oh you are my star

they told us months and months ago that they were coming out with new stickers for the 30th anniversary of the school. i'm not sure if these are them? but they aren't very much fun. so when i was sitting around today with too much time on my hands, i decided to spiff them up with my new markers. my kids went insane for them. those markers really are magic.
synchronicity of the day: i told jerry the story of the chicken picatta today at lunch because my 'toast bread' at latini's has capers on it. [story--i threw a dinner party for my parents and neighbors when i had an apartment, and i made chicken picatta. i used up half a jar of leftover capers i had in the fridge.. but my dad wasn't satisfyed with the 30 capers that were in the dish, as his favorite restaurant must use at least 35. so since then, i've been consistently harassed about the 'caper shortage' in texas.]
anyway JG and i were watching grey's anatomy tonight and what did they mention?! chicken picatta. totally out of nowhere.
i forgot to put in my contacts today so i called and had jon bring my glasses to school. my kids have never seen me wear them and their reactions were pretty funny. they had also never seen jon and they asked me 100,000 times if he was my boyfriend. that's the only class i speak chinese with and only before class, but it gives us a special bond. i understood everything they said today!
outliers lesson of the day: a study followed a group of kids who had the highest IQs in gradeschool throughout their lives found that the difference between the kids who performed well after college and who didn't was socioeconomic status. it concluded that kids from wealthier backgrounds had more support from their parents, who took an active interest in their gifts and talents and tried to promote them. apparently the poor families had an attitude that their kids would naturally find their niche, but didn't do anything to foster their natural talents.. even though those kids were just as smart.

it also talks about how wealthier families groom their kids to interact as equals with adults and learn to use their resources. one example was a mom telling her kid, on the way to the doctor's office, that he could ask the doctor whatever questions he wanted when they got there.. making the kid feel empowered in the doctor's office.

they contrast that with an example of a guy who had a really high IQ but who never learned how to interact effectively with adults, so when he wasn't making it to school on time because he had car trouble and wanted to have his class moved to a later time slot, he got really defensive with the school counselor and didn't end up getting the time switched because of his lack of social skills. his inability to deal with authority figures held him back from a lot of opportunities.
i'm not explaining it as well as the book does but it's something to think about.

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.

here's a song for you, lovely

..did anyone see the comment the mederma rep left on my blog yesterday? kind of creepy/cool.

mr. kuo asked if i would wear shoes if he bought them for me. i've been wearing the ones mom sent for my birthday a lot because they're silver and match everything. he said they aren't winter shoes because they have so many holes. i said meiguanxi. (no problem). i think i might stick with silver shoes from now on. i dare you to find an outfit they don't look lovely with. maybe brown. all i wear is navy and brights.

today my little girls ran up to me when i walked in the door and my teenager jerks just turned up their noses. they had a big test today though and they actually did really well. their reading is pretty good. they aren't too hot on past tense verbs when they're speaking though.

i'm doing too many things to write this right now. we'll catch up tomorrow.

but no one will do

a couple of things today.
1. jerry taught joyce a variation of paper scissor stone called paper scissor stone claw. claw beats everything. joyce caught on really quickly and it was hilarious. i tried it in my class tonight and my kids loved it. we paper scissor stone clawed all through the break and they came up to me after class and even while i was getting on my scooter to leave, we were still doing it.

2. our lesson last week involved a scale that takes pennies, so i showed them some real pennies. they were all really interested and one of my favorite kids, kevin 1, asked if he could have one. i told him only if he could spell penny. he couldn't consistently do it last week, but he came to find me before class today and spelled it before even saying hello. so i gave him one. then a bunch of girls around him were asking for one and he explained our system to them- first you have to come up with a task, then you come back and do it next week. next week, amy has to spell 'texas' and kevin has to spell 'california'. his english is really good, he asked me a bunch of questions about my scooter tonight.

3. lesley got into grad school in paris for the fall so i told her i'd move to paris if she could find me a job. she said a woman she nannied for before lives in paris now, so we'll see about that. i did some research online a few weeks ago and it makes it seem like it's basically impossible for expats to work in europe unless they're an au pair. i'm really trying hard not to go to grad school just because i don't know what else i'd rather do. for now, i'd rather hang on to my flexible life for as long as i can before i settle in to another 40 hour work week.

4. mederma (skin care for scars) really works. it may be $20 for a little tiny tube of it, but it's amazing stuff. if only i had the sticktoitiveness to apply it 3 times daily for 3 months like it told me to. even with sporadic applications, my scooter scar is fading really nicely.

5. correction: louxia is downstairs. loushang is upstairs.

being alone, it can be quite romantic

i've been dying for new music lately. i've worn out the songs i used to like and now i've even overplayed 60 years of disney music. i hadn't mentioned my music crisis to jerry, but what does he pop in my room with today but a mixed CD for me? magic jerry.

we watched ratatouille in my first class tonight and my coteacher tried to get me to turn on the chinese subtitles for them. it seems counterintuitive to me. she made dessert for the kids.. it was giant jelly pearls with a red bean in the middle, spooned into a cup and then covered with milk. i ate as many of the pearls as i could muster, but i couldn't do the milk. the kids had all brought their own cups and chopsticks though like she asked. it was pretty cute.

quiet day. it got chilly and misty. if you remember that we're on an island and it's just coastal weather, it makes the mist kind of nice.

crisis averted

so somehow i downloaded a virus onto my computer called 'xp police antivirus', ironically. it was causing my antivirus thing to pop up every 20 seconds and was annoying the living daylights out of me and kept taking me to this page that wanted me to pay $40 for antiviral software.. so i started searching on forums and found out that it was a virus, but when i went to try to fix it, i kept hitting all of these snags. it wouldn't let me open my task manager (which would have let me end the program) with key commands, or in my 'run..' thing.. so in the last hour i learned a whole lot about my registries and manually located and disabled the code that wasn't letting me get to my task manager and killed the virus.
it's funny because i've been reading digital fortress which is all about computer viruses and i was literally just thinking today about how long it had been since i had had anything wrong with my computer. i'm glad that i'm just barely computer savvy enough to have navigated the fix.
i bought groceries this week for the first time in months and had a deliciousss tomato, cucumber and cream cheese sandwich for brunch. god bless cream cheese. and i spent a good chunk of the afternoon in the coffee shop reading. it was a pretty slow sunday. jerry and i went to debbie's for dinner and i killed 3 mosquitoes in my room. that sums up the day. time for bed.

build me up, buttercup

i'm usually happy it's valentines day because it means i don't have to decide what to wear that day. something pink or red, done (hot pink today). i haven't been single on valentine's in a loooong time, but it was a really really sweet day all around.
daisy.. uh oh, now i can't remember if it was daisy or dora. i think daisy.. bought me chocolate! i showed them to mr. kuo and he said 'for me?' and i said okayyyy, so we ate half of them at lunch. i had passionfruit, zao zhi and chocolate for lunch. i brought augusta her valentine when she was teaching my class on her day, and she gave me this wand thing with a chocolate on top and my whole class started chanting 'LESBIAN, LESBIAN'. we just sneered at them. junior high really is another planet.
lesley's mom sent her these pixie stick valentines which we tag teamed. i wrote the names and she assembled them.
last night jerry presented me with my valentine. it's a poster with all kinds of little inside jokes. above is a chinese book full of 'de' which is a word with a million uses in chinese. and a lunch box from japanese place.
the sweetest note i've ever received from anyone i wasn't dating. boys really have their moments. dena and i had a long discussion tonight about how much more we value anything that obviously took some thought vs expensive, thoughtless presents. alex took us to see a bazillion temples in tainan and kaohsiung.
classes were cute today. i gave all of my little kids these cute conversation heart stickers. i played so many rounds of thumbs wars. one girl, sandy, has teeny tiny little thumbs and it's hard for me to play with her. i always get sandy and sammy mixed up. sandy has glasses but she looks just like sammy and their names are so similar.
this is danbing and a $2000NT bill. the danbing is my favorite thing.
so alex got back from cambodia tonight. he was hilarious. you could hear him in the living room or his room or the bath room as he rediscovered civilization. 'hot water! clothes! milk! subber! human interaction!' he came back with really amazing pictures and some pretty funny stories. apparently he was sick as a dog for a couple of days. it didn't sound pleasant at all. lesson: don't eat questionable shellfish in foreign countries.
tonight i was brainstorming what i could do for jerry as a reply to the poster, and lesley suggested a scavenger hunt. it was a stroke of genius. i sent him to the twister box, a pizza box, some pizza throw up outside, and the coffee shop. i think he liked it.

tonight everyone watched some bad ben stiller movie, and a show about a military boot camp for naughty chinese children, and something about shou lin temple. lesley made a cake but we only had this deep glass dish so it turned out more like cake loaf. tasted yummy though. i lost count of how many pixie sticks i've eaten. time for bed.