you cut me out in little stars

yay valentine's mail! as happy as i am to receive new email, there's nothing like physically opening an envelope and reading a handwritten card. my mom's generation hardly sends mail. i wonder what will happen to letters. i guess there will always be the becca and megans of the world.
becca sent me a valentine that she sewed a heart onto. it's hard to see in that picture. she's one of my best friends from high school and she's super fantastic about making cards for every occasion. she sent some old papers her mom found in a cabinet at their house with scores from our domino-playing days.. that must have been 4 years ago.
one mosquito down! apparently they're attracted to moisture, fragrances and heat which are all working against me at night since i'm a night showerer. taiwanese mosquitoes don't make any noise at all though and it doesn't hurt when they bite you, so you just wake up with tons of bites without any warning.
the other night i thought i felt something weird on my cheek and i went to scratch it and there was a mosquito on my face and it just flew away after i manhandled it.
thank you mutti and gram&spanky! i'll send a real thank you note soon.

went to my outside class at the jr high today for the first time since the beginning of august. i love them. the kids at my favorite table had little cracker things and i couldn't stop eating them, i had to make them put them away. that class is 2 hours of inside jokes and questions about when i'm going to get married. it's so much fun.
tonight i made pork tenderloin with chipotle raspberry sauce from texas and corncakes with green chiles for dinner and it was soooo yummy. i added too many green chiles and my corncakes didn't really form very well, but whatever. they were delicious.

at home i used to add the kernels from 1 ear of corn that had been microwaved in plastic wrap for 3 minutes, whatever cheese i had on hand, and 1/2 a can of diced green chiles to cornbread mix and it was the bestttt snack. you can toast it or put raspberry jam on it or use it as stuffing. at that point it doesn't really work as corncakes, you have to make actual cornbread.

synchronicity of the week: bozeman, montana. it's where greg mortensen, the author of three cups of tea is from. it was also mentioned in outliers. it popped up in one more place but i can't remember right now.. surely not my book about france. maybe a blog. oh! a new york times article about 20somethings with no health insurance. one guy was in bozeman.

Of course, there are those who do feel invincible, like Eric Williams, who is 24, unemployed and currently in the middle of a six-week snowboarding adventure in Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Utah, British Columbia and California. Mr. Williams said by cellphone near Bozeman, Mont., that he looked into buying health insurance before he left, but abandoned the idea after being unable to find anything for less than $400 a month. Instead, he is just trying to be careful, though not always with success.