Sunday Afternoon 4/16/2017

To those of my readers that observe the holiday, I hope you are having a happy and glorious Easter!

I have been sleeping better this week, Brett’s been waking me up every morning (although I did sleep in later on Friday morning), and yesterday I got up before 9:00 on my own. I still think it’s going to take another week or so for things to really get back to normal, but at least things are moving in the right direction, sleep-wise. What a royal pain though.

Although today’s weather is sort of cool, it’s been quite hot and humid here all week and has felt more like summer than spring. While I love the sunshine and warm temperatures, I’ve never adjusted to the humidity here. A few of the farmers and some shoppers were commenting on Wednesday, as we waited for the market to open, that with temperatures this hot right now we can probably expect a long, hot (and possibly miserable) summer this year. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it won’t happen, but I’m not feeling very optimistic at this point.

I wrote in Friday’s Five Frugal Things post that we had found a better deal on a graphing calculator with Amazon, and cancelled the first order. Well, there turned out to be problems with the second order as well – after two days I checked on it to see what was happening and Amazon hadn’t even charged us for the calculator, let alone shipped it, even though their website claimed it was in stock. This is the first time we have ever had an issue with Amazon, so I was feeling quite angry and discouraged and wondered if the calculator was something we could even find on the island. But, I found it in stock at our local Walmart at the same low price, placed the order and it was ready for pick-up the same day! I never thought I would be happy with Walmart, but here we are.

Don’t forget to keep entering Japan Giveaway #3, for the KitKat tasting experience! The giveaway is open through Wednesday.

Anyway, this afternoon I am:

• Reading: I finished The Burglar’s Guide To the City – a very interesting and enjoyable read – and just downloaded My Year of Meats, by Ruth Ozeki. I read and enjoyed it when it first came out in 1998, but it was mentioned again somewhere a week ago or so, and I decided to reread it.
• Listening to: Little chicks peeping away outside! It’s like all the neighborhood hens had eggs hatch at the same time.
• Watching: Brett and I are still watching This Is Us – such a good show! It does an exceptional job of tackling adoption issues (like usually there aren’t any), and especially trans-racial adoption. On Friday night we watched Cool Runnings as it was YaYu’s turn to pick the movie and it’s one of her favorites, about the Jamaican bobsled team. I finished the Band of Brothers series (and now have the book on hold at the library), watched the whole Ken Burns National Parks series and have started watching The War, about WWII, at night while I earn Swagbucks.
• Cooking/baking: It’s Sunday, so that means eggs for dinner! If all the girls were all home we’d have had Eggs a la Goldenrod for breakfast, which was our traditional Easter breakfast, but it was just Brett and I this morning because YaYu attended a sleepover last night – we had our usual oatmeal and yogurt and fruit. Tonight we’re having a zucchini frittata, and fruit. Still no baking: we have plenty of the snacks yet to go that we brought back from Japan.
• Happy I accomplished this past week: We’re almost ready to send YaYu’s visa application for her summer trip to China. We have applied for a Chinese visa for either us or the girls five different times now, and each time it’s been different! Brett and I roughed out some more details for our Big Mystery Adventure™ this past week – we’re still a l-o-n-g way from finalizing anything, and are still in major saving mode, but it’s nice to be putting things down on paper and seeing things start to gel. There’s still lots of work to do, but what we got done was pretty exciting! Even though it was very uncomfortable at times because of the weather, I got in all of my daily bike rides (three times a day, for five miles each time), and Brett got in his daily one-hour walk. I also drank all of my water every day and did my 10 minutes of Portuguese study (this past week I learned vocabulary for measurement, both distance and weight, and prepositions).
• Looking forward to next week: YaYu heads over to Oahu on Friday evening for her big Key Club convention, and on Saturday Brett and I are going on our overnight anniversary getaway! Otherwise it’s a pretty normal week – I’m still hoping we can get to the beach, but YaYu’s schedule has been brutal!
• Thinking of good things that happened: I’m very happy that we were able to find YaYu a calculator locally, and at a good price. I have been so happy with the response to my Japan Giveaways! I had fun coming up with them, and fun finding items while we were in Japan. I truly mean it when I say I wish I could give something to everyone that entered/enters. My friend Denise sent YaYu two beautiful formal dresses that had belonged to her daughter – one dress fits her perfectly, so she is set for prom (the other would require alterations, so we’re going to try to find someone else who can use it). We put $6.48 into our change/$1 bill jar this week.
• Grateful for: I am frankly very thankful right now that we are not at war, although it seems to be on the horizon with us dropping big bombs in Afghanistan, playing chicken with North Korea (which threatens South Korea and Japan), and troops in the pipeline for Syria and Somalia. We’re a military family, and we know what going to war means, and it frankly makes me sick to see or hear about pundits and others on TV cheering for or getting excited about bombs and war. It also makes me sick and angry that the current occupant of the White House is still taking golfing trips most weekends down in Florida while all of this is brewing.
• Bonus question: What’s your favorite thing to have for breakfast? I don’t think I’ve met a breakfast I didn’t like, whether eaten in a restaurant or at home (well, except for ‘restaurant’ pancakes when I was little – they were too sweet and I hated them and the whipped butter that came with them). Breakfast really is my favorite meal of the day. When I lived in San Diego in the early 1970s, there used to be a restaurant in the Mission Bay area that made a sort of Eggs Benedict dish, with an amazing cheese sauce replacing the hollandaise sauce . . . and the cheese sauce contained loads of crab meat. It still is the best breakfast dish I’ve ever had. I doubt the restaurant is even still around, and I don’t even remember the name, but I remember those eggs. Eggs Benedict, in almost any permutation, from classic to made with smoked salmon to other additions is my favorite breakfast. If I see it on a breakfast menu, that’s what I’m having for breakfast in spite of all the carbs and fat!

That’s it for this week! Hope you all had a wonderful week and are looking forward to the one coming up!