Long Road Home

Chris and I, seasoned travelers that we are, made a huge mistake last week. We decided to arrive at LAX at 5:30 a.m. for a 6:30 a.m. flight on the busiest travel day of the Christmas season. Hah. Of course we missed our flight last Friday (what were we thinking?) and our subsequent connection. We then spent 28 hours in Denver, trying desperately to get to Nashville. In a word - it sucked.

We managed to grab two of the last seats on a Frontier airlines flight on Saturday afternoon and arrived just in time to change clothes in the airport bathroom and race to see a performance of Handel's Messiah. After all of that, the two hour performance was really, really nice. We then made our way to Chris' parents' house, where we saw Mr. Frankie again.


Little Miss Gioia was very much with us this Christmas, even though she is still far away. Soon, very soon little one.


I hope all of your holidays are merry and bright.

Celebrate

To my husband,


who has worked incredibly hard for almost two years,


studying, learning, growing.


I am incredibly proud of you.

Good Things Just Keep Coming

Zylo's ornament arrived today. Mailbox love.

Jiufen

A 45 minute trip on a slow train headed northeast of Taipei will get you to Jiufen, an old famous mining town on the coast of Taiwan. We shopped, we ate, we squeezed through narrow alleys filled with teeming masses....

The town was cute, and the surrounding hills and coast were really quite pretty. Even though no one mines gold in them thar hills any longer, the waterfalls were still full of shiny metallic flecks. Did you know that the Mandarin word for waterfall is pronounced "poo poo"?

It was getting dark by the time we made it to the sea, but we were able to see the waves crashing against the shore before we traipsed back home to Taipei. It was nice. More pictures from our day trip to Jiufen are available here.

Ornaments in the Mail

About two weeks ago, I finished and mailed six ornaments for a flickr group swap. It was hard to let those kids go, but I was happy I did. My own mailbox was bursting this week with ornaments from my fellow swappers. The cameo ornament came from Tracie. The artwork on this piece is really lovely. If you have some time, pop over and see her other work as well.


Julia sent this sweet little sunflower shadowbox.


And Michele's mitten is cute as can be. The embroidered flower is delicate and charming. Love it.


Such a fun week. Thank you guys for sending such neat ornaments. They are all so different, yet still are perfect additions to our tree. I am so excited to see what arrives in my mailbox this week!

Crape Wine

It really doesn't get much funnier than this, y'all.


The Korean food was good, but man the wine was crape.

Frankie Day

Four years ago today, Chris and I walked into a shelter in Chicago and found our first baby. We took him home wondering what in the world we had gotten ourselves into. He was skinny as a rail - so much so that someone admonished me to feed him in the first week. He also was nervous and scared. Perhaps so were we.

Frankie is in the United States right now with his grandparents (paternal), waiting until Taiwan allows him to come home. I miss him so much that it makes me weepy. His grandmommy sends wonderful email updates so we can know he is safe and sassy. Today apparently he sneaked into the car as she was getting ready for work, hoping to go for a joyride.

Good gracious, do I love my Frankie. See you next week sugar. Happy Frankie Day.

In the Matching Room

I sent an email to Bridge of Love last week, which is the adoption service in Beijing that assists with expats living in China. I wanted to know where I should send a copy of my updated homestudy, which documented our move to Taiwan.

The response was this:

I think your dossier now is in the matching room, which means you
don't need to send your updated home study, if CCAA didn't ask for.

Our dossier is in the matching room, y'all.

Trying not to cry at work.

Belief-o-Matic

I discovered the Belief-o-Matic through the American Family blog. Turns out I fit best with Reformed Judaism. Whee!

Here are my top ten.

1. Reform Judaism (100%)
2. Orthodox Quaker (91%)
3. Orthodox Judaism (91%)
4. Liberal Quakers (89%)
5. Bahá'í Faith (89%)
6. Islam (85%)
7. Sikhism (80%)
8. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (76%)
9. Unitarian Universalism (73%)
10. Jainism (66%)

I absolutely adore the fact that my list includes Bahai, Islam, Sikhism and Jainism. I really am pretty happy with that.

Most excellent. What does the Belief-o-matic say about you?

EDITED: Perhaps it is important to note that I am not actually Jewish. But this does probably explain why I seem to have such a hard time finding a worship community that I feel comfortable with here.

Tea Time

If you take the brown subway line to the very southernmost stop in Taipei (the zoo stop), you can ride a gondola up to the top of a little mountain and see cute little tea houses and hiking trails. Unfortunately the gondola line was crazy long by the time we arrived yesterday afternoon, so we settled for a taxi ride to the top.



We found a sign for a little tea house and followed the creaky wooden steps down a hill to the serving area. As the sign said, the tea and the view were "well," but the kareoke was ...ummm...not so good.


The server showed us how to steep and pour the tea in a complex ritual which involved brewing in one teapot and transferring to a second one for pouring, washing the cups with the first leaf brew, smelling the tea aroma in a pre-cup cup (see picture below), and finally drinking.


I think I would like to go back - to actually ride the gondola, to spend more time wandering the trails, to take more macro pictures of bees, and to drink tea at a house without a karaoke machine.

Ornament Swap

One of my flickr groups organized an ornament swap for the holiday. I made six tree faeries for the swap based on this great tutorial . For this little project, I was able to use supplies from my doll-making stash, including some lovely hand-dyed wool felt from Australia. All six were mailed out to the recipients today.

Unfortunately, I did not make an extra ornament for myself. Maybe one of these days I will make another. Hah. Probably not. But in exchange for these girls, I will get six different ornaments back from my lovely swap group. So excited.

Before they left, we got to enjoy all six hanging on our own tree for a bit. A win-win for all.

Man, I Miss Mexican Food

I have been moaning about how much I miss Mexican food for about a week now. In Beijing, we did have quite a few decent tex mex restaurants. We ate it often, maybe once a week. On Friday, Chris tried to surprise me by taking us to a Mexican restaurant (isn't that sweet?). Unfortunately, we got to the address only to discover that it had been torn down. We ate instead at a restaurant nearby with a funny little name and yummy risotto. It was goo-ood, but not Mexican.

Some peeps came over to our house for dinner last night and I decided that if we couldn't find Mexican, at least we could make it. Let me tell you: it was fabulous. We used some recipes from the new Nigella Express cookbook. We made corn chowder, quesadillas, and Mexican chicken salad with an avocado lime dressing. It was so good that Chris and I exchanged a secretive - WOW - when our quests were in the other room after dinner.

We also made brownies - from a box, thank you - and served them with ice cream. It was a big hit.