The best part about presents....

So, around Christmas sometimes businesses send home with their workers large boxes of goodies (chocolate, chorizo, wine, more chocolate, other sweets, a leg of dried ham, and other such things). This was the case here this past week. So....what did the boys and I proceed to do? Eat lots of chocolate? No, that was later... Instead, we transformed the box into a magic carpet...errr...box... :-) It conveniently fits both Alex and Hector and has a handle to which we added a long plastic cord for easier pulling.



While it was already bringing lots of excited squeals, laughter, and clapping, the job was not yet done. What's next? Coloring our new vehicle!!!











When I got tired of pulling both of them, Hector decided he would take over. He needs to work on his driving skills a bit, but overall it was a lot of fun. :-)



So, all in all, this just goes to prove that the best part of presents is quite often the box they come in. :-) The contents happened to be good too, and helped us wind down after playing so hard. Yay for truffles!

Thoughts

Who am I?

I've always thought I loved learning...but looking at my habits...do I? I tend to do enough in my classes to get by...getting by might mean an A for me most of the time, but that doesn't mean I actually ever delve into the material. I always have ambitions and talk big about how much I enjoy one thing or the other or some subject....and then I find myself writing my paper last minute, knowing that if I had spent more time on it not only would it be easier to write, but I would understand my subject and the paper would reflect that, rather than being a sad attempt at clever choices of filler words with just enough subject matter that the emptiness either isn't noticed or is generally overlooked.

And when I start out to learn something that isn't in a class...well, there isn't much to say there. I start and then it just becomes a lower priority and drifts off into forgotten plans... This spans from Koine Greek to knitting, origami to pie baking, gardening to sewing and any number of things in between.

Even Spanish, which I really enjoy...I don't work at to learn. Thus, my grammar is terrible... I know enough for people to understand me in conversation and to write a paper, as long as I have someone edit it before I turn it in, and to watch a movie or read a book. But there are so many things that I should have learned so long ago...I even remember doing worksheets on them, but I never took the time to actually learn them well enough for the knowledge to last. And, I know this and have a grammar book from classes past across the room in my bookshelf...but there it stays.

In conversations, I tend to sit and listen to what everyone else has to say, maybe adding a short comment every once in awhile. While this is more excusable here in Spain as it takes more energy to follow the conversation in the first place, thus rendering responses less obligatory, I know that I do it in English, too, most of the time.

I feel like I'm empty of things like knowledge and ambition and motivation and opinion... I know that it's not completely true, but it's truer than I would like for it to be...yet with the lack of motivation to finish things that I start...it doesn't get me very far. How do you fix a habit of not finishing well? Or rather than "finishing", continuing? Hmm....

Anyway, for now it is time to sleep. Cooking tomorrow. Peanut butter chocolate balls and some sort of cookie. I'm excited. I want to buy cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and vanilla to make the house smell like Christmas. Baking bread earlier today helped... They don't drink hot spiced apple cider here, so I'm also on a mission to teach that to my host family. Unfortunately, the mission was thwarted for the day by something called a holiday...something like Constitution Day or the like.... Anyway, all of their stores, with the exception of some restaurants, actually close on holidays (and every Sunday), so food was not to be bought today. Maybe tomorrow.

See what I mean about continuing though? I can't even write a contiguous blog post... I start pensative (or whiny, as you like), and have to add in a happy bit about baking. Oh well...

Names

So, what's in a name?

Here in Spain, many people have four names, though some only have three, but the structure is different than in the U.S. They have one or two first names, neither of which is quite like our middle name, and then two last names. The first last name is that of their father and the other that of their mother. And, women do not change their last name when they get married, at least no one that I've met so far(though I haven't asked at my church, it might be different there...). When asking my host mom about this she got rather upset and asked why would she want to change her last name to Rokiski? She's not a Rokiski; she's a Belles Fortuno (forgive the lack of accents). "And the children? The father's last name? What about the mother's? That's very very misogynous, isn't it?"

One of many conversations lately that has shown me some of the differences between our cultures... And I think she doesn't think too much of me, at least in reference to any sort of world view or the like... She gets frustrated that I don't know much of anything about politics and the like. We watched La Vita e Bella the other day and afterwards she said, "You know somewhere where lots of people are dying senselessly nowadays? In Iraq. Doesn't anyone in the US say anything about it? Do the churches do anything like protest, or write to the government to change things?" To say the least, the majority of the people over here are really quite upset with American politics. I don't know how to respond. I don't really know anything about politics... I know my president's name, I know that there's war going on... Much more than that and I just shrug my shoulders. I should probably try to read up and expand my knowledge base in that area....but where do I start? And who do I listen to?

Anyway...I also learned that the dating/engagement/marriage process isn't the same here either. So, after explaining how it goes for us, I think I'll be asked a little bit less about when I'm going to get married. As that was getting to be rather frustrating, this change is a good thing.

Christmas plans aren't going as smoothly as originally anticipated, so be praying for wisdom in that area for me if you think about it. But, it looks like Venice will be added to the list of places I'll be going... That sounds fun. :-)

I made bread/cake today! We have a crate full of oranges so I've been searching for orange recipes and foound one for orange honey muffins. Lacking muffin pans it became more like a sweet bread..almost cake. Tasty and it made the house smell nice. Yay for baking!