Venezia made up a cool new game with her kids frisbee. First one person throws it, then both people run to try and get it. Then she asks “did you just throw it or did I” (of course she knows the answer but it’s part of the game to ask anyway). The person who didn’t throw it last gets to throw it next. Fun times!
Living in Oregon, we did not have to deal with hardly any bugs, pests, or critters. Occassionally in the summer, some powdery mothes would fly into the house from a door left open. But we certainly did not have the humongous, disgusting cockroaches that you find in the South. We didn’t have loud crickets, or cute fireflys. The only outdoor critter that ever really caused me stress and to say a few cuss words outloud, was a deer that came trampling through my yard and beheaded my beautiful tulips which I had painstakingly planted the fall before, on my hands and knees, each and every bulb, which I nurtured, and and cared for, and lovingly grew. Until one morning I looked outside in horror to find that my precious little tulip garden was now a bunch of tiny little green stumps! I will never find deer “cute” again.
Down here in NoCal, we also fortunatley lack any sort of large, disgusting, animals, critters or bugs in or around our home. However, our apartment complex does have a large problem with …..ants. Now, I’m not new to ants. We had Oregon ants. We had sugar ants. Whatever. But I have never seen an ant problem like we have here.
The ants come in when you leave food around. but not just “food” like a leftover piece of hot dog, or a big cookie, or a big slab of watermelon. No, they huntdown a microscopic drop of butter that melted, and is now invisible on the counter–making it impossible to know that it is there in order to clean it up. They will hunt down, in armies, that one grain of sugar that the sponge just barely missed when you were trying to wipe down the counter thoroughly.
Fortunately, our kitchen is clean the vast majority of the time. And this is quite a heroic effort on my part, you have to understand, because we do not have a dishwasher!!
There are occassions, however that something gets left out….a cup with leftover coffee, some toast crumbs, a piece of food that hopped out of a pan, underneath the burner, and is now dried up and is unidentifiable. you know, the usual.
This past week, in a haste to leave the house (we were meeting friends to go to the pumpkin patch), I did the unthinkable and left out the papertowel that I had used to blot the turkey bacon with. It so happened, that there was a little piece of turkey bacon left on the grease-soaked papertowel too. Of course I didn’t realize this huge mistake until I got home. (that’s usually how it goes…”Damn! I forgot to clean out my cereal bowl!” or “Damn! They found the peanut butter!”) So, as you can guess, when I got home it was “Damn! Ants like turkey bacon greese!” Of course, I didn’t say that because Venezia was with me so I said, “Ooooh, want to see some cute ants??”
Well? Do YOU? Because I took a picture!
Tony and I have really been slacking on the blog lately. Tony has a better excuse than I do since he started school! He’s working A LOT! In fact, last night I think he got 2 hours of sleep–literally!! But that is Tony in perfect Tony form: when he wants to do something, he does it RIGHT!! Afterall, he married ME, right??? ha ha, just kidding honey!
Ok, so back to the car story, if you didn’t read the last blog entry, shame on you! But you would have learned that Tony’s car got stolen! Well, the police called us about a week later to tell us they had found it! It showed up less than 10 miles from our apartment in a not-so-desireable area of Richmond. The ONLY major damage was they stole the passenger side air bag! They didn’t take the spare change, Tony’s sunglasses, CD stereo–nothing! just the air bag! If anyone has any info. on why this would be, please enlighten us! We are delighted yet curious at the same time! Anyhow, we have the car back. It’s driveable, a little dirty and now we have another car to pay California car insurance on! whoo hoo!
Other than that…I will entertain you with some links to a couple recent parties. The first one was a 1 year old birthday party of our Japanese friend’s daughter Aika. The second link is to the Labor Day BBQ we hosted in our small apartment for about 30 area MBA students and their families who live in our apartment complex.
Other than that, keep the comments coming! Otherwise we feel like we’re talking to ourselves! 
Click here for the Japanese birthday party photo gallery
Click here for the UC Village People Labor Day barbecue photo gallery
Tonight we attended a small informal gathering of several families that live here in the Village. It was enjoyable and interesting, as many of our social outings have been. We met a couple from Korea (”Suzie” and Micky”), a couple from Chile with a 3 year old girl, a couple from France with a 13 month old, two couples from China, one with a baby named Mau Mau, a couple from Japan and a man from Nigeria (Oh, there were a couple of Yanks there too, but who cares).
I chatted at length with one of the men from China, the country in which I’m most fascinated. I love hearing about the Chinese experience with their state-owned businesses, or businesses that are affected strongly by the government (so far everyone from the mainland I’ve spoken to has worked for a company that falls into this category).
I meant to update a couple of nights ago, but I might as well toss it in this post. I went out to meet some new classmates at a local bar, and I sat next to a woman from Denmark, across from a man who grew up in Iran (Him: “it’s just like living in any other country.”
Me: but what about the Iran/Iraq war, you must have lived there then, right?
Him: Oh yea, I guess there were some bombings occasionally
Me: and what about living in an extreme religious society?
Him: Sometimes the radical Islamists would beat me up because I had gel in my hair.
Me: OK, that sounds normal.)
And around the table was a guy from the Phillipines, a guy from Malaysia of Chinese origin.
Another night of great conversation!
We had a couple of new friends over for dinner the other night–Joe and Noriko. Noriko is Japanese and speaks little english, and Joe has lived in Japan for the last several years. Joe is a Haas student as well, and they live in the Village with us. Very cool people. Noriko is great with Venezia, and it was amusing to hear V try and pronounce Noriko’s name.
In true Japanese fashion, they brought us a gift–a nice set of chopsticks for each of us. A daddy chopsticks, a mommy chopsticks and a baby chopsticks. Here is a picture of Nezia and Noriko.
As a child, our family did some traveling…mainly road trips. With me and my two sisters piled in the backseat, we went to Canada, saw the beautiful mountains in Banff, took in the beauty around Mt. Rushmore, and vacationed in Medora, North Dakota (btw, FABULOUS place…ya gotta check it out if you haven’t been!) Our longest road trip was all the way to Florida to see Disneyworld. I do not really remember that trip much because I was about 5 years old. However, one of the few memories I do have was of a small earthquake that hit and rattled our van we were sleeping in. That’s right, I said “van we were sleeping in.” Don’t confuse it with the man who sleeps in a van down by the river. Mind you, we were at a CAMPGROUND, and probably one of those fancy KOA ones too! Anyway, my memory is seeing the palm trees shaking and blowing, and maybe a coconut even fell onto our van! Ok, maybe I embellished a little there, but my point is, what I remember from that trip were the palm trees and thinking to myself, “Wow! We are really in a tropical place!”
For the next 30 years, I’ve made numerous trips to other tropical places; LA, Hawaii, Thailand, Sicily and Miami. And the one thing that continues to get me super giddy and excited when the plane touches down is seeing all the palm trees! As you probably know, Oregon doesn’t have palm trees. A bleak reminder that we do not get that much sun. I don’t know what the palm tree represents for me. A place where there IS more sunshine? More blue skies? More white sands and turquoise waters? A vacation destination with pina coladas overflowing from coconut cups and little paper umbrellas? If so, that’s the place the place I want to be!! Perhaps it could be understood with a simple equation, palm trees = sun and for me, sun = happy!
As most of you know, Tony and I downsized by 2/3’s moving here and are now living in a small apartment. However, I’m surprisingly pleased with our little home and the surrounding area of our apartment complex. Although I definitely LOVED our home in West Linn, there are things that I enjoy about our humble home here that we did not have in Oregon, one of those things being what I see right outside my window! check out the link to the pics below!
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/medoraces/album?.dir=/1db7scd
