November

Happy November to everyone!

So I’m an avid…. borderline obsessive label reader. It can be any label really…. shampoo bottles, nutrition facts, my green tea bag, the back of my nail polish remover bottle… well you get the idea. My favorites are cereal boxes and cliff bar wrappers. I love it when they give you the history of the product on the bag and it’s one of those basement/garage to super product stories but it still maintains the basement-humble origins. It doesn’t matter how many time I’ve read it…. each time I pick up an item and spin it around in my hand looking for boxed out sections filled with tantalizing information, it’s like I’m reading it for the first time.

BUT….. I do have to complain about one of the ingredients on my peanut butter jars…… WHAT on this blessed green earth is rapeseed?????!!!!! The ingredients in my peanut butter read the usual…. peanuts, hydrogenated oil, ya dah ya dah… and then rapeseed oil!!! Is this implying something about the processing??? Like extra-virgin-olive oil is the most pure and unprocessed??? If that is the case then that’s just a menacing process that almost takes away my appetite for peanut butter. Anyway that was just the internal dialogue during my cup of tea this morning.

So my order of 300+ books arrived at the school last week. I popped in one Saturday to drop off something and I saw the HUGE stack of 14 boxes at the front desk. I was SOOO excited to have more material and resources, I wanted to rip them all open right away but I was going out of town for a few days and I didn’t have the time to open and organize them right away. So I left a note to 4 different teachers at the school asking them to wait for me to get back to open them…… of course they didn’t wait and opened them while I was gone and I found the books in huge piles in the library when I got back. *Sigh… it’s ok… they only just robbed me of the Christmas morning feeling of opening 14 giant boxes of highly anticipated books but it’s OK! It’s ok because we had a box opening re-enactment. Oh yes! They brought out the boxes and we shoved some books back into the boxes and slapped on happy smiles for the camera. The Philippines is all about professional documentation in pictures… pictures… pictures… so they wanted to capitalize on this moment…. Even if it was artificial and contrived.

So I was able to enjoy frolicking in a swimming pool last weekend because it was one of the teacher’s birthday and he treated some of us to a day at a “resort”. I think we are all programmed to relate resort to post card pictures of Fiji , fluffy pillows, and room service but resort means something different here. I guess you can equate it to your neighborhood pool – swimming area, BBQ area, and shower area. That was a treat because the smell of sunblock and chlorine is one of the best smell combination ever! Coming back from the resort, I had a stowaway in my bag. A salamander managed t crawl into my bag while I was there. It scared me to bits the next morning while I was getting ready for school and switching out my bags. It was my roommate for a few days and I named it Jezebel. I know it’s a girl because it wouldn’t move when I was holding camera 4 inches away taking a picture, but she would bolt when I was hovering 1 foot away with something to catch her with.

Next entry will be made from good old…. USA… home for Christmas!!! Hope to see you all then~