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    Small Victories

    Man fixing a toilet.

    The sound of our toilet flushing is sweet music to my ears! There are few occasions in a person’s life that warrant a photo of a toilet for a post image, and this is one of them.

    Next up, the fridge. Then, washing machine. And after that, internet. Unfortunately, the 3-5 day timeline for getting WiFi has morphed into something like a 3-5 week timeline.

    Alrighty then.

    Needless to say, we’re finding new ways to have fun in our refrigeraterless, internetless, and washingmachineless life. I guess the washing machine wasn’t that fun to begin with, so that helps. As Bjork noted last night, “If nothing else, we’re going to get really good at talking to each other.”

    Man sitting at a small table eating.

    I mean, we do fun things sometimes. For example, we can check the balance on our matching prepaid Nokia phones, which sends us a text and makes us feel cool. Or there’s always the classic Photo Booth pictures and videos on the MacBook, too. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but they have some sweet new effects like Chipmunk and Blockhead. Hours of fun.

    And if all else fails, I could pretend I know how to wash clothes by hand.

    Woman washing clothes in a tub.

    Um, the likelihood that I will die in the next 3 weeks from internet withdrawal is medium-high to high. The likelihood that it won’t matter because I’ll be comatose from fresh juicy mangoes is higher.

    This week we had some small victories, including our first homemade cafe con leches (sweetened condensed milk in your coffee is not a bad deal, folks), a successful taxi ride home even though we don’t know the name of our street, an ant-free snack cabinet as of today, and a newly purchased fan that doubles as a blowdryer.

    Woman drying her hair with a fan.

    Small victories that we have yet to experience are dry laundry (which will hopefully be sometime within the next year thanks to the humidity), clean laundry considering my inexperience with hand washing, unmelted makeup, the luxury of cold foods –please go stick your head in refrigerator for me, and the courage to ask our neighbor to stop singing karaoke.

    Let’s talk about cooking. I cooked once this week and it was almost enough to melt the skin right off my face. There were about 1,000 times that I wanted to bail and just eat coconut ice cream for dinner. In the end we enjoyed a plate of homemade fried rice and sweated through every bite. I can’t decide if that’s a victory or not.

    So the cooking-for-the-blog will have to wait yet another week. Please and thanks.

    School starts next week and I can’t wait to share pictures of my students with you! Did I mention that they are all girls? Heyo!

    Photos of young women.

    As always, thanks for being awesome. Until next time…

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