12,000 Miles From Familiar: Tuesday

6:00am – Good morning! Chris is flying again today-he got ready; we ate granola, fruit and juice together.

7:00am – Chris leaves for work. Tuesday is the one weekday that I don’t have to be dressed and ready for the day by 8:00am; my language tutor doesn’t come until 10:00am-hooray! Sometimes I even go back to bed for a little bit, but more often I leisurely check email, scan Facebook, and take my time showering, getting ready, and doing my morning work-that’s what I did this morning. After fighting with the computer a bit to get the sound working, including a call to my husband for fix-it advice (he is so patient with my ineptitude and impatience with electronics), I also chatted with my mom on Skype-the internet is such a blessing!

I managed to while away the time until…

10:00am-12:00pm – My language tutor arrived and we studied and discussed another long passage in Indonesian. She said my reading comprehension is getting better and better-yay!

12:00pm – So hungry, as usual! I ate lunch alone as Chris was busy flying the friendly skies-leftover Bakso from yesterday…that is the last time I can eat that this week I think. Chris and I generally have a rule that we cannot eat food from the same meal more than twice-we get sick of it after the second time around. It makes cooking the right size portion challenging sometimes since neither Chris nor I eat a lot and I don’t like to throw away food.

12:30pm – Rested. I’m usually tired out after language and lunch, so I take some time to rest around this time if I can. I often can’t sleep, but I read or watch part of a movie or just sit and process. Today I finished reading the book “Half-Broke Horses” and enjoyed it all the way through.

1:00pm-ish – Made chocolate chip cookies that I planned to bring to my friend's house. Chocolate chips are not sold here in Tarakan, and the chocolate available to bake with is not very yummy and not semi-sweet. Lucky for me my generous friends and supporters in the States send bags of chocolate chips my way, so I save them for when I’m really craving cookie dough-ahem-I mean cookies! Not so lucky for me our oven freaked out again and decided to heat up to the set 375 degrees and kept right on going up to 450 degrees, at which time I smelled burning and discovered that most of the cookies were ruined-grrr. I washed the dishes and resolved to look up the problem on the internet later and see what can be done about it. Not enough cookies left for my friend and each of her kids to get one-too bad. I'll have to make up for it next time I visit.

2:00pm – Usually at this time I am heading over to the home of a friend and fellow MAF colleague to provide speech therapy for her son. However, today the family is celebrating their daughter’s birthday at the pool, so I spent my time hanging out with another MAF gal-we chatted and laughed, it was great to get together, a good pick-me-up as I have been feeling sort of down and lonely lately.

4:00pm – Headed home to start dinner, chicken strips with dipping sauces, garlic-herb roasted potatoes and salad, one of Chris’s favorite meals.

5:30pm-ish – Chris arrived home tired after a long day. We ate dinner soon after and talk about our days. I cleaned up while he made phone calls and caught up on email and news from the day. Chris took the trash to the bin on his motorcycle. We don’t have door-to-door trash pick-up here, so we have to drive the garbage down the street to the dumpster every few days. Neither of us enjoys the task, but it must be done. The trash bins are super-smelly and a popular hang-out for roosters, chickens, ducks, stray cats, stray dogs, and of course rats-yuck!

Not sure where the rest of the night went! I had several emails to write and people to call, which took some time. Chris received a message that our guest room furniture is going to be delivered tomorrow, so we moved things out of the guest room (all the random stuff that will soon have homes in our desk drawers-so great) and pushed the free-standing closet to the other side of the room to get everything in the place that I had in my mind. We quickly realized that somehow I made a mistake measuring (it has become clear to me that taking measurements is NOT one of my strong points, as easy as it seems to be), and my original plan for the furniture was going to make it hard to open the guest room door-boo. We figured out another option, but I’m not crazy about it. I’m still clinging to the hope that somehow my original design will work (fat chance).

9:00pm – Chris heads to bed, I’m still finishing computer work. I go in to hang out with him before he falls asleep, but he is already pretty incoherent-bummer. I grab my PJS, glasses, Bible, and book reader, turn out the light and head to the TV room to get to work on this blog post before reading and heading to bed.

Here's my language tutoring book, notebook and dictionary...