chinese new year = one week. O-M-G. words cannot express my excitment: spending chinese new year in a chinese country, SEEING RACHEL!, getting a suitcase full of american provisions delivered, a vacation!!!, finally making it to the east of taiwan, seeing david and jeremy, playing translator/tour guide...its going to be an excellent week, one for the books i'm sure. ;)

tonight in the kindy, i was teaching animals vocabulary. i showed a picture of a bird, and this kid shouts of "TEACHER! BIRD OF PARADISE!" i was cracking up so hard that i almost didn't see him point to all the other animals and shout "monkey of paradise! pig of paradise! spider of paradise!" oh~ where do they come up with this stuff...

thanks to rachel's impending visit, i have cleaned my house from literally top to bottom. i swept the upstairs today for the first time in about 3 months (i know, i know...). for anyone who knows me well or has ever been my roommate/housemate, you know that i am a slob and completely messy and not at all domestic. so for the occasion, i bought a broom and -gasp- used it. i mopped, dusted...don't worry, this domesticity isn't permanent and i intend to go right back to my slovenly ways after chinese new year...but i figured my houseguests were getting sick of having to put on hazmat suits when entering into the american abyss that was my apartment.......
........but i'm sure i'll make a horrid excuse for a housewife.

ps-
"i have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. they are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. they may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows. perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. here at last he finds rest."-- w. somerset maugham