Sunday Morning 10/25/2015

Murder Capital of the Western World

I’m posting this a little earlier than usual today as we have to be out of the house in just a little while and probably won’t be back until early afternoon (HST). Last weekend’s showing was rescheduled to this morning, and then there’s another one scheduled for tomorrow morning. The girls will be in school tomorrow though, and Brett and I have errands to run. Today’s showing is a disruption – we all have plenty to do around here today and having to be out of the house doesn’t help. The only upside is that the house is cleaned and ready to go for the week. These are the first showings since the house went on the market 40 days ago and I’m already tired of them!

After a day or so of celebration for WenYu, she is right back to the grind. Besides her usual full schedule of school and sports, yesterday she and YaYu were up early to participate in a Key Club service project down at one of the beach parks (they cleaned the weeds out of a sacred heiau and got yelled at by someone who didn’t know what they were doing 😦 ) and then they went to work for three hours at their homecoming football game. After they got home WenYu cleaned her room, which looked like a tornado had struck, and then she spent most of the evening studying for a math exam. I wish I had just half of her energy! The stats for this year’s Questbridge finalists were published on Friday: 13,265 applied; 4,895 were chosen as finalists, and only 1% of those finalists came from Alaska and Hawaii! If their percentages from previous years hold, out of all finalists only around 585 will be selected for a match scholarship.

I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that next Saturday it will be Halloween, and on Sunday it will be November. This month has just flown by!

This afternoon I am:

• Reading: A Pleasure and a Calling is turning out to be a very fun read. I’ve still been too tired most nights though to read. My head hits the pillow and I’m out (which is a good thing, I guess)!
• Listening to: Good heavens but the chickens and roosters are noisy this morning! Screeching is too nice a word for the sound they’re making. I have no idea what has them so stirred up but they need to cut. it. out.
• Watching: Brett and I are about five episodes into Band of Brothers. It’s just as good as it was the first time around for me, although I have a lot of trouble watching the actual fighting scenes and often have to get up and leave the room. We’ll watch another episode tonight, probably followed by yet another episode of the never-ending Midsomer Murders. We’re currently watching Season 11, and there are at least six seasons more to go!
• Cooking/baking: Our food supply is getting low for the month, so I’m having to get creative with what we have on hand. I’ve got a package of chicken thighs I want to use tonight, so I think we will grill those and serve with zaru soba (chilled soba noodle with dipping sauce) and a cucumber salad.
• Happy I accomplished last week: We got all of the necessary paperwork done to be sent off to all the colleges WenYu ranked for the scholarship. Test scores and transcripts have been ordered, and all financial paperwork (which was a lot) has been downloaded, gathered, filled out, copied, etc. and will be sent off via Priority Mail tomorrow. We made a spreadsheet so we could keep track of everything, and marked it off as it got done. Almost everything has an X through it!
• Looking forward to next week: We are due for our big monthly Costco shopping, but I think we’ll just get a few things this time – the freezer needs defrosting and I don’t want to fill it up again. I’m looking forward though to not having to do the shopping on my own this month! I am also hoping that Brett and I can get another puzzle started this week.
• Grateful for: We’re feeling very grateful this week for the Questbridge program and the service they provide! It’s an amazing opportunity.
• Bonus Question: Is there anything in your life you would do differently if you had the chance to do it over? Basically no, because I feeling like I’ve learned something valuable from every experience, both good and bad. I like who I am today, and where I am, and those things have been shaped by every experience and relationship, whether positive or negative. I do sometimes think though that if I were going to spend so much money again on a graduate degree that I would get it in history or literature versus linguistics. Linguistics is interesting to me, and I enjoyed teaching ESL, but as the years have passed I wish I had taken the chance and studied a subject I’m more passionate about rather than what I thought would make me more employable.

I hope you are all enjoying a wonderful Sunday afternoon and that you had a great week and are looking forward to the coming one!