debate: christmas music

in one week, i am working alongside five fellow PCVs to create the side dishes for an illustrious thanksgiving dinner for the newest group of Volunteers, currently completing two additional weeks of training in my site.

and the debate therein lies:

when is the appropriate time to commence christmas music listening?

judge kate's and andrea's ruling: post thanksgiving.

judge jill's ruling: december only, please and thank you.

i say, since we'll be cooking post real american thanksgiving, next saturday is a perfectly acceptable time to begin decking the halls and letting it snow.

what say you?

turns out...

...chipping your tooth and getting it fixed in cambodia while your serving as a peace corps volunteer is as easy as catching a ride with a staff member heading back to the capital city, spending half an hour in a dentist's chair, finding an hour to stuff your face with some delicious mac and cheese from a favorite western restaurant, and then catching the only bus back to site and enjoying a nice long 4 hour ride home.

can't even see it!  had chipped the right front.  all betta!

and in the end you get an even better composite for your chipped tooth than that dentist in baltimore gave you four years ago when the chip first occurred!

topher wants to know

why do girls take pictures of themselves in restaurant bathrooms?

i want to know: do we really?

is this a thing?

why do we even take our cameras into the bathroom?

are we thinking something exciting is going to happen there?

and we might miss it?

or is that i've forgotten that you gals in america have a camera on your phone and it goes with you by default?

or is every other girl like me, and had a few glasses of wine and waiting for the bathroom to be free and thus resorted to self-indulgent photos of myself outside the bathroom while waiting?

and then take a picture with the friend they were waiting for when she exits?

topher says there's a support group online and he stumbles on it online.  via stumble upon.  and it makes him laugh.

so topher wants to know. what say you?

self fulfilling prophecies

don't let the face above intimidate you, but i need you to tell me your thoughts. or, i need you to tell me you agree with me.

everytime topher gets a cold, he laments about how it's going to turn into a three week long hacking cough.

he's usually right. it does, and he keeps himself and me awake for nights on end, coughing up a lung.

and he hates it mostly because every time, i tell him that he wouldn't get that hacking cough if he didn't say that he was going to get it.

instead, if he would focus positive energy on telling his body and the world that his cold was going to last a day, max, and then he'd be back to normal, then that would happen.

don't they say that your mental state has an impact on your health?

don't they?

doesn't chris condemn himself to a month of coughing when he says it's going to happen when he gets a cold?

doesn't he?

tell me you agree with me.

things i never thought i'd say, fifteen months later

"why am i not sweating?"

"i'm cold. can we turn the fan down?"

"pants feel weird."

"i'm sort of sick of nutella."

catching up on an education

I read Animal Farm this week.  I never read it in high school, and I've always felt like...I should have?!

Independently of one another, Chris and I decided- myself, informally and Chris rather formally- to use our reading time here in Cambodia to read those books we "should" have read.  Chris went so far as to look up the many varied lists of 100 top books and made himself a little list. 

A many good summers ago, I took the time to read about twenty classic novels. I pursued on even after it took me a long three weeks to read Anna Karenina.  Even longer because I knew how it ended, and it seemed that we'd never get there.

If you had to give a recommendation for a "classic" book for Chris or I to read, what would it be?

deep thoughts on marriage

I ran across this blog post I wrote a good long time ago, and it amazed me that something I wrote over two years ago can resonate even now.

I had a moment of reality check: I’m going to be a wife. Like, a living breathing wife with a husband, and another human being upon whom my decisions will need to be discussed, shared, and decided together.

Gone are the days of “I’ll just move to Denver now” (so, this never happened, but you get the idea). No more large life decisions alone, because I’ll be one part of a whole. I want to move back to Rome. We want to do the Peace Corps—does one mean that the other can’t happen?

Probably not, but time, and money, aren’t endless. I want to go back to school and get my PhD or something—but I also want to have a baby and/or children in the somewhat soon future (as in, before I’m 30). I still want to continue to do well in my current job, and potentially move upward in the organization I work for. I want to buy a big house—before I’m 30. Again, time and money are NOT endless—AND I have another human with whom I need to discuss how to spend these two things.

I've been grappling with what's next and how it impacts my marriage and this rang true all over again. Except now it's real. I am married. And I do have to think of Chris in all decisions that I make, and I can't DO ALL THE THINGS.

And in other marriage notes, this was interesting: http://www.danoah.com/2012/10/16-ways-i-blew-my-marriage.html/3/