Seriously, though, it's a little old-fashioned and pretentious, and I like it. But it's just weird that people still do that--why don't they just mummify him? (not that he'd be decomposing anytime soon with all that plastic, right? and doesn't he oddly resemble this fellow, Akhenaten?)

Just had to say something about it all. I'm looking forward to this 3-day weekend, I've now worked 12 days, 8 hrs a day, in a row...and I need a break! Plan on picking up some kitchen chairs tonight, tomorrow baking some apple pies and treats with Annie & Mariam, and probably watching the BYU-Oklahoma game at night with whomever is willing. OH YEAH and I wanted to go to the fair! We'll see which day that happens...BUT it will be lovely and relaxing. And Tuesday I'm going in to meet with the Arabic professor to see what opportunities are available--he said the tutoring center has requested a tutor for Arabic, so he'll give them my resume, and that he also might be needing a TA in the future...hooo-raaaah.

So, wish me luck! I hope you all have splendid holiday weekends. Oh yeah, my wedding pictures have been loaded onto Jacque's website. Here's the link: http://www.jacquelynnphoto.com/#
and then click "order prints", then click on "Mark & Annalee Wedding"--then you're good to view! SO BEAUTIFUL, Mark and I are incredibly happy with all of them...I love love love the ones with the family that are small (immediate family, sibs, etc), some of the candids with friends (especially the frisbee toss!), and of course mine with Benjamin and Parley...oh dang I can't think about how much I adore those kids. :) SOOOO yeah, take a look, let me know which ones you love cuz I haven't put together an album yet.

LOVES to all! and Happy Ramadan!

ninjetta

2009-09-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

Hey! One more fun shot from our trip to Exeter overlooking the super calm river. :)

Mark and I are officially addicted to playing Settlers of Cataan on the internet. Except we play a free version called Explorers. We can't go to bed at a decent hour anymore. My blogging isn't helping either... :)

BUT we also still love Wipeout! We watched it again tonight and peed a little. hehehe...jk. There was a hilarious girl who did ninja moves. It didn't work too well.

AND we made a fantastic frittata! (not f-r-i-t-t-a like Mark kept insisting)mmmmmmmm....we're making a LOT more of these for the next forever. If you don't know what it is, seriously, look it up.

Then I made some more amazing baking and it was zuchinni bread and cinnamon and oh my . goodness . I LOVE IT! Here's the recipe for that, try it, now. Please! (although I did substitute some apple sauce for oil and sugar cuz it calls for a lot)

NOW, tomorrow, I'll drop a happy revelation on you all...so sleep well, happy September!

2009-08-30T19:31:00.000-07:00

As it is now 10:35 pm and I'm getting really tired, I'll make this quick with some pictures. While they load, I'll be brushing my teeth...

mmm...the latest batch of blueberries I picked. As the season continues, they just get sweeter and juicier! OH I love them in everything, on everything, especially french toast with maple syrup...yum yum yum. Mark and I are doing really well at eating healthy, except for all of my baking, but even that is homemade so it's full of love, right?

We're also getting good at assembling and cleaning a house! We have gathered so much cheap or free furniture, here's Mark cleaning out the new kitchen pantry we got along with a matching computer desk and side filing cabinet for just $10 at a garage sale last Saturday. AND they delivered the stuff too! Excellent...we found a microwave and kitchen table for free, and are hoping we spot some kitchen chairs soon.

Just a little touch of New England--taken in Exeter looking out on the river with a crazy name that even Ethan couldn't remember. This river was beautiful! So reflective.

Mom--zoom into this picture, if you can (click on it)--you'll see that it says "Gen. Washington was entertained in this house" or something of the sort. In like seventeen-seventy-something. Awesome! I retraced the great man, the present beware, the future beware...mwahahah!

A number of the buildings on the incredibly beautiful Phillips Exeter Academy campus I spoke of in the last post. Perfectly New Englandish in every way.

And that's that for now! Love you all lots, I'm loving your comments and reading your blogs as well (Allie, Sue, Carolyn, Nicole, Anna, etc...)...keep it up! :) We have had a really busy and fun weekend, spending lots of time with our new friends. I hope to catch up on that in the next few days on here, but if not, it only means I'm having more good times and that's what I really want. DEFINITELY hoping that I get some more stitching done, cuz I want to try to finish a Christmas present I'm working on in time to stitch it up into a pillow with my friend Annie this week! (She's an expert sewer who has a fantastic machine, so I know if I want to do it well, I'll do it with her.) :) Tata, have a great Monday!

back to back to school

2009-08-27T16:31:00.000-07:00

Wow, how busy have I been lately? I started out this job I talked about in the last post, temping at the Bookstore on campus. Things have just gone into overdrive there, the undergrads are all arriving with their helicopter parents (because they "hover" far too long! hehe...) and of course everything that can go wrong goes wrong, but somehow students are still getting their books. I've solely been working on packing and charging the online orders with about 5 other staff members. There's a lot of effort I need to put into making sure people aren't charged a new price for used book, or vice-versa, or charged when we cancel a book (because they order three options that are all the same, just used, used old edition, new, etc....). It's surprisingly tough, and not as much of a mind-drain as one might think because the people are fun. But today just went crazy because the students are all moving into their dorms tonight and tomorrow! It's so much fun to be around this energy again, and for every idiotic customer we get, we have about 10 more who are awesome and nice and appreciative of our help. I'm going to be working a register starting tomorrow, and that will be a whole new monster. :) Yay! haha...

So, beside this lovely job of mine (which I'll be working till Sept. 11!), I had a lovely weekend with Mark. We visited our friend Ethan in Exeter, NH. He was back on a short vacation from Korea, where he's been teaching English for a year and is continuing for one more. It was so good to see him! He used to be Mark's roommate for a year, and he's just a freaking awesome guy. He took us around his hometown, where we got to see the Phillips Exeter Academy campus, which is one of the wealthiest prep schools in the world. Besides being a beautiful, classic New England-style campus, with red brick buildings and plaques dedicating the buildings from the 1700's, there was an amazing new science center that had an incredible WHOLE whale skeleton hanging in an atrium! To read about it, and see a small picture of it, click that link. It was great!! And then we went into town, visited a local book store, and got to hear a reading of The Last of His Kind by David Roberts about an old mountaineering master. It was pretty cool, although we came in late and knew nothing about any of it. Oh well. :)

After enjoying Exeter, we all ate a yummy dinner with Ethan's parents, then went on down to Portsmouth. Here we enjoyed walking around in the artsy town of New Hampshire. We saw some awesome little restaurants and shops, but ended up playing some shuffleboard (tabletop-sized, so yanno, only like 15 feet long!) in a dark basement. Afterward we walked along the coastline in the fog, found a few gardens and parks, where I saw some vegetables growing (in public spaces). There was this crazy pepper plant, with little teeny black pepper balls. I picked one, bit in, and HOLY crap it was the hottest pepper ever! Then I made Ethan and Mark try it and we were all dying...hehehe...good times.

OK, so that's the play-by-play. Ethan took off early the next morning, so we got to go make a big Target run and get a TVVVVVVVVV and some excellent other household items we've been needing. Thank you wedding gifts!! We had quite a disastrous time trying to convince the salespeople to give us our 10% registry discount, ended up we were at Wendy's for lunch adding items to the registry and going straight back to Target to purchase them (since the salespersons wouldn't let us add them in-store, weirdos). We showed them! Mwahahahaha... :)

Sunday night we got to eat a wonderful dinner at Dan & Annie's house. She cooked a delicious veggie lasagna, and we had a salad with beets that reminded me I have no idea how to cook beets! I need to learn! Tips are welcome. hint hint.

And we also got some great furniture at a garage sale on Saturday morning. We picked up a free kitchen table on the side of the road on Monday night, Mark and I walked it back to our house and now we actually feel like we have a home. I can't wait to start decorating it! I've already got some cute cross stitch projects ready and waiting to go, so I'll start posting some pics of that. For now, I'll leave this post pictureless and I'll do one soon that is all pictures of our newly arranged home. :) Love you all so much!! Thanks for reading this. Mark and I miss you guys at home, but gosh we're keeping busy right now so we haven't had too much time to realize it's almost been a month since we left. Hope you all are having a great August!

at the grindstone

2009-08-21T15:19:00.000-07:00

Wow, I've got a job. Granted, a temporary job, but I'll be getting paid and I'm not home 8-5 and I have no more time to cross-stitch (boo-hoo) and come up with crafty new ideas. It's great for now!

I've been working at the UVM Bookstore since Wednesday, filling online orders and fielding odd questions and complaints from every passerby. I know nothing about the campus, and yet, because we're on the middle floor in a dark corner of the student-center-building, I become the information desk. So confusing...

I think I had it with the last crazy kid in a lime green shirt, neon yellow hi-tops, and baggy jeans combo, dropping his computer on my desk on top of the order I'm obviously working on so intently that I'm ignoring him. He tells me I need to put his books on hold since he doesn't have any $$ bling $$ and needs mommy to pay for them on Monday. Then, dropping his books on my counter, turns around with his saggy (to match his pants) backpack and knocks over a whole stack of books 6 feet high. I KNOW I'm a klutz and do this kind of crap all the time, but not wearing NEON! And then he didn't even offer to pick them up. Just adjusts his headphones and gives me a look like "whoops", says his name is "Chaz" or something equally terrifying, and walks away. Uhhh...ok...straight back to the shelf with his books. (He did manage to get his computer back in all of that, dagnabit)

So, that's the weirdest customer I've faced so far. Many a parent that is utterly confused with return policies and teenagers eager to sign up for extra classes and drop them so they can claim the $$ from mommy and daddy's book purchasing. This is going to be an interesting few weeks...in which I'll either spontaneously combust when I tell people they actually have to find their textbooks themselves for the 1,000th time because I don't know their class schedule (weird, I know, isn't every freshman in exactly the same classes?), or in which I'll begin to love love love all of the undergrad population for their charming smiles and sweet spirits. Burlington residents are warning me that life becomes much less free-spirited and relaxed, and parking becomes a nightmare, once all of these kids roll in. We'll see...

All of this sounds very negative, but truly, it's just sarcasm. I'm loving the Bookstore and the campus energy is fun. It's more that I'm just shocked that people can do so little for themselves and are now going to be attending a university and claiming to be educated. And that I've got that degree and am getting paid $8.50 an hour to help people who make a bajillion more than me and are brainless :)

cooking up a storm

2009-08-18T17:01:00.000-07:00

Hello once again! Whew it's been a long, humid, fun-filled weekend. I spent all morning Saturday going shopping at BB&B and Goodwill for those necessary kitchen items to begin my baking fiesta (sorry, but picking 10 lbs. of blueberries starts making you desperate for some darn good muffins!). OOOOh boy! I got an amazing stash, after using up all of the store credit and gift cards we amassed from our wedding and then some extra, we now have a beautiful 6-Qt stainless steel pot, a 3-Qt pot (that's tall, cuz I like em skinny, not wide), a lid for one of our awesome Calphalon skillets, a giant muffin tin, a normal muffin/cupcake tin, a loaf pan, a cake pan, a mixer, 2 Pyrex measuring cups, 4" tart pans, an 11" tart pan, a collander, an ironing board (no baking being done on that ... yet ...), and a bajillion little kitchen gadgets that I've learned to appreciate from working in a bakery (we're talking pastry cutter, cake decorating set, frosting spreader, etc. etc. etc.). YAY! I was so giddy and happy. Mark kind of looked at me skeptically when he came home from his ropes course, highly doubting I'd ever use a single thing. Mwahahahaha I showed him! AS IF the humidity (93% +) and heatwave we're experiencing can stop me..........

I baked these lovely babies on Saturday night, with Mark's help. They're following this Awesome Banana Muffin Recipe I found on Google. I threw in some chocolate chips and baked them in my giant muffin pan. Mark fell for it, he'll let me get anything for the kitchen I want now. :)

Oh, and today I continued the amazing homemaker streak and baked some blueberry muffins. No pics tho, silly me. I used this To Die For Bluberry Muffin recipe, but I had to use frozen blueberries since we scarfed all of the fresh-picked ones days ago. It was good, but the insane heat in my kitchen combined with the frozen berries being thrown into the batter I think kind of shocked the dough a bit. They weren't quite as fluffy or flaky as I'd hoped, but they will be next time! The streusel part was the best, that will definitely be added to my next batch of banana muffins. :) mmmmm...

AND I thought I'd celebrate mine and Mark's 1-month anniversary with a couple tasty dinner casseroles. First I made a potato/hamburger/onion bake, and threw in lots of extra cumin...tasty. THEN I made an incredible, seasonal dish from The Gardener's Community Cookbook called "Summer Squash Baked with Cherry Tomatoes, Olives, and Fresh Thyme." HANDS DOWN the best recipe I've made in a long time (and we've been getting pretty good at curry!). I can't wait to make it again! If you want the recipe, gimme an email, I have this book from the library for three weeks and look forward to trying more things.

Oh yeah, and we went climbing on Sunday, which ended up just being so hot and muggy that we only got three good climbs in (whoohoo I did a 5.9 balance-y face one that was suuuuper fun), but I made a good new friend, Kathryn. She's invited me to join her book club group, and I'm already reading The White Tiger in preparation for the meeting next week. So many new and exciting things happening here! I hope all is swell for you in whatever part of the world you're in, and you should definitely try one of those two muffin recipes. Yeah yeah yeah! (and sorry I ramble, I'll try and keep a few of these short every once in awhile in a blue moon)

take me out to the ballgame

2009-08-16T05:38:00.000-07:00

Go Lakemonsters!! Yeah, that's right, baysee-bool! We had a fantastic time at the game the other night. We met some couples earlier in the day at the pizza lawn party for med students and families, and then we hung out with some of the same people again that night. First, though...pictures...
Be very afraid!

Hahahahahahahaha...this is why I don't play baseball.

So, this adorable little girl's name is Mariam, she's 5 (and a half) years old, and she belongs to a fantastic couple from San Francisco. Their names are Dan & Annie (I've already met FOUR other Annies! We should start our own club), Dan is the one in school and Annie is going to be teaching special ed students part time in about a month. Until then, she and I are very looking forward to doing some crafts together, since she is into sewing, knitting, and baking also. And doing some canoeing. And I'm hoping to babysit Mariam, since she is a lot of fun, very intelligent, and can actually throw and catch a frisbee decently! AMAZING.

And this is Ethan! He's two years old, and SO cute and blonde he MUST be from Utah. :) His parents are Bryan & Kristy (not sure of spellings yet), Bryant is in school with Mark, and guess what--they ARE from Utah! They both went to SUU, and they seem like a really fun and friendly couple. Ethan reminds me a little too much of the sweet little boys I left behind, except he's a bit more afraid of bugs and a little less into sugar. He sure likes balls just the same as Ben tho! (and look--a truck on his shirt!) Mariam took this picture, and I think it's brilliant.

Anywho, as said before, we had a great time getting to know these couples and their cute cute kids. Mark went off during the game for about an hour and got Mariam and Ethan playing some little games together, and everyone kept remarking how incredibly good with children Mark is. Dan said he's better with kids than anyone he's ever seen...and now Mark's sort of contemplating pediatrics (or something to do with that field) again. That makes me happy, because Mark really does have the most natural ability to put kids at ease that I've EVER seen as well. The second a kid looks at him he's smiling and laughing!

So that was Friday night, and now it's Sunday and we're headed off to New Hampshire with another person from the med school for some rock climbing. I did some MAJOR kitchen shopping yesterday, it was so much fun! I have all of these wonderful pans and pots and utensils and...oh boy...I'm giddy. I'll take some pictures and show you the prize jewels of my stash, as well as the TASTY muffins Mark and I baked. :) Love ya lots, have a rockin day everyone!!

ps--Lakemonsters beat State College 5-3, and I'm pretty sure I only watched one pitch the entire game. ;)

domicilic phototastic

2009-08-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

Introducing...

Our new crib! Word, respect...

And so that is the entire house--notice how on the far left, it sort of looks like a barn? I'll get a better street view later, but the front part that juts out has a very charming old look to it. Love it!

And THIS (above) is around back, it's the entry to our upstairs apartment. Awesome red stairs, and that whole covered porch is all ours, too! However, I wanted to take pictures of it today and realized it is super nasty dirty, along with most of the house...so I've got some clean up to do. :) I can't wait to add our own style to it and make it our own.

And this is a shot of the cooking/counter area of the kitchen. Limited cupboard space, but the rest of the kitchen is actually quite large so there's room for more shelves and things.

And some hydrangea from the garden. I'm so psyched that these are growing of their own volition, seeing as I desperately wanted some at my wedding and couldn't have them! These are a beautiful light purple, I'll be chopping them after I do that cleaning I talked about and putting them on our kitchen table. Tres belle!

Thought you'd enjoy these shots of our life. I've been applying for jobs and trying to FIND jobs worth applying to like crazy for the last few days. Got lost downtown driving today looking for Cherry Street--got home and googlemapped it. Naturally it was one block south of where I finally got so frustrated I just went home. Bummer! But maybe it was a sign I'm not actually supposed to apply for that job...we'll see...

Tomorrow is fun day for Mark and I! His medical school is hosting a bbq/pizza party in the park for all students and their guests (family, friends, whatever), so I'm really looking forward to going and meeting some other spouses/partners/significants. Maybe even some cute kids! haha. Also, at night, the med school has given everyone tickets to go to the local minor league baseball team's game. They're the Vermont Lakemonsters! That's right, Lake Champlain has a legend, akin to the great Loch Ness, only our dear Nessie's name is Champ. :) How cute is that? And now, after googling the Lakemonsters, turns out the future of baseball in VT is sketchy, due to the small field (it's part of UVM property). Hmmm...ok.

Anywho, I'm hoping I can make Mark guest-blog on here soon, so ya'll can get his perspective on things. I'm just trying to come up with creative ways to make money, with no luck yet. Meanwhile, off to my broom and sponge! tata

a big move, hospitality, and blueberries with a side of no-keys

2009-08-10T19:15:00.000-07:00

AN UPDATE *gasp* I cannot believe it myself. The blog is back up and running! What a fantastic bit of news, seeing as I never did quite finish that whole Middle Eastern journey on here. :) Oh well.

SO, Mark and I got married, and now we took the big long journey cross-country, cross-continent, to Vermont from Utah. Driving. In a car that was completely loaded down with the little "stuff" we have left to call our own. We found some incredible hospitality with friend's parents along the way in Des Moines, Iowa, and Dearborn, Michigan. Big thanks to Tom & Wendy, and the whole Suleyman crew of Arbab, Nadia, Zee, Ali, and Miriam. It was so amazing to have a huge comfy bed to sleep in Des Moines. And to eat falafel again and have some really good laughs in Arabic! :) oooooh man Mark and I just kept remarking after we left the Suleyman's how much we miss the hospitality and food and spirit of the Middle East.

Anywho, after a long long sleepy three and a half day drive thru Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ontaria, Quebec, PHEW, we reached the destination--VERMONT! It was dark and we were giddy by the time we reached the border, and the last little drive into Burlington pushed me over the edge. I had to pee and I had to eat, both of which were URGENT, and unfortunately by the time we got into Burlington, it was nearly 11 pm and nothing was open! (not to mention where the heck do you find something in a land with no billboards? love it, but hated it right then!)

First we found a camp site at North Beach on Lake Champlain, then we ate a bleh meal at Friendly's Restaurant. We ended up camping there at the Beach for four days until our first and favorite apartment that we looked at came available for us! WHOOT, we got a great place that's just about 2 miles from Mark's school, and out in a quiet, beautifully wooded and charming area of the nearby town of Winooski. It is just wonderful, a great arrangement for us because the rent is in our budget and also includes some FURNITURE! (which, natch, didn't fit in that darn car) SO, as of Saturday, we've been wrangling all of our junk into a nice big bedroom (we'll have the whole apartment in a few weeks, for now we're sort of sharing with our landlord until he can move all of his things onto the ground level, once his business clears out...long story, but that's the gist). Made a little BB&B, Goodwill, and Walmart (AGH!) run Sat. night to get some shelves, plastic drawer units, trash cans, hampers, etc...It's a little frustrating to me to have to buy all of this stuff I know we had back in Salt Lake, when our money is so tight anyway. But Mark has the best attitude and always remembers how necessary it was and how this is just the beginning of our awesome life-marriage-adventure together, so he pumps me back up with excitement! I made a grocery store run today and got all the baking basics, yanno, flour, sugar, baking soda, etc... so I'm planning to go pick blueberries and make some muffins! YUM YUM.

Which brings me to my next story... Blueberry picking! And no-keys...SOOO Mark and I went off to go hiking yesterday (Sunday), but when we reached our destination of "Mt." Philo, a nice 5000 foot peak or something, it was raining and we decided to just use the State Park entry fee to go pick berries at a little organic farm we passed. DUDE, so much fun! Neither of us had ever done the berry-picking-at-a-farm thing, so we were super psyched and happy, especially cuz the owners told us to snack our hearts out while picking. Unfortunately, there was a little damper on our experience when Mark turns to me and goes "Annie, I don't know where the keys are. I REALLY don't know where the keys are." Whoops, turn around and find out they're sitting in the ignition, all of the doors locked (of course I'd had a little premonition I denied to leave my door open--I made a separate trip to go back and lock it right before we picked! DANG). Here we are, stuck in rainy Vermont, 30 miles from our home, with our only house key and the only cell phone we had on us (which was the only place we had our landlord's #, the only person we know in Vermont), locked in the car. Big bummer whoops crap everything! The owners of the farm were generous and offered their car, but we declined and hitched a ride with some other pickers heading back to Burlington (thank you random truck with the awesome folks whose daughter ALSO just got married and ALSO had a cupcake tower instead of a wedding cake, too!). Then, thankfully, our landlord was home and let us into our apartment so we could get my spare car key, and Mark rode his road bike the 30 long, hilly miles back to the farm and our car. WOW, the adventures never stop!

So, Mark started school today and I'll write some more about that soon. Or maybe I'll let him do that. I applied for a job at the UVM library ILL dept. today, too, wouldn't that be great if I got the first job I applied to? We'll see! :) I look forward to applying to many many more jobs in the next week or so too anyway. Talk to you all soon, I can't wait to hear all about what's going on back home with my lovely friends. Keep it real!

Annie (& Mark, who is talking to Jared on the phone)

Never laugh at a Japanese man on the Syrian border, and other useful tales

2009-04-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

Hello all! Well, here is my little update as I make my way forward on my journey with Mark. I know I've been absent for awhile, BUT, now that I'm in Syria, I have found a way to write again! (more on that to come)
First of all, Mark and I said farewell to the last of our traveling companions--Ralph, el padre del Marcos--last Thursday (the 16th). It was tough to say goodbye, we had so much fun traveling together, but it was time for Mark and I to start journeying alone. Mark and I took a crazy venture from Dahab, Egypt, up to Nuweiba, Egypt, had to pay $80 for a 1-hour ferry ride (that you wait 4 hours for) to Aqaba, Jordan. That was obnoxious, especially as our current daily budget is a meager $35! But, we got to Aqaba around 8 pm, took a taxi up to Petra (so sad to skip another Red Sea city, but Dahab was more than amazing) and got in 10 o'clock at night. Supposedly, now is the "busy" season, so we had a tough time finding a hotel room for cheap. Turned out we stayed on the roof of a hotel far outside of town! It had a metal covering, but wow, it was cold at night. We did Petra for two days, and this has definitely been a high-highlight of our trip. Petra is a city built into the sandstone cliffs of the desert in somewhat southern-central Jordan. Essentially, the people carved out lots of square caves and then carved elaborate facades into the outsides of the temples and tombs! They also built buildings from stone in the valleys and things, but the canyons and mountain peaks were the best parts. We enjoyed just doing a nice slot canyon hike the first day, and then seeing some of the more remote parts of Petra. Then on our second day we did the major hikes--up to a peak with some sacrificial tables and things, and then onto another mountain top with what is called the Monastery on top. This was a MASSIVE 50 meter-square facade, unbelievably well-preserved and just beautifully set. I could hardly even comprehend how big this stuff was, but it was so cool! Also, we saw the Treasury three times in total, and it is also very impressive (this is the big facade you see in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I think...one of those films). Mark and I just liked being in a different landscape with mountains and some trees and brush, altho it reminded us a LOT of our landscapes in Southern Utah, too.
After Petra, we headed up to Amman and spent two days there. The first day we just spent traveling and then wandering the city at night. We hiked up and down a couple of the large hills in town, and were really impressed with how much less haggling we encountered compared to Egypt. Of course, there was a wonderful falafel and hummus restaurant across from our hotel, so we enjoyed overdosing on that for less than $2 a person. Mmmmm....BEST hummus ever at Hashem Restaurant. :) The second day in Amman we caught a public bus out to the Dead Sea, went to a public beach there and really reveled in the sun and salt. We couldn't believe how truly flotative the Dead Sea was-we could stand straight up in the water and just bob around (in fact, our favorite game we created was to stand like a soldier and see which way your body bobbed, as your feet would inevitably pop like a cork to the surface). SO much fun! But it got REALLY hot there at the lowest point in the world, so we got lucky and hitch-hiked all the way back to Amman (about 2 hours) with a couple friendly guys in a truck. Oh yeah, and we ate falafel from Hashem for breakfast AND lunch this day! hehe...
Anyway, after that second day there, we kind of felt like we'd had enough of Jordan. Not that there wasn't a ton more to see, and it really was fantastic...but the place is a little expensive. One Jordanian Dinar is equal to $1.50 USD, and we wanted to see if we could get into Syria. SO, yesterday, the 21st? (losing count of days now, I am) we shared a private taxi with a British couple to take us to the Syrian border, wait however long it takes for us to get a Visa (which they say usually takes Americans about 7 hours...just waiting), and then drive us on to Damascus. The deal here is that technically, as Americans, we were supposed to get a Visa for Syria back in America. Ooops. Online stories report a variety of things, such as Americans will be hassled and grilled like crazy at the border and often rejected. Mostly, they just tell you it's impossible to get into Syria if you've been to Israel, so we avoided there, but we were still worried we might not get in. However, we lucked out! After just FOUR hours of sitting in the border control building (which was quite large and okay in comfort, at least it was air conditioned!), and very little questioning except for the perverted interrogation I got from my taxi driver about what the word "gay" means (remember to ask me about this later...this man was FREAKY), and completely smashing the pride of a very ignorant and unprepared Japanese fellow by trying to HELP him understand that he needed to PAY for a Visa (also ask me about this), we got Visas!! Of course, it only took our British companions 5 minutes. But here's the truly awesome part -- buying a Visa ahead of time, in America, will set you back $130 for the Visa and at least $50 for shipping, while getting it at the border was a whopping $16. Mock-YEAH-ing-YEAH-bird-YEAH! :) haha...
SO, wow, after that, we were in Syria. And our very impatient/perverted/insane taxi driver shoved us in his car, started yelling "baksheesh!" (tips) at us and repeatedly telling me "You're GAY!" and laughing his head off...and then he drove the entire 100+ km to Damascus going over 140 km/hour, slamming on his brakes just seconds before either rolling the car off the side of the road or smashing into the semi truck in front of us...we were all closing our eyes and just begging that we would make it to Damascus alive. We arrive in Damascus, the driver tries to dump us off amidst a sea of taxi drivers yelling at us, and suddenly a brawl breaks out between two of the taxi drivers who want us to get in their cars. My adrenaline was pumping at this point, and I remember just yelling SILENCE (in Arabic) and the taxi drivers start getting more excited that I speak Arabic, and all 4 of us hop into the taxi looking most capable of driving away quickly (they were parked about 4 thick in this sea). Thankfully, it had a meter, and only charged us 50 Syrian Pounds (equal to $1 USD) rather than the 200 the crazies were demanding...OK, so other than that fiasco, Syria has been just AWESOME. The guide books and other travellers all insist that this is the most friendly place on earth, and altho I don't know if I'd quite agree, it is definitely a welcoming city and we have met some great people. There is ZERO hassling like in Egypt or Jordan, not even when walking thru the markets and bazaars. We walked the souq (market) in Old Damascus City, which is housed within old ruined Roman walls. This was a crazy, tunnely little area with plenty of excitement going on. After trying Belgian waffles (ooooooh baby), baklava, fresh squeezed orange juice, and a mysterious white ice-cream like thing dipped in crushed pistachios (surprisingly not so good), we all decided this is a wonderful place to be. And THEN we sat and smoked nargileh (the hukah pipe--just tobacco, so don't worry too much about me) and drank mint tea at a little cafe outside of the Umayyad Mosque in the heart of the Old City. There were plenty of other Syrians lounging there with us, and one friendly young guy named Ahmed came up and started chatting, asking if he could practice his English and talk to us. He was so fun and friendly, turns out he was great fun and we (it was Mark and I and the two British all together) met a few of his friends who were with him and had a wonderful long discussion, much of it was about politics and religion but also plenty of fun stuff too. :) Around 11:30 we decided we should probably call it a night, and walked back to our hotel. We've made plans to meet up with the guys at the cafe again tonight, so hopefully we will go wander the city a bit more. It was a lot of fun!
Anywho, today we just got up and had a lazy morning. Then around noon we finally left and went to the National Museum here, which was nice--we got to see some cool Mesopotamian/Babylonian/Islamic/Crusader ruins. Syria really has been a major crossroads in the history of civilization, always being conquered and over-run so it has quite a melting pot of culture. However, we're all a bit tired with museums/monuments/etc...I think Egypt burned us out (and put us in awe), so we're saving our energies for some castles and things to come in the next few days here in Syria. We had a lunch of delicious hummus and massive falafel sandwiches, which only set us back $.50 each (tough life here, eh?). And, now, we're internetting until we go meet up with our new friends at the Old City again.
WOW, this has been a HUGE update, so if you made it this far, THANK YOU! On another personal note, my sister finally had her baby and everything went really well (with a natural delivery, and a big fat healthy little boy). She had him on Sunday night, and his name is Parley Hansen. Don't know his middle name yet, but I'm pretty dang excited to hear this good news...I'm coming home in just about two weeks now, so I'm hoping I can see him right away because I don't want to miss any little alien heads or rosy cheeks! Altho he is pretty fat already, from the sound of it--9 lbs. and 22 inches! WHOOT, go Allie!!
And that is the excitement of my life...I've tried uploading pictures but it didn't work so maybe next time...sorry! It'll take me a good month to load them all when I get home, but I think I'll have to because we have some really awesome ones. Take care!!

a long time in the making

2009-04-10T11:13:00.000-07:00

whoa whoa I have no way to play catch-up for the long lapse in my blog! Essentially, what happened is that my life got a LOT more interesting, fast-paced, and much less stable. Really, I am just traveling non-stop! It was SO much fun to have my mom and everyone here with me, and I say it past tense just because mom left three days ago. Or was it four? Time is starting to really run together and I can't comprehend it. BUT that is boring, and what is fun is all of the things I have seen and done! First, mom came out on March 26th, I picked her up from Hurghada and we relaxed and snorkeled in Quseir for a few days. Ahhh the Red Sea...then we did a mad over-nighter bus to Cairo, spur-of-the-moment trip to Bahariyya Oasis where we saw some really excellent tombs and mummies. After that, we did Alexandria for a few days, and I tell you that town feels so European after being in Upper Egypt, hehe! It was beautiful, I especially loved the Catacombs as there was one tomb entryway that felt just like walking into an Indiana Jones movie (doesn't everything in Egypt, tho?). Mom and I also really enjoyed mango juice on the Mediterranean Sea at Qobesi...yummmmy pulpy goodness.
Then, we went back to Cairo and Ralph (Mark's pops), Mark and Peter all arrived on the night of the 31st. We spent the night in Cairo and went to the Egyptian Museum the next day to get a taste of what sort of treasures of ancient Egypt we could enjoy. Tut's treasures are still just mind-blowingly beautiful, even for the second time for me! (I went to the Museum when I visited Erin a month back) We all took an overnight, over-priced first-class (which really means smokey, noisy, well-lit, anything-but-first class)train to Luxor. Not a pleasant trip, especially for Peter who got sick. But Mom, Mark, Ralph and I all met a man named Crazy Ahmed in Luxor who helped us arrange some great stuff for our few days there. We went to Karnak Temple and got bombarded by the U-20 Egyptian Cup soccer teams who all wanted photos with my mom and I and swarmed us like flies. So crazy! That night we took a felucca ride no the Nile with Crazy Ahmed, Peter felt well enough to join us thank goodness. This ride was SUCH a highlight, it was at sunset, we got to eat some delicious fish (which, truly amazingly, I think has forever changed my taste buds in favor of fish!!! Allie--this is how you do it!). AND we took a short detour for camel rides at sunset through the fields of hay and such growing on the Nile shore. BEAUTIFUL.
The next day we did a whirlwind tour of the West Bank of the Nile in Luxor--here lies the Valley of the Kings, Hatshepsuts Temple, the Colossi of Memnon (two giant statues, mostly destroyed but impressive in their restoration), and Medinat Habu. Also here is the Valley of the Queens, but apparently most of the tombs are closed so we skipped it...plus, the tombs at V of the Kings were SO awesome that we got tired of tombs! Haha...but they were SUPER colorful, intricately carved and painted heiroglyphics in impressive deep halls, just so awesome and better than I had imagined. Also, Medinat Habu was a temple dedicated to war and this was very complete with ceilings intact. And, funniest part, was the piles of hands, feet, and penises of the enemies laid at the feet of the Pharaoh! :)
Whoo, so, at this point we were all sick of temples to an extent, so the next day we just rented bikes and let adventure take us. Riding bikes was fun, but more fun was when Ralph accidentally let our falafel slip into the Nile and we were welcomed into another Ahmed's house for tea and to meet his family. Then this lovely, hospitable Egyptian showed us his farm and animals (I loved the baby ducks), let Mark ride his motorcycle, and it was just a wonderful experience for everyone with me to see what Egyptian life is like (and not just get the hasslers along tourist streets!).
And, wow, this was only like the 3rd or 4th or something...we took an overnight bus back to Cairo, we all slept in the next morning because the bus ride was also difficult to sleep thru. Hmmm...in the afternoon Mark and mom and Ralph and I went to the Citadel, which I might agree with the guidebooks in saying it is over-rated (altho lends some GREAT views of the city and Al-Azhar!). We went to the Khan al-Khalili, or market, and bought a few souvenirs and enjoyed the touters. Also, we ate some GREAT Egyptian pancakes--the food this whole trip has been amazing, Egyptian cuisine is fantastic! (as long as you eat at the local places) The next day, the 5th, we all went to the pyramids at Saqqara, Dahshur, and of course, Giza. I LOVED the Sphinx, and we ate at a Pizza Hut overlooking all of the pyramids at Giza and it was lovely! haha...
Anywho, I would love to write more, but I'm already verbose and I'm paying for this so I'm gonna go...more to come soon, but for now, I'm in Dahab and diving again! BACK TO THE SEA!!!

the sea cow is my friend

2009-03-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

heyeyeheyeheyehey i saw the dugong!!! wowowowowow i am SO shocked and surprised and elated and overwhelmed and happy. ;) silly how a little sea cow can do that to you. BUT here's the story:

The British family and I went to Abu Dabbab this afternoon (the same bay that's 100 km south of Quseir where I saw the turtles and octopii and guitarfish earlier while diving). We've been trying to go for days now, but the wind and weather have been really off and not good for the water, so we've had to put it off...finally, the wind dropped to only 15 km/h today, so we went for it. The goal was to see turtles, as Andy and Lyn really wanted to snorkel and see them. We arrived around 2, and I hopped in quickly to snorkel and immediately saw a turtle right on the surface really close to me. It was fun, but I got out and let Lyn use my fins to swim out far and try to see a turtle. I tended the kids on the beach, and we kept talking about how lots of people have seen the dugong here lately and wouldn't that be cool if we could see it. They asked me several times if someone on the shore said the dugong was out, if I would just RUN for the water and I told them yes. So, when Lyn came out of the water and they greeted her, and came running back to me telling me that she saw the dugong, I thought they were teasing and just trying to get me into the water. But then she really had!!! So, I RAN! haha...I almost forgot my mask and snorkel, which would not have worked too well...but, I made it out to the small group of people collecting over the dugong, and the visibility was spot-on (she was about 10-13 meters depth). The dugong was so pretty, just vacuuming up the sea-grass!!! And while I was snorkeling above her for about 30 minutes, she came up for air 4 times and two of those times she swam so close to me I could touch her. Unfortunately in the Red Sea you're not allowed to touch, but it was so fun to look into her eyes and be that close. She was probably 2.5 meters long, just a big fat animal so graceful in the water...one time she was up, I was swimming in front of her and she actually came straight for me pretty fast, staring at my eyes, and I think she was playing with me cuz I darted and she turned a little and ducked under me...Oh I would have loved to jump on her back! haha...but WOW it was breath-taking and amazing, I will never forget this experience. So much fun, and so fantastic to not be expecting it at all and to have it come so near to the end of my time here on the Red Sea. Mom arrives in one week exactly, and then my traveling begins and I'll only have a few more days in Quseir, and then 4 days of diving while I'm in Dahab later. I am so happy!! I can't wait to be with everyone...and I'll post some more pics of myself on the beach with a picture of the dugong later. ;) If you are more interested in them, as they are fascinating and very similar to manatees which many more people have heard of, then just go to wikipedia.org and search for the dugong. They have some great photos as well, and in my diving guide book, both of the pictures of the dugong are from this Abu Dabbab bay. ;)love you and I hope you all have as good of days as I just did! AND happy 13th birthday to my littlest brother Nicholas, wish I could give him the same gift that karma gave me today but I hope he gets other fun things of his own.

al-hefla!

2009-03-16T01:20:00.000-07:00

(me hanging with some of the diving crew)

So I had a birthday last week... ;) It was a lot of fun, but it's taken me awhile to get back on here and write about it, since I was so busy with the festivities of it all! hehe...It was Thursday, and in the morning I went diving and I got to see some pretty awesome stuff on one of my dives. I saw two more turtles (they're smaller ones, about 1 meter, and they're the type that eat jelly fish), a giant moray eel SWIMMING (usually they're just poking their heads out of a hole), and some giant napoleon fish (about 2 meters long, and FAT). It was a great morning of diving, and was the last diving I'll do before I go to Dahab in April with Mark and Ralph (Mark's Dad). :) Happy me that I got to see turtles again!! One of them even swam right next to me and I got so excited I wanted to swim with him till I realized I was rising to the surface really fast (a definite no-no in diving)...oops!

(Sam, me, and Lauren, all pulling awesome falafel faces!)

Then, in the afternoon, I went to the Center and hung out with the British family, said hi to people, called my family. It was so good to talk to my mom and dad again! I miss home quite a bit nowadays, but that's only because people are coming here and I'm just so anxious to see everyone. Anyway, the evening of my birthday I bought a watermelon (YAY in March!!!), and the British family and I went and ate a massive amount of falafel at my favorite place. Mmmm...we went home after that, feasted on the watermelon (so tasty, too! Dad--it was a 7, so good enough for me!), and then I went to bed early because I was SO tired. Got a phone call from Mark, too, which was awesome. :)

(Nora, Iman, Lauren, Lyn, Ahmed and me)

WHOO, and then Friday the party kept on rockin'--Iman, the English teacher at the Center, invited Nora and Lyn (British mom) and Lauren (British daughter) over for dinner. We went to her house about 2 o'clock, and she fed us SO much DELICIOUS food! She made masa'a (eggplant in a garlicky-potatoe-tomatoe sauce, mmmmm), stuffed peppers and eggplants, and some really nice fried beef and chicken for us. Everything was amazing, I think masa'a is my new favorite Egyptian dish! It's got so much garlic, mmmm it makes me happy...I don't think I've really even been hungry since that dinner, either, I ate so much. :) After dinner we girls all went to the Center and we had a big dance party for all of the teachers and girls in the youth group here. The amazing thing is everyone actually danced! So much fun, dancing to Arabic music and seeing some of the ladies take off their head scarves and get down... We also had some amazingly delicious desserts for my birthday, too, including my new favorite basbusa and some really rich chocolate cake. Yay! I couldn't take any pictures of the dance because the women don't want photos of themselves dancing and not wearing their hijabs, so I respected that. I do have pictures of the basbusa and cake, tho! :)

After the dance, some of the girls and Nora and I went to a wedding party. It was really just a huge, loud dance party for MEN, while the women have to sit around and try to talk over the music. But, it's outdoors and there's lots of fun lights, so it was interesting to see! I must admit, I enjoy wedding parties with good food and dancing for everyone a little more, but that's just my own cultural thing...

(The happy couple.)

So, those were my birthday celebrations. It was a great couple of days, and Sunday I went to the beach and yesterday I participated in a big beach clean up at Mangrove Bay. WHEW I'm SO tired today, and completely sore from all of that bending and lifting of trash...we spent about 5 hours working super hard in the sun. It was fun, tho, and memorable to me! I can't believe the impact trash has on the environment, it's unbelievable. I want to start making a much more concerted effort to buy things that come in minimal packaging, and recycling everything I can.

Anyway, my internet is going to be much more sparse now because we can't connect to the internet at the house on dial-up anymore. So don't expect quick responses to emails or comments, sorry! :) Thanks again for all of the birthday wishes I received, it was really nice to get so much attention from home and I really appreciate you all and your friendships and love. Thanks!!

complete with illustrations

2009-03-11T06:02:00.000-07:00

One little corner of the Khan al-Khalili, we were in the gold and silver district. :) Hence the blingy balls!
Erin and Tuba, attempting to figure out his new camera lens.
"Rifraff, street cat, I don't buy that...if only they'd look closer! Would they see a poor boy no sirree...They'd find out, there's so much more to mEEEEEEow!"
Erin and I doing our superstar poses in front of a mosque. I think this is al-Hussein Mosque.
The Egyptian Museum from outside (no photos are *technically* allowed inside, so I obeyed).

I'm at/in/on Egypt

2009-03-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

MASSIVE apologies for the lapse in time here...I know so many of you *hehe* count on my blog for your entertainment, and to make you wait a week (maybe more now?) is so unfair. Sorry! I was in Cairo, that's my excuse, and in Cairo...wow, there was not enough time in Cairo. I only had two short days and one evening to hang out with Erin and see a few things (and get a much-needed hair cut), so I chose not to be online much. :) I hope you understand!
My brief recap is this: got to Cairo about 7 PM on Thursday night, walked around the large downtown square of Midan Tahrir and met Erin in front of the KFC. Happy times! We went straight to a tasty dinner and enjoyed a little of the ambience of Cairo night-time, then just got me settled into her friend Rosa's apartment and chatted till I needed to sleep. Friday we got up and were driven to the Khan and accompanied by Erin's Iraqi friend Tuba (well, I'm sure you could spell it Tooba or something like that, but I just wanted to call him Suzaphone after he marched us through the Khan! BAND JOKE). Anyway, the "Khan" is really Khan-al-Khalili which is the major market downtown, one of the old-fashioned souqs (although not with tents over head, more just wrapped inside of the tiny walkways between buildings). This was really fun, we didn't really try to shop or barter, just look and catch shots of the street cats. I got one, which I'll post later (all photos will have to come later since I'm on dial-up again). We did end up getting some perfume (mmm, my own blend of heliotrope and gardenia) from a little fellow who tried to charge us his "friends-price" of 500 LE for a small bottle, and eventually got it down to 20 LE per bottle...Anywho, after the Khan we did lunch at a Lebanese restaurant and I finally got hummus! YES. Super tasty...and at night we went out on the town with some of Erin's American-ex-pat-student friends. It was lovely meeting all of her friends, it seems like there's a fun community for Americans living in Cairo!

Saturday I woke up and had the day to myself. First, I wandered into a really dodgy part of town by the Metro, and got lost, and made friends with random men who tried to point me in the direction of the bus station. Once there, I booked my ticket back to Hurghada which I got way over-charged for because they would only give me the tourist price (urgh...even tho I spoke Arabic and everything). Then, had an easy time finding my way back to the Metro, and ate street food before getting caught in a wild dust storm. The temperature was about 90 degrees both Friday and Saturday, with lots of wind and humidity so it was pretty unpleasant. I escaped into the vast and haphazard confines of the Egyptian Museum, which is even better than the guidebooks say (as long as you can avoid the tour groups). It has a little organization, at least things are arranged up and down hallways based on time periods. But, things are rarely labeled, and when they are, the labels are small and old and don't give you any really important information. I viewed it as my own chance to "discover" these ancient treasures myself, and try to piece together what they all might mean...my favorite things were the Royal Jewellery, King Tut's golden sarcophagi (IT'S REAL!), and the random frescoes of war-scenes and musicians playing instruments with dancers. Hard to believe it was all so long ago, but people were still the same...Loved it. After that, Erin and I visited her friend's house in the fancy American part of town. She and some other female friends from the American University have a pole-dancing club. NO, it's not as scandalous as it sounds--it's actually a great workout and really just a dancing and fun evening. In fact, after seeing the first move on the pole in a well-lit house with girls who took off their hijab upon entering, the pole-dancing lost all of its sexuality and really just became girl bonding time. I felt like it was almost like bouldering--they all help each other learn new moves and they have to really practice to build up the strength to do inverted flips and what not. I got a couple little beginner spins in, and I was sore for three days. :) haha...a REALLY great night, I hope to see some of her friends again when I pass through Cairo later!

Anywho, that was Cairo, I came back by leaving early on Sunday but not getting into Quseir until 6 pm...I've been mostly at home, but my birthday is Thursday so I'm going diving then! YES. I've also got a few more courses I'm finishing up over the next two weeks, so Inshallah all goes well and smoothly. I'll have a few pics of Cairo tomorrow, hopefully. :) Hope things were just as exciting for everyone else! Congrats to my bro for his Homecoming (returning from the mish in Argentina--I'm proud of him, and can't wait to share foreign memories together). Also, another brother, David, got his Scouting Eagle on Sunday too, so congrats to him! (also proud I am) I'm just waiting for my sister to have my new little nephew...I guess there's a few weeks left before he's officially due, but he's gonna be totally healthy at this point so I'm wishing her super health and safety now. :) Love everyone!

wanna ride in the Allah boat?

2009-03-02T06:44:00.000-08:00

Huzzah! It's the Allah Boat! OK, so I've been meaning to take a picture/post a picture of this ever since my first day in Quseir, but the lighting was never quite right or I was always getting too much attention to pause and snap it. BUT, I finally did it, I got the Allah Boat recorded for all of my posterity! Really, ain't it the coolest? For the majority of you that cannot read Arabic script, the sail of this beauty says "Allah". Hence, the name. I love this statue, it is so creative and lively, and one of the best landmarks in town! It's right in the center of town, at a roundabout, so it really catches your eye. We have lots of funny sculptures at every intersection/roundabout in town, but this one is by far my favorite--it actually kind of makes sense why they have it! (But the statues of horses, or small clocks that don't tell the correct time, or mermaids...they are all so weird)
And this is just a view through an arch out into the harbor in town. I took this the other day after I went to the fort. All of the restaurants on the beach have little archway entries like this, and then just plastic picnic tables set up outside for you to enjoy the wonderful weather here. It's been kind of cold the last few days, and I actually mean that literally because I've had to wear a jacket all day and am always sleeping with two blankets at night. I hear it's raining in Cairo--but thank goodness that will be gone by the time I go there to visit Erin on Thursday!

So a small update on my future plans. One--the wedding date is most likely set for July 18th at the International Peace Gardens. My stoke is so high! :) And two--Mom comes into Egypt on March 26th, and then Mark and Peter (and maybe even Mark's Dad now) will join us on March 31st. Mom stays until April 7th, then Peter until the 8th. We're going to do as much of Egypt as we can in such a short time, and I'm SO excited to have some of my beloveds with me here! I can't wait to travel again!! :) If anyone else wants to join us, haha, now is the time to book your flights.
OK, I don't know WHAT my computer is doing but it is showing up all of the pictures for this entry twice...I hope it does not come out that way! Take care, and I'll have some pretty wicked pictures from Cairo to post next week, yay. Also, if the weather gets better I'll be going snorkeling again with the Brits tomorrow, so cross your fingers for me!

feel free to comment...

2009-02-28T10:08:00.001-08:00

Just one more quick note so say that I think I changed my settings so that ANYONE can comment. No need to make a Blogspot or Gmail account, and I think you can even remain anonymous if you need to harass me for fun. :) That means YOU Aponi!

2009-02-28T09:23:00.000-08:00

First of all, just want to say that the last few days have been really nice! On Thursday night the youth group at the Center did an art gallery/sale, and it was just a nice time to socialize. We had a lot of people come to the Center to support it, and so it was a great success. (Plus, there were lots of cookies!) I even bought a couple things...One was this "Allah Pear" as I call it...however, it is Arabic script that says the first scripture of the Quran, essentially the name of Allah. I love Arabic script pictures, there are some really amazing shapes they make with their letters! It's a beautiful art, and it's especially prevalent in Islam because they believe that you should not make depictions of God in a human form, as this is representing him as a less powerful and perfect being. The theological word for ascribing human forms to a deity is called anthropomorphism, and they are anti-anthroblahblah. SO, they have a long tradition of instead just writing the scriptures and Allah's name alone in the most beautiful possible ways!
Anyway, the Allah Pear is made with glittery glue that they put behind the glass of this mirror. I've seen how they do it, and it's so awesome, so I'll be bringing this home and cleaning it up and getting it a nice little frame to display my happy Allah Pear mirror. :)

And now, finally, some pictures of my flat...I kept putting off taking pictures because I thought I might clean it. But, never did, SO here is the real thing...
The main room, the first thing I walk into. The kitchenette is on the right side there, and then on the left I have my TV and just out of the picture is a little place to sit. :) Then, thru the door in the back/center of the pic is...
My bathroom! This, I do keep pretty clean. It's so small, it's hard to make it a mess! I have a sink off the left of the picture, and on the floor I store all of my toiletries. I kept those out of the photo, no need to see that pile! (and yeah, check out how small my shower is!)
And finally, through that previous doorway above, and to the left is...
The bedroom with the HUGE bed! OK, it's actually two beds just right next to each other (or rather, two mattresses on a huge bed). I sleep on the far one, and keep all of my random projects/books/etc (cross stitch in this picture) on the lower bed. I love it too, because out those angelic door on the right I have a very small balcony. It's nice to breathe some fresh air periodically. :)

So, that's my flat. OH yeah, and anyway, yesterday (Friday) was a lovely day because I went to the Movenpick with the new British family who is staying in our house for a month. The dad is teaching computers at the Center, the mom and their two children (a boy and a girl, 10 and 12 respectively, I think) are helping with the Kindergarten. We went to the Movenpick and hung out on the beach the entire day, and I finally got in and snorkeled in the bay there. WOW, it had AMAZING snorkeling! I can't wait to take you there, mom. :) I saw lots and lots and lots of fish, really beautiful coral, and a couple rays, too. The fish here seemed even bigger than the other ones I've seen, the parrot fish just all looked massive! I had SO much fun, and it was fun to have the kids because I kept telling them the little things I know about fish and showed them my coral reef guide book when we got back home. It's nice to have some new excitement in the house, plus, they're happy to include me on their adventures and I've been needing people to do fun things with me! So, at least I have some companions for my last month now. :)

Also, I've made plans to visit Erin next Thur-Sun in Cairo, I can't wait!!! I need a change of scenery, and I also look forward to being in a big big big big city! And, of course, I'm totally excited to see Erin and hang out with an old friend. I'm re-appreciating the value of all of my friendships and family now...I miss the people I love. Ahhhh... <3 hehe, so yes, now this next week I just have to keep my excitement to a minimum and get through a few more classes. Tata!

a quiet afternoon

2009-02-24T07:48:00.000-08:00

I did it--I finally made it to the fort, like I said I would. Yes, that was two or three days ago now, on Saturday. I'm finally finding the time and fast internet to blog about it now! :) I went by myself, because no, Nora was not interested in going. I arrived, and it turns out I was the only tourist interested in visiting the fort that afternoon. So, I got all three travel guides to lead me around! (Luckily, I only had one for the first half of it.) It's a small fort, probably the size of half a city block in Salt Lake, and the whole central part is wide open with just a few old items strewn about. It was built way back in the 16- or 1700's, I think, but was kind of destroyed in the late 1800's when the British and French were fighting. Honestly, I wish I had paid better attention to the signs and read more of them, but my tour guide insisted on trying to say things to me in English/Arabic, and I felt really really rushed. It was awkward, he couldn't just be quiet and let me read. It was nice, that he was trying to guide me, but he didn't actually know how to GUIDE me and so I was too distracted. Take note of this for future travels in much larger, far more interesting areas: DON'T accept the tour guide unless they speak fluent English! (Although I had no choice on this guy, I think he HAD to accompany me throughout the place...)First, I looked at these old railway carts used to transport the mining materials. Apparently, the tracks they are on went all the way out to the port on the Sea (approx. 1000 meters away). Then, we went up on the tower you can see in the large picture, and these were the views I got from there:
A map of Egypt, looking south. So, Alexandria is on the very bottom there by the Nile Delta, and then that's the Red Sea that forks. Sinai peninsula is in between the forks, with St. Katherine Monastery marked on the map. (You may be able to see more detail if you click on and enlarge the picture.) Quseir, albeit very difficult to read in the picture, is along the coast straight across from the railings that jut into the map. :)
This is looking out toward the Sea and the city--you can see two minarets from mosques in the picture. It was really a breathtaking view of the city and the Sea...it's so lovely from above!
This was an old saddle for a camel. They had reins hanging from the ceiling in this room, and they must have been about 30 feet long. I have no idea why they are so long, but it was amazing! This came out a little shiny, because I had to use the flash...but it was totally all old hand-crafter leather. B-ea-u-ti-ful. :)

A little statue, the man kept saying "Hatshepsut" but I didn't see any signage to verify this. I am pretty sure this is neither ancient nor by anyone famous, but it was cool.

This picture verifies my previous claim--seriously, dead rats everywhere. I saw about 3 or 4 of them inside the fort, and that was my very talkative guide standing in the background, laughing at me taking this picture. The rat is up on a little pedestal of sorts, old remnants of walls, and it is oh so sad.

A boat, which they used to use to sail from Quseir to Saudi Arabia to reach Mecca for the Hajj. Also, I think they transported goods in these too...Apparently, Quseir, before the 1700's, used to be the number one port to depart from Egypt to reach Saudi Arabia. Now people just fly. :)

And finally, me! Sitting with the canons left over from that French/English fight. I think the French were occupying the fort when it got a bit destroyed, because I remember reading something about them withdrawing later...and I know the British were there for MUCH longer than just the 1800's. :) Anywho, that was my afternoon, stay tuned to my blog for many more pictures and they are only going to get better! (especially when Mom, Mark, and Peter come at the end of March...I can't WAIT to start seeing some of the treasures here in Egypt!!)

Bad weather is all relative

2009-02-21T02:14:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, my great plans to go to Fanadir to snorkel and enjoy the beach yesterday blew out to sea with the weather. It cracks me up what "bad weather" is here in Quseir--yes, it's winter, but can we really call it that when it's just cloudy and windy? I don't know...but the humidity was probably -10% since all of the air was blowing in off of the mighty desert. And my throat is hurting because of it. I still haven't fully recovered from being sick, but I'm getting there--I'd say I'm about 20 tissues away (and a headache) from being back to normal. :)

So to make up for my lackluster attempt at doing something exciting yesterday, I got some motivation from my wonderful sister in her comment to my previous post. She told me I'll never regret working hard, and I guess that made me realize I don't want to come home regretting NOT working hard...regrets suck. SO I spent a few hours studying Arabic yesterday, just working out a book and drilling myself on some basic colloquial grammar stuff (like all of the different pronouns and possessive phrases, how to negate things, etc...). It was fun! However, I'm still a little afraid to apply it all in speech. I still don't feel like I know enough to do anything more than greetings and basic info about myself, but whatever, I'll try. My plan is to spend this afternoon prepping for my course tonight (I'm going to teach them prepositions and the kind-of-sort-of rules we have that we always break), and then visiting the fort in town for just a few hours before I teach. Hopefully tomorrow I have some cool and different pictures to post from this! I'm trying to get Nora to go with me, but if she's going to be a pooper and bail, my plan is to go alone anyway. The fort is practically right across the street from the Center (oh wait, EVERYTHING in Quseir is practically just across the street!), so it'll be easy to get to and from. :) Can't wait!

PS--thanks for the motivation/reminder Allie...it's amazing how much easier it is to sit and watch TV (at least I was reading the subtitles in Arabic, tho!)

Who doesn't love a 5-star resort?

2009-02-19T06:15:00.000-08:00

Hello again! Well, despite my illness-invoked pessimism, I still can't deny that Egypt along the Red Sea is a beautiful place to be. On Friday last week I went to the Movenpick with Nora...or maybe it was Saturday...or maybe Sunday. I'm confused, but it doesn't really matter because it was the weekend, and a perfectly calm day. The Movenpick is of course a 5-star resort just north of town, and I've just begun teaching a group of 4/5 students (that's 4 OR 5, not four-fifths...some of them are prone to absence, like many of my students) that are all in lower-level management there. I began that course Monday, and I taught again on Wednesday and it's going really well!
Anyway, Movenpick is the ONLY place to go for good ice cream around here, and their creme brulee is to DIE for. I'll catch a picture of it next time! Because you know there will be several next times for sure... ;) Nora and I wandered around the "campus" of the resort, and found a few fun secluded areas to sit and meditate by the ocean. And to dig around in the shells on the shore.

Also, my Arabic-motivation all but died with my sickness. I came out of the house after those few days of imprisonment to discover that I really don't know this language. It sounds 100% different than what I'd studied for three and a half years! AGH this darn colloquial...BUT I've spent a few days poohing and paahing in complaint, only speaking English except of course "shukran" and "khalas" (enough), and now it's time to get over it. I'm in Egypt, and if I'm not going to at least keep pushing along and learning a little more every day, then why the heck am I here?!?! I could be at home, with my friends and family and of course my beloved Mark, planning my wedding and playing in the snow...but I put all this effort and money into being here, so I'll persevere. Mark also gave me a sweet little nudge via email to help me feel more motivated. :) He's great for me. SO I'm meeting with the English teacher from the Center two days a week--one for English, one for Arabic. And also continuing to meet with Esraa (although we have to work out a new schedule for this), doing the same English-Arabic exchange. Iman, the English teacher, took me out to look for jewellery on Monday because I've been complaining about not having any. I found a couple of pairs of earrings, and they are CHEAP! Just about $6 for each pair, and now I feel much more girly again. It is strange, though, because Iman even noticed how awkward it is to walk around with a tourist--I get so many cat-calls and comments and she started getting really uncomfortable. I wish she had told them to shut up! But it's not worth the breath sometimes I feel...oh well.

So that is my week so far. My plan for tomorrow, Friday, is to go to the Fanadir resort (where I was diving in the beginning) and do some snorkeling and lounging on their beach. I feel more comfortable there than the Movenpick, just because it isn't nearly as fancy or crowded. Plus, I know some of the staff at Fanadir and they're my buds. :) Hope ya'll have a good weekend too!

PS--MARK COMES ON MARCH 31ST!!!

How to waste a weekend in Egypt

2009-02-14T06:00:00.000-08:00

Ahh, hello again...So, the title of today's post is incredibly pessimistic, I know. But I HATE the fact that I had to waste this entire weekend (practically a week now) being sick. I could have done so many wonderful things, seen some ancient temples or floated with the fishies but instead...yeah, I've just been ill. Nothing exciting or oriental or even boring-by-choice. Forced imprisonment! AGH. Why?? Oh well...at least I'm finally getting better. Just in time to get back to work! Oh yeah, and HAPPY VALENTINES DAY. :)

So I thought I'd just post some pictures since I really haven't been up to anything at all except going through three rolls of toilet paper to blow my nose, and discovering daily that either the power or water or internet is out. :) It's ridiculous! I think Egypt is having a tough week, and I'm a victim of it...I take none of the blame. Oh, and about those pictures, I have made the mistake of forgetting to bring my camera-computer-connector-cable with me to the Center, so I only have old photos and most of those you've seen. So I'm just doing the one of me and Nora, Esraa, and Mona for now (I think I look a little strange here, whatever). Esraa is the girl I'm starting to meet with to practice Arabic and English. She's great, and she's very forgiving of my cultural ignorance which I do appreciate! She and I like to talk about sports and American movie stars and things. She loves America. :) Mona does art here at the Center, and she and Nora are good buds but I'm having a tough time getting to know her cuz she knows zero English. I'm trying tho, I'm speaking as much Arabic as I can with her, but I don't understand her accent very well. Working on it...
Anywho, that's it for today. I hope your Valentines are much more lovey and healthy than mine!

woe is me

2009-02-11T08:55:00.000-08:00

It's been almost a week since my last post and I think I owe an update at least to explain why I disappeared. First, the internet and phones went down in Quseir two days ago right as I was about to write a new post. Ever since, we only have dial-up internet--the wireless at the Center hasn't been working. So it's impossible to load any pictures or surf the internet at a decent speed.

Second is that I'm sick. A few days ago I had a really rough night of sleep--I just couldn't fall asleep. Ever since, I've felt worse and worse and yesterday I was completely exhausted and had a super sore throat. Today, I'm worthless, just aches and pains and runny nose and swollen throat. That's what I get for thinking that I'm immune to whatever viruses haunt Egypt, huh? Oh well...I've slept or sat around all day today and I'm sick of it. I was supposed to have four days off this weekend, in which I wanted to either visit Cairo or do a little trip to Luxor, but instead I'm now going to be spending it in front of the TV, wishing I had some NyQuil. I don't think it's anything serious, just your run-of-the-mill cold (which HAS been going around the teachers at the Center, so I'm not surprised). I'll let you know when I feel better because that will be reason to rejoice! Oh well, at least I'm not canceling any classes. Except I was supposed to have the kids one last time tomorrow morning, and I don't think I'll be able to go. Suzanna is taking good care of me, offering me soup and making sure I'm not worried about my courses or anything. Thank goodness...Now, I'm going to go get back to my sleep and try to get better ASAP so maybe by Sunday I can at least hit the Sea again or something. Happy Valentines Day! (and tomorrow, the 12th, is Mark and Annie's 4 year anniversary--from our very first date--YAY! I don't even remember life without him, and that makes me the happiest girl in the world)

greasy grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat!

2009-02-05T01:07:00.000-08:00

oooookay, I'm actually singing about rotten recumbent rat remains! I'm still waiting to see camel vomit in the street. But really, there is rat roadkill everywhere here! As you can see in my picture, this is just one unfortunate carcass... The amazing thing to me is how flattened they become. It's like they never used to be a complete body anyway! Some are more obviously "rat" than others--usually the tail is still intact, and you can even see teeth sometimes. But not this poor sucker. hehehe ;) I don't know why, but it used to make me ill when I saw them and now it just cracks me up! I think it's disgusting, but kind of funny that no-one EVER cleans the streets. And, truly, I am happy that one less rat is alive because they are SO gross. We don't have many by my house, thankfully, but in town at night and in dark alleys there can be several running around and it's really really disturbing. I come from lovely America where a MOUSE is reason to scream and run for cover, let alone a fully-grown street rat! haha, ahhh the joys of the third world. :)

While I consider this to be a rather beautiful street corner--midan--in town. It has a little "Welcome to Qusair" (spelled differently from normal, of course) sign on three corners, and a LOVELY picture of the beloved *cough cough* Mubarak. ;) OK, he's not so beloved, but he still has pictures of himself from when he was 20 years younger and much more attractive posted about every 100 meters in town. Whatever!
This is a group of rowdy boys in our little children's course. They were painting the German flag.
And these are some of the wonderful, obedient girls. The little one on the bottom right is my FAVORITE! Her name is Abrar, and she is quiet but good and adorable. :)

Gotta go get back to class now! Love ya :)

i'm always a day late...

2009-02-02T09:45:00.000-08:00

SO I realize this is coming a few days after the fact, but on Friday, Nora and I spent a lovely day not working. :) That's the universal day off here, and we used it to go to the beach and seashell hunt. She snapped a few pictures of me, and I thought I'd include one of them. It blows my mind how many hours I can spend looking through the massive piles of seashells on the beaches! There really isn't much sand near the beach, it's all just bits of coral reef and shells and trash. Nora and I found lots of fun shells which we plan to make jewelery with--I really hope we do! It would be so fun to have a little bracelet, maybe some earrings made of the shells I collected here in Egypt. I do love the Red Sea, the color is unbelievably AQUA in every wonderful way (although this picture doesn't necessarily do that statement justice)...and all of the beaches are made of really incredible rock formations, which all used to have coral reef attached to them who-knows-how-many billions of years ago. This Sea truly is just one GIANT length of coral reef!
And I taught my first class of crazy English/German to the children yesterday. It turns out we have kids from the age of 5-14, and it's really hard to do activities and teach stuff they can all learn. We learned a lot of nouns, and then played games like "Hot/Cold" hunting for objects (this was their favorite!), musical chairs where we chanted "Go" and "Stop" in the two languages, and had them draw and paint flags for America, Germany, and Egypt. We teach again tomorrow morning, and we have no clue what we're going to do! It's a three-hour lesson, and it's amazing how quickly the kids run through things. Even though they enjoy themselves, they do things at such a fast pace and finish all of the activities so early...But I think tomorrow we're teaching them "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" in German (then I'll teach them the English another day). I'm having fun learning some German words tho! I know all the colors now, I feel so smart. :)
I'll post more soon, now that I have three private lessons (well, groups of one or two people) and these kids in the morning, I'm feeling much more active and involved. It makes me happy! I am still working on Arabic, and even though I'm really only progressing at the rate of about 5 words a day, my understanding is improving... :)

a photo blog, part 2

2009-01-31T05:30:00.000-08:00

Chronologically, these photos are backwards. Unfortunately, I don't feel like taking the time to fix that. :) Enjoy the pictures!
We had a birthday party for the kindergartners at the Center on Wednesday. It was for all the kids with birthdays in January, and their mothers brought them some lovely cakes!

Here is one of my favorite little children--he is totally shy, but always doing something funny. He was chewing on a balloon when I snapped this, and later he and I played with the plastic fruit behind him banging them against our heads. :)

Musical chairs!

Me, Esraa, and Nora. Esraa works with the Youth Group that volunteers helping kids in the community. I'm going to ask Esraa to start doing private conversations with me to work on my Arabic. She's awesome!
Preparing art project examples for the winter break for the children. Papier-mache pinatas!
This is the resort located at the Abu Dabbab bay, where I went diving on Saturday. It's huge! And notice how it doesn't blend into the surroundings? The resorts can be quite gaudy along the coast.

This was our little set-up area for diving on Saturday at Abu Dabbab. Tomas is the guy in the orange pants, my divemaster. The other guy is an Egyptian who likes to talk about romance movies. This dive was when I saw the guitarfish and more turtles and two octopi!

Right in front of Fanadir Resort, where I've been diving quite a lot. I love how there are plenty of people dressed in traditional garb riding around with a mule and a cart. This is how they transport a lot of the produce. But here, I think the kids probably just wanted a ride!

And this is something random in town, next to a produce market. I think they like to decorate any and every surface they can here! But I think this is pretty... ;)

So those are some of my recent photos. I have been working hard this last week teaching my courses. I still have to work on my knowledge of verb tenses so I don't screw up my students! But I think I'm getting better, now. I begin some new lessons this week, in addition to the ones I already have going. I'm going to be crazy busy! Nora and I will be teaching a group of children, ages 9-12, some English/German lessons. These will be three days a week, for two weeks, and the lessons are 3 hours in the morning. We're planning a lot of games and role-playing because these kids are doing this on their winter break. I hope it goes well--we start tomorrow! Wish us luck... ;) I also begin teaching two supervisors from one of the 5-star hotels on Tuesday, as well as one of the general managers for the same hotel in a private lesson. Oh boy! The pressure is on. But I'm excited, and I want to be busy. Expect less emails/postings, however...sorry. :) Love ya all! Hashoof-kum bukran (hashoof-kum=see ya'll, bukran=tomorrow).

re: Your Brains

2009-01-26T10:13:00.000-08:00

Last night I downloaded about a million podcasts (ok, actually just 200...is that excessive?) in my search for good English listening material. Oh, and in that quest, I found some sci-fi nerdy fandom podcasts, which looked interesting and appeared to include much sci-fi literature read aloud. This morning, I listened to one of those. It's called "Starship Sofa", and it's hosted by this crazy Irish guy who makes me quite happy. BUT the best part was in a section about audio books in which the reporter decided to review a man named Jonathon Coulton, who doesn't write books but instead writes/performs songs about all things that belong in the interests of the nerdy culture. And the song they played was "re:Your Brains" (hahaha, I just wrote "Breans"--how does that hapean?). And it was the most hilarious thing I've heard in a LONG time (and I've been listening to a lot of NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!"). I know Angie and Mark and anyone who likes zombies at all will enjoy this. Here's a link to a YouTube video I found that is a fan-music video set to the song. I don't claim the actual video is good, but just turn away and listen to the song and trust me, it'll kill you! SOOO GOOD. I just wish I had known about it when I did the zombie walk this summer. New zombie material is well appreciated. Ok, that's all for now! :)

another week of fun

2009-01-25T09:39:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the delay! I have no good excuses except I'm getting a little tired of the computer. I want more of a life here, but it's so hard to meet people on the street or anything like that. Cuz the men will think I'm a sleezy American looking for lovins, and the women...well, there's not many of them, and it would just be weird. :) I've met a few lovely men at shops though, I like to chat with the falafel stand guys. They're pretty funny! They always say things with really weird accents, and I know they're doing it to test my English which is a really weird concept to me...but hey! It's a laugh. I'll make sure to take a picture of the stand next time I'm there. For now, I've just got more photos of things around town.
The men all sitting around in groups, doing what appears to be absolutely nothing (I'm pretty sure they get up and do something eventually, they just have a lot of leisure time!).
The harbor with so many boats just doing nothing. This picture is really trippy--something about the waviness of the cement on the bottom really makes me seasick! haha.

Anyway, these are things I see everyday, and they're just part of the charm and character of Quseir (and Egypt).

I have begun teaching more, I now have two classes with two men in each that are very advanced. I'm going to be working on reading science papers (they're all engineers) and doing business language and communication with them, since they're definitely capable of talking about current events and politics! My first class with one of the groups was last night, and one of the men spent the entire time chewing me out for being American and talking about how horrible America is...It was really frustrating, my hope is I can have more classroom control next time by being more forceful in saying "we're changing the subject now", or just having more organization in my lesson and maybe that will not give him room to be so rude. It was shocking! Everyone else is so excited for America because we have a new president, the majority of Egyptians seem to LOVE Obama! (as I've seen on TV, and around town) As they say, and as I somewhat agree--almost anyone new is better than Bush, at least for the Middle East. They could care less about our domestic issues, oh well!

So I was supposed to have a beginning conversation course with 6 students tonight, but for some reason, they never showed up. Remember inshallah? haha! It's frustrating, but I think Mark is going to get online and that means I can chat with him instead. A nice trade-off! Plus, I've found time and motivation to write another blog post. YAY!

In other news, I did even more diving in the last few days. I went up on Thursday and dove at some old favorite spots. We tried to hunt down the dugong, but to no avail (she's been spotted all over the area lately). On Saturday I went on a little road-trip with the diving center down to a bay called Abu Dabbab, where there's sea grass and a whole herd of turtles. It was AMAZING! I did two dives there, and saw at least 10 different turtles. They're adorable...plus I saw a guitarfish, which is a great mix of a shark and a ray. Also several octopi, a school of squid, some really wild boxfish, and beautiful beautiful reefs. The best dive spot I've been to yet, for sure! I'm gonna have to stop diving now, because I have no more money until I figure out what kind of traveling I'll be paying for later. But it's been so much fun, I'm glad I got it in while I could!

a photo blog

2009-01-20T05:22:00.000-08:00

Not much to say today, except I'm cracking down on making a curriculum for the different courses I'll be teaching this week. So, while I am at the Center on a wi-fi connection, I think I will post some of my long-awaited pictures!

A view from the roof-top terrace. Looking this direction, you can see the Red Sea (but not in this picture).
Another little view from the roof, you can see the city looking this direction. I love to sit up here and do my reading in the sunshine, hearing the honking cars and noise of the city.

Just an example of what the women walking around town look like. Initially, I thought that women didn't walk around town, but I was mistaken. There are plenty of them, just not on Fridays (their Sabbath) or as much at mid-day (probably the heat). And every woman in Quseir wears a head-scarf, completely covering their hair.

Another vision on the streets of Quseir, a microbus that takes everyone around town. The routes must be learned by trial and error, and, as you can see, they cram as many people as they can in one bus. It's only 50 piasters (50 cents of 1 Egyptian Pound--so 10 cents) to ride one way.
The largest mosque in town, all lit up at night!
And this is the outside of the Learning and Development Center. It is an old hospital that has been renovated to be a school, it's much larger than this picture makes it appear.

And this is just inside that front door at the LDC!
While this is just to the right after you enter in those doors. There's a courtyard inside, it keeps the air cool and fresh. :) And I thought I'd try to take a shot of myself...

This is Pharaoh Dive Club, located at Fanadir Hotel just south of town. This is the Club I did my certification through! Too bad it was a cloudy day because it's a really lovely beach.

Malak (means Angel in English), the daughter of one of the teachers at the LDC, and I hanging out in a back room at the Radisson. Malak and I had a lot of fun spinning her in that chair...
And this is the reason we were at the Radisson! They had a staff party and invited the teachers from the LDC (we teach their employees) to attend. They had this guy who spun like a whirling dervish, and also a belly dancer. Pretty fun, but also really odd because everybody just sat in their chairs! Notice Malak on the left.

OK, tis all for now. xoxo - Annie

my first falafel! and lots of diving...

2009-01-17T22:50:00.001-08:00

I did it--I finally found some falafel in Quseir. And oh boy, it's some gooooooood falafel (that's why I look so evil in that picture)! For those of you who don't know, falafel is simply these little balls of some sort of grain (couscous-like, but not quite) and spices all rolled up and then fried for a minute, so it's soft on the inside, crunchy on the outside. Then, they stick these balls into a pita, along with some small pieces of lettuce and tomato (not unlike a taco), and also really crunchy french fries, maybe some spicy eggplants stuffed with peppers (they're really soft tho), a weird tomato/french fry mixture, whatever. It's just a pita stuffed with these falafel balls and whatever else. And oh it's tasty! Plus, it's only 1 L.E. (Egyptian pound) for one pita-stuffing, so hooray, that's only about 20 cents! (the exchange rate is currently 5.5 L.E. to one US dollar) It makes a great dinner, and there are always fun people to chat with working at the falafel stand or sitting around. Good times...

AND I finished my advanced open water diver training yesterday! I did it in two days, so I've kind of been out of touch for awhile. :) On Friday, I did two dives in the morning at a site called Serib Kebir, 10 km south of town. It was a great site, the reef here was really beautiful because it was like a giant garden, so many little lagoons and canyons to see. I don't think I saw any crazy fish on these dives, but I practiced doing a deep dive and also doing fish identification. I saw a scorpionfish, they're quite funny! On Saturday, yesterday, I dove ALL DAY. The weather was absolutely perfect--the Sea was super calm, the sun was shining brightly with no clouds, and no wind. I dove in the morning at Al-Moghar, 12 km south, which is just a large reef wall in pretty much a straight line. It went maybe 30 meters deep, so we stayed off the bottom and just looked into holes and crevices on the reef. I practiced peak performance buoyancy, which was SO helpful, and I saw my first eels here! We saw a small giant moray, and several other smaller eels just hanging out with their heads popped out. They really look like puppets! In the afternoon, I dove at the house reef in front of the dive club, and I saw an octopus!!! He was so cute, and they seem incredibly intelligent. He stared at me, and when I moved he changed colors and held still, then played around for a minute. It was so fun...I practiced navigation on this dive, and I actually did really well--surprise, I didn't think I knew how to use a compass. Then, I did a night dive at 6:30 pm at the house reef as well. Night diving is amazing, I look forward to doing this again a lot. I saw lots of squid and blue-spotted rays and torpedo rays out, we even saw a scorpionfish eating--half of the poor fish was still sticking out of his mouth. One lionfish came really close to me, he showed a lot of curiosity--fish are so cute when they're not shy to interact with you. :) I also had a great time getting to know my dive instructor, Betra, and her boyfriend, Tomas, who is a divemaster (he leads dives). They're in charge of the dive club for a few weeks, and have told me I should come and dive for free with them whenever I can. They live really close to me, so hopefully I will see them around even if I can't make it to dive. We even went and got falafel together last night after the dive, 'al-hamdulillah! (said as a "good" or "great" whenever you want--any time in conversation, including "how are you?" or "i'm so happy!")
So, now the weather today is HORRIBLE--it's sunny, but WINDY. Tomas told me it would be about 40 knots today, which I assume is really fast since it's making a lot of noise. And blowing trash and sand everywhere. But, I need to go to the market and get some food, so I'm going to make a quick trip out and then come back in where it's safe. Take care, I hope you all survive the inversion!

true Arab style

2009-01-15T04:53:00.000-08:00

The view from my balcony--looking one direction into town. Like most Egyptian buildings, they leave them all partly unfinished so they don't have to pay taxes. Cheap-skates, yeah? Well, they have a horrible bureaucracy, so it makes sense.

Salaam (peace--said as hello and goodbye, whenever you want) again! Well, I have a bit of time to write here, and I'm going to discuss my teaching so far. Although I haven't done much! haha...no, the other night when I was supposed to teach Mohammed, he had to cancel. This is sooo typically Arab, at least from what I've learned and observed just in school and one week here. Everything, EVERYthing, is "insh'allah"--God willing. You make plans, and unless it is a class with several students, it's pretty typical for it to be canceled and plan on "sometime tomorrow, inshallah". And, students often miss class and think it is no big deal, because you know, they ran into their cousin, or their neighbor is going to Cairo so they had to smoke shishah together (for those who don't know--this is the tobacco water-pipe). Hehe...I enjoy it right now, but it is a little frustrating, especially for Suzanna and I because we are American, and you don't do this in America! Oh well...

But, I had a lesson last night that worked out PERFECTLY. I mean, my students showed up. :) They are two engineers, Hazam and Sammy, at a de-salinization plant near Quseir. They both want to learn English so they can help their company with international affairs/business, and so they are REALLY motivated, which is so nice. For my first lesson with them, we mostly just had a conversation about who we are, what they do for their work, where we have traveled, what we want to do, etc...I did make them read a news article, about a flying car, and I think they enjoyed that.

I am learning a lot about how to teach--I need to speak more slowly, REALLY learn my English verb tenses (oh, they're horrible! perfect, continuous, perfect-continuous, simple...agh!), and how to manage a classroom. I need to use the white board more, I think writing on that gives the students time to digest the material, and also solidifies my authority. (hehehe...me, authority) But, I'm good at making it fun, I think, because they seemed to really enjoy themselves the whole time. I have a lot of creative ideas on what kinds of new activities to do--listening to news podcasts, role-playing conversations (ah, the theatre in me), games and puzzles and reading exercises. I hope I can help enhance their program out here so it is more interesting and interactive, and not so book-based! That's a lot of what Suzanna wants me to assist in, and I'm really happy using my creativity for this. If you guys have any other ideas, please, suggest! I really want to use news and internet for my advanced/conversational students, because it will teach them ways they can keep using English even when class is over. I loved that about my Arabic practice, we had a broad variety of materials to learn from, so I feel competent at speaking, reading, writing, all the important stuff! So, I teach again on Sunday, and next week I will be preparing a course for intermediate-conversation, which I will teach for 4 weeks. I have a lot of books to look over, I almost feel over-loaded with information, but at least I will not run out of ideas. :)
The Red Sea--a nice private beach, where I snorkeled on my first day.

I'm also starting an advanced scuba diver course tomorrow morning (Friday), which I can hopefully finish over this next week so it doesn't interfere with my courses later. Insh'allah! Tomorrow I do the deep dive and the fish identification dive, so I have much to study for that, too. So much reading and studying...I'm learning more now than when I was in school. I'm so happy! :) So I'm going to go study, I hope this post was sufficient to update everyone. I'm rather verbose, I apologize, but oh well! Again, love you all... salaam!

some thoughts on Quseir

2009-01-14T10:01:00.000-08:00

Dinner the other night--Monday night--at Samakino again. This picture has most of the women who teach at the Center, and I'm hiding in the back left corner. I'm blonde, if you blow it up--the only one. :) I think I will write a little today about how funny the female drama is here in Quseir. Well, just small-town drama, really. Everyone gossips! And all the women are trying to act like "oh, poor me, my mother is ill, I have no money, my husband lives so far away" you know, things like that. They are so silly!! And I see right through most of it (I think! I hope!), so I just play along and tease them. But it's fun, I don't get too worried about it because I know it's not something I have to feed into or imitate. Oh boy, it would probably be really frustrating though if you lived here for a long time! Such a different culture. Course, maybe America has its own funny drama like that--I don't pay attention at home. But I have much more to observe...
Darn, I must go now--so I'll update more later. Take care! (And below, there is a picture of Suzanna and Nora, waiting in front of Samakino. Nora has a camera in front of her face, the stinker)

of all the fruits in egypt...

2009-01-12T23:12:00.001-08:00

The largest mosque in town--the reflection top left is cuz I took it in the car!

As every day passes, I think I will have more and more work to do here in Quseir until I have no free time left! I begin teaching tonight, I have one lesson that is a beginner English course I'm teaching with Suzanna and one of the Egyptian English teachers, Iman. Afterward, I will be working with a Mohammed who is high up in one of the hotel managements around here. He needs to improve his conversational English, as well as writing, because he needs to sound like a native speaker. So, I already have lots of things planned because these will all require two to three lessons a week, and I'll begin a conversational English class with some local young adults in a few weeks. I need to plan that and get it set up so they can register first. AND I'll be reviewing lesson plans for beginner's English, improving them and adding ideas for games and activities. PHEW!
Somehow, I will find time for snorkeling and eating, and learning Arabic, I hope. Right now, my favorite thing to learn in Arabic is fruit! I keep looking up the names for every fruit and vegetable I can think of, but for some reason, the fruit names are always MUCH more fun to say.
This was my lunch today--khiyar (cucumber), kantaloob (I bet you can guess), and farawla (strawberries). mmmm...Khokh (with the German guttural "ch") is peach, mishmish is apricot, bateekh is watermelon...it's just full of fun words! I look forward to going to the fruit market, maybe today or tomorrow, and just saying them all. I'm such a kid--I imagine Benjamin and I would have quite a lot of fun, if he were learning these in English. Although, you know, it's maybe still just a little too advanced for him. I don't know. :)
Last night, we had a staff dinner at Samakino (that same restaurant). It was really fun getting to know some of the women who teach at the Center, and also letting them get to know me. I kept trying to speak in Arabic, unfortunately my thoughts don't slow down for my mouth so I resort to English when my words get twisted up. But I'm definitely improving, and especially in my listening comprehension. And I've learned all the basic hellos and goodbyes in colloquial (they are very different from what I learned in school), so I can do that much! (and then say "do you like mangoes or plums or cucumbers or tomatoes or salad or fish or"...you get it)
So tonight I have my lessons--wish me luck. I hope all is well in Utah, Mark said there won't be snow for awhile, I hope you enjoy some sun then! (not that it's all too warm...I'll send my Red Sea weather vibes your way, maybe you'll get lucky)

the opening of a restaurant, and my first night

2009-01-11T02:09:00.000-08:00

My first night here in Quseir just happened to coincide with a new restaurant opening in town! It is called Samakino, and in Arabic, "samak" means fish--so I guess it's just a cute play on "fishy". The owner works with tour groups through the local hotels, where we teach employees languages, so he offered us a free dinner! It is honestly the NICEST restaurant in town, hands-down, and the food was good. And guess what--it was ALL seafood! I actually liked it! Well, the stuff with lots of spices, anyway.
These are our appetizers, my favorite was the shrimp kufta (a GREAT Middle Eastern dish--it's just minced meat, rolled up in balls and cooked in a spicy tomato sauce) --the red meatball looking things, and also spring rolls with the orange slices, and shrimp kebobs.
This is saffron rice with crab. I would probably order those again, although I doubt I'd order my fish fillet with cheese again just because it was too much fish. We're going there again on Monday night for a staff meeting, and this time, Ahmed (the owner) said he'd have some lamb or chicken for me. :)

my new old home

2009-01-09T10:05:00.001-08:00

Marhab my friends! I made it, I'm in Quseir--and it only took 4 days! :) Above is my friend and fellow intern, Nora. And she's hanging out with the mangy (how do you spell that word?) dogs on the beach...but they're actually really sweet, they just get no food or baths.

First of all, the journey to Quseir, this whole things, was well worth it. This place is fantastic. It's out in the desert, right on the Red Sea.
The house I'm living in, with Suzanna (the director of the Learning and Development Center) and Nora (a German-Egyptian intern), is beautiful. I'm in a one-room apartment, with a kitchenette and a bathroom to myself. There is a top floor on the house that is on the roof, and it just has lots of chairs and tables set up, with a view of the city and the sea. I'll post pictures later, but right now, I'm connected to the internet at the home, and it's a phone-line connection so nearly impossible to upload. This post is mostly here just to let you know I'm safe and all is going better than I had hoped for!

I took a walk through town today with Nora, and she showed me the main street, the best markets to shop at, and where the Center is. Additionally, we got quite a few cat-calls, all in good spirit. I see that it is never going to stop, because Suzanna and Nora both said it doesn't matter how long you're here, the men will always do it. The best answer: no response. :)

In the afternoon we also all went to the beach, and I got in the water to snorkel. Everyone says it's cold here right now, because it's only about 75 degrees fahrenheit, but i thought it was wonderful! The water was even warmer, honestly, and I found a great little spot of reef where I got to see some big lionfish, a cute little puffer, and plenty of other typical tropical fish. Nothing else more exciting, but I've got plenty of time for that later--it was just so awesome to be in the water, from the shoreline, seeing amazing fish and coral again. AGH! I'm happy!!

So, that's all for tonight. Love you guys, and just follow my links if you want some pictures.

Frankfurt, a cold place

2009-01-07T11:49:00.000-08:00

ahhh.... My journey has begun! I am actually traveling, rather than sitting in an airport/shuffling round an airport/etc, as I have done the last two days. For those not privileged to hear the story already, I'll give you the brief on the flights to Frankfurt. 1) Attempting to fly from SLC to San Francisco, to catch a flight to Frankfurt (which was departing an hour after my flight was supposed to land), I was delayed in Salt Lake City over an hour and a half because San Fran had fog. 2) We land in dense fog, to discover I have missed my flight by 5 minutes or so. 3) I get the run-around trying to find a United representative who will actually help me, and after an hour at a counter, I am told I'm flying through London. 4) I wait a few hours for that flight, only to discover my previous flight has VOILA had mechanical problems and returned to San Fran! What a relief I was not on a flight and turned around, nor that anything worse happened to this plane... 5) I wait another hour and a half, and get my seat on the lovely new 747 that takes my whole flight to Germany. So, I arrived in Frankfurt just 7 hours behind schedule, not too bad, since the weathers in Salt Lake, San Fran, and Frankfurt were all rather touchy. I caught a train from the airport and my hostel is right next to the Hauptbahnhof, the beautiful main station in town.
Due to exhaustion, last night I didn't go out, other than down the street to grab a chocolate croissant (which I did not realize was chocolate, I thought it had ham and cheese! This was not the most unpleasant surprise). However, this morning I arose early and just decided to wander the town and see what I could find, since I have no map. I made the mistake of not waiting until my hair dried, so it froze in a rather odd place and kept my head extra cold. Not to worry--there was plenty of coffee and many shops in Frankfurt where I warmed up. I wandered for about 4 hours, just looking at the skyline and finding old towers and churches. Here are a few pictures of what I found:
This third church was AWESOME. It had an ancient
graveyard outside, totally beautiful and decaying. The front door had funky metal carvings, they looked like a kid made them with play-dough, and my FAVORITE motif was this saint who is confronted by a mob. He definitely knows what body part to protect! (If it weren't for the far-left guy's sword, I'd think they were going to tickle him...how about you?)

This church was also great because it was the first
one I came across that I could go inside. I assumed it would be beautiful and old inside, since the out was so old and fancy. Lo and behold--what do I discover upon entering, but a professionally lit stage and dance floor, complete with...that's right...

a disco ball and the Star of Bethlehem!

So, I moved on, enjoying the beautiful graffiti art, and finding more churches.

This one, known as the "Dom", used to be the coronation site for the Kaiser (aka King). The black and white 'photo of a photo' is from 1945, following bombing and destruction in the city. Thankfully, this cathedral was left standing, while the rest of the city was bombed to smithereens.

If you were to wander Frankfurt like I did, you would see it is an incredibly modern city, architecturally. That's all thanks to the bombings in '45, which destroyed the classic architecture and paved the way for skyscrapers.

This church, on the Main River (I think it's pronounced "mine", correct me if I'm wrong mom), was the second church in Frankfurt to oppose the Nazis during their rise to power. And yet, one of its stained glass windows has a swastika! Why, you ask? Well, I shall tell you.

Back in the early early years of Christianity, the cross was still a symbol of a tortured, vicious death, and not at all respected/revered outside of Christian believers. So, Christians made the variation of the cross--the swastika--that would not be detected as the cross, but could still be used as a symbol to remember Christ. Then, over a thousand years later, the Nazis stole it, and now it is definitely NOT holy. That sucks...

And, at this point in my day, I had been walking outside for 4 hours and the sky clouded over and the temperatures dropped to freezing, and I decided to call it a day because I couldn't feel my toes, let alone my legs, my fingers, my ears... you get it. Egyptian weather is looking SOOOO great right about now!

Since my walk, I've just been hanging out in my hostel. I went out to get a bratwurst cuz I figured I was in Germany and needed to eat some sort of sausage. It was rather gross--I think I shouldn't have been so cheap (it was only 2 euro). It reminded me vaguely of something I was force-fed on a Christmas Eve a few years ago, in a town called Amsterdam, with something resembling green mush...but that's another story. ;)

Before I go, however, I have a riddle for you all.

What is the best machine to use while un-decorating a Christmas tree the size of Frankfurt's town hall?

Have you guessed it yet? Well, here's the answer...

Why a giant, levitating truck, of course!! ("Look Ma, no tires!")
And that's my fun for today.

I've got a flight to Cairo early tomorrow, then a layover for several hours, another flight to Hurghada, and then a car ride to Quseir. So, I probably won't be in touch for at least a day, but I'm sure everything will go well and I can't wait to meet Suzanna who's the coordinator with the school I'm teaching at, see my new home, and settle in. Please pass on my URL to everyone you think might enjoy reading this--most of my posts will NOT be this big, but I had a lot of fun today on my own, taking pictures! I'll be posting even more on a flickr site soon, which I'll link to as soon as I get that set up. Love you all, wish me luck! And I hope everyone settles back into school/work/reality after the holidays well. Don't forget those New Years resolutions...I'll tell you more about mine later. xoxo -- Annie