YUMMY!

Caleb and Hudson decided to cook supper tonight. They were being so helpful and it tasted great. It is amazing what a little food coloring will do huh?

Tea Time

One benefit of living in a place that used to be a colony (and didn't just reject all things British like Americans did) is having tea time in the afternoon. Sure we Americans have snacks in the afternoon but it doesn't have the same class as when you call it Tea Time.

Caleb has been working on his extended pinky finger. Classy.
This day we did it up right with not just tea but scones as well.
Other days we did other stuff that always included strawberries--even cheesecake.
Chocolate-dipped ones.
Of course, the classic--covered in whipped cream.
Even a frenchy version--the crepe. I could go for some hot tea* even now.

This dude is a rascal

Buddhist monks have this thing about going around begging. I suppose its something they have to do but it seems to me to be in the televangelist vein. Like a shakedown. And I never understand why they come into Muslim restaurants with their bowl asking for stuff. The people just wave them off. But I always hear great stories about monks being open to real spiritual truth, so I try to talk to them ... and then wave them off when they give me the "I-don't-speak-no-English-just-give-me-some-money" shoulder shrug.

Anyway, me and a friend (a Christian) were eating in this Muslim restaurant when this dude comes through with his bowl. I try to talk to him in one language and then another. No dice. Finally we decide he's from Thailand and I tell him to have something to eat.

He goes to the hot bar and is getting his food when EVERY employee makes me verify with a hand wave that I am buying his lunch, which I do. I'm covering the monk. So he gets his food and I call him over and he humbly says no and I call him again and he says no again and I call him again and he says no and walks away. How about that!?? Not even a thanks.

So, I jump up and drag him to my car and take his picture. This is the third one I took and I think he is about to go all Xiaolin Showdown on me, throwing down a karate chop. I'm sure at this point he thought he was getting the raw end of the deal, I bought him $1.60 worth of lunch and take up $3 worth of his time.

Finally I just laid my hand on his shoulder and prayed for him while he spoke out loud the whole time that he didn't speak English. I guess that I why Jason B gets so mad at them. Shake down and no thanks, just some little Buddha bookmark. At least I finally got a picture. When I see monks walking down the street talking on their cell phone or whipping out their wallet at the ATM, I'm never brave enough to snap a photo.

Well, as John Lennon said, "Instant Karmas gonna get ya. Gonna knock you right in the head." I'd watch out if you see this rascally monk flipping a sign outside Wal-Mart. He won't say thanks.

Gooseberries

We ran into this little guy for the first time ever recently. Its a gooseberry. At first I just thought it was a flower or something.

The outside had the feel and look of a leaf.
It tore open just like wrapping paper and inside was hiding this little guy. Its smaller than a cherry tomato.
This is what it looks like inside. The fruit lady said it was like a tomato inside and when you bit it, it did have a slight taste like a green tomato but still sweet. A touch bitter and sweet. And Bethany ate as many as we would give her.
After she devoured an entire package (10-12) we wondered if that was a very good idea or if her digestive tract would explode so we made her stop. She finished the rest of the gooseberries the next day when we realized she was OK from the first round.

The fruit just has to be one of the best things about living in the tropics. Watermelon year round and just today I bought something without knowing what it was and it turned out to be something like a white cantaloupe (no photo available and Bethany already ate all that as well).

Strawberries

The mountains where we vacationed are famous for strawberries. In the way that Gatlinburg* is famous for me hating it, famous like that. Really famous and you should buy and eat lots of strawberries whilst there. You should also buy strawberry shirts and umbrellas and pillows for the back window of your car.

So we did our share of picking strawberries--even at $5.81 a pound. I suppose you are paying for the privilege of picking your own. I mean $5.81 for the place that advertises SELF-PLUCKING that is an entirely different matter. THEY PLUCK THEMSELVES!
We hid in the strawberries.
Played with the strawberries.
Looked beautiful with the strawberries. We did it all.
Then we did it right before we left since our neighbor said, "Bring me some strawberries." And so we did. But if he asks for a Hard Rock Gatlinburg shirt, well, he can just forget it.

*Really I just hate Pigeon Forge, I just say I hate Gatlinburg since everyone says they're going to Gatlinburg, then they spend all their time in the traffic and malls of Pigeon Forge. Plus you have to drive through Pigeon Forge just to get to Gatlinburg, unless you go all the way around and enter through North Carolina. P-Yuke.

No offense to Dolly. Or to Ricky Garmon.

Fashion Show #2

Before we went on our vacation, Bethany was invited to do another fashion show. Here she is with a couple of the other girls, one of whom is either deaf or mute or Russian just depending on what the prevailing thought is at the moment.

They had make-up artists on hand, just like the big celebrities. They also had these security guards who kept trying to keep Dad and the boys out but we just used our Jedi mind tricks on him and while he tried to stop us we said, "Its OK." and just kept moving.
Here she is all made up and ready to be dressed.
Doesn't she look like a regular model, except that she is a kid and none of the people in the audience seem to be looking at her.
This picture is a bit out of focus but was her last outfit (of 3). Opinion was divided on the hat. It was roughly Caleb for the hat and everyone else "agin it" (as we say in Kentucky).

Turkey

Since most of our neighbors are fasting, we decided to take a break for some vacation days in the mountains! It’s a great time for non-fasters to travel since school is in session for everyone else and even on the weekends, most people don’t like to travel. Believe it or not they prefer to save vacation days for time they eat!

We’ve been making some family rituals while we come to this chalet and since the other times we’ve come its been Thanksgiving time, the traditions involve TURKEY! We scrounged around and found a decent-sized bird but couldn’t get our hands on any stuffing.

The massaging and cooking got underway early and by the time we were ready to dig in, everybody was pretty hungry!! Not too shabby, though, for a pre-Thanksgiving: turkey, cranberries, potatoes, and green beans. Angie made some awesome homemade bread and it rivaled most Thanksgiving Days, except for no company with us.

We’re looking forward to doing it again in three months!

Hiking

There are a ton of hiking trails around here but normally we only come for a day or two so we don’t try them out. This time, we’ve gotten out for the first time and hiked through the rainforest. Rainforest since it rains every time you enter into that jungle!

We walked around 30 minutes and ended at a park. When we asked the guy how to get back to our car he said we should just turn around and go back the way we came since that was the closest route. Turns out we had driven to town and then walked all the way near our place, only to walk back to town and drive home. Perhaps not the most efficient thing but it was good exercise and the kids didn’t complain too, too much about the hike … except when we had to stop for a 30-minute downpour.

Ramadan Markets

Night markets are back open to help people break their fasts. We hit one tonight and among the load of goodies we brought back was this for Craig: blue rice! It gets the color from being cooked with some flower (which would make an interesting post but would for sure get me in trouble).

The dish is served with bean sprouts and the saltiest egg ever. It had a lot of other random things thrown in as well like fish crackers, a pepper, and some onions. Its a definite treat during this time of year.

Most Awesome Understatement Ever

Found this gem on wikipedia and love the fact that it says, "The upper part of this diagram is not to scale, as the Moon is much farther from the Earth than shown here."

The problem with showing the Moon to scale is that its WAY OUT IN SPACE and so we sort of know that if you showed it to us in scale it would be FAR AWAY. That caption could only have come from a Committee, no single person could say something like that and live with themselves.

(Sorry I couldn't get the picture any bigger, I tried but gave up, just click on it ... or take my word for it.)

This Will Bless You!

A few days ago I installed the free Kindle app from Amazon.com so you can download books and read them on your Mac, or iPhone, or Droid phone, Blackberry, or whatever. So being the thrifty man I am I also downloaded this FREE BOOK by Hudson Taylor.

Its a autobiography and it reminds me again why we named our son after him. What an amazing guy. To read him say things like, "He all but knocked me down again and again, seized me by the hair, took hold of my collar so as to almost choke me, and grasped my arms and shoulders, making them black and blue. Had this treatment continued much longer, I must have fainted."

Then just a few paragraphs later he is saying, "As we were walking along, Mr. Burdon tried to give away a few books that he was carrying, not knowing whether we might have another opportunity of doing so." To think he was being dragged around by the neck while soldiers argued whether he should be killed right off or taken to the magistrate first and his thought is of passing out bibles while he still has the chance!

What a great testimony that you can read and be encouraged by for FREE ! I hope you do it and I hope the Lord blesses you with increased desire to follow Him as well.

**The other book I'm working through is AW Tozer's The Pursuit of God and its on there too but requires the investment of 95 cents plus tax, so its not for the fainthearted.

Teh-My Arch Enemy!

When I was a kid I got a Commode 16 computer that had one game I remember in particular. A text-based pirate adventure game that it seems was called: Pirate Adventure. This was (as I remember it) a black screen with white text and you would type two word commands: Look Left, Open Treasure, and the like.

Excursus: Now this was originally in my mind the post that would be written and would have appeared last Friday on this blog. However, I started to find a cool weblink to the Commodore 16 and to see if I could find something out about the pirate game I remembered. This led to an array of websites devoted to kids games from the 70s and 80s, which got me to remembering this owl calculator thing that I had. Now this wasn't the red-eyed light up thing or the Little Professor from Texas Instruments.

I'm almost positive it was basically the Little Professor but it was an owl and it had a mortarboard hat and it was Texas Instruments and it had the cool handle hanging off the side and everything. So I looked for that owl on a ton of sites and went from one toy site to another and collector sites and eBay and on and on and on. I did this until I was a bit ashamed of how much time I wasted on this stuff that was only supposed to be a link in a blog post that most likely no one would ever even click.

Plus I got sort of down on the whole 70s/80s generation as I saw how many of these "grownups" were laying out serious cash for toys from their childhood. These are people who, when their Farmville isn't sucking up all their time, are trying to track down an Intellivsion or a ColecoVision or a Merlin or something. Lame. And don't even get me started on Atari and on the whole episode of our family saving for the Pac-Man game when it first came out for $30 or so and how it was just about the biggest disappointment of my childhood. It breaks my heart...

Anyway, that went on so long I got sort of down on me and my fellow Gen Xers. So I just went to bed, the post just left there to roll around in my brain. And it was especially bad since the post really isn't about the pirate game ... its about TEH! End of Excursus.

So I had this game and I would spend my time saying: Read Map, Ask Parrot, Say Yoho! Well, believe it or not typing even those short words made me an incredible typist. By "incredible" I mean that I can type fairly fast with three fingers: my two index fingers and the middle finger of my right hand. I tried to break this bad habit in high school when I took typing for a while (the class being was also full of girls) but it didn't work out, so I had to drop the class.

One habit I somehow picked up in all this fast finger-pecking was a problem with the word the, which is always spelled teh. Always. Wheteher it appears in teh word otehr or in anotehr, I get it wrong every time. Back when I was using Microsoft Word and Outlook a lot, I just had teh auto-correct feature take care of it. Nowadays, I don't type a lot of documents but I do send a lot of emails and do a fair bit of this type of thing.

What I don't use now is the auto-correct feature. So I spend a lot of time going back through all my stuff and change all my teh to the. On and on I change things. I use teh find and replace feature and I generally growl teh whole time about my inability to type teh easiest of words! That is why I decided that teh was my arch enemy. Teh big thing that wasted all my valuable internet surfing time.

But you know what I found out? I'm not alone! The kids these days are using teh word "teh" to emphasize in the way we older folks used to use italics. So now if you are cool enough to be in a chat room (as opposed to say, feeding your sheep in Farmville, or is it on Farmville) you can say teh when what you really mean is the. Pretty awesome, right? Kids these days. Who knew I was so with it?

Summer!

Since its always hot where we live, Hudson has worn actual shoes about 10 times in three years. Somedays we are not sure where he stops and the dirt begins. Not sure what he will do when he experiences an entire winter with no flip flops...

Favorite Bathroom Sign Of All Time

Everyone is used to having two bathrooms--one for boys and another for girls. Two restrooms just seems right. Differing washrooms only makes sense. But this restaurant took the two WC concept to a whole new level.

Its not based on gender--its based on FUNCTION! Before you go in, first ask yourself, "What exactly do I need to accomplish in there?" Then choose accordingly!

Actually the "Pee" room is really a shower. Meaning you have a tiled room with a water pipe sticking high out of the wall, a hose bib-type thing down low, a bucket of water and its accompanying scoop, and the all-important drain in the floor.

Whereas normally you would shower (or dump water from the bucket over your head with the scoop) and it would flow down the drain, in this room you just do your business right onto the floor and then throw a scoop of water on it as a chaser. Classy, right? And clean. This is why Abby tells people to bring closed-toe shoes!!

Ballet Ceremony

Hey! Bethany here. What's up? I graduated from 1st grade of ballet the other night. It was cool. I got a 72 mark. My examiner was Australian. I was REALLY nervous. But I remembered to smile and keep my chin up.

This is my ballet teacher. She is tough but fair. I'm the only white kid in her class... She's my teacher again this year.

Back to School!

Since our November will be broken up a bit by traveling back to the USA, we needed to get a jump on school. So even though the kids wished we could put it off a bit longer we dove in anyway.

Taking advantage of the flexibility of homeschooling, we scrapped our 9am start time and went a different direction. That direction eventually flowed through lunch at McDonald's and a 2pm start time. Even with all that everyone was wrapped up before 6pm. Awesome!

Everyone is using curriculum where a entire class was taped and the "students at home" participate right along. Someday our kids will learn you can't pause a real teacher to laugh at something she said. Everything in its season though...
The Middle Schoolers have a separate room with air conditioning. Sometimes they can be a bit sly behind closed doors, though!
So according to our count, only 179 days to go.