Oops

It could have been the classic set-up for some serious wailing and gnashing of teeth, but conveniently BOTH of us forgot today was our anniversary. Our 4th anniversary, to be exact.


Let me explain.

Our bestest friends in the whole wide world are landing on Chinese soil in just a few short hours. Matt and I had already agreed to officially celebrate after they leave next week. Needless to say we were a bit distracted today in anticipation of their visit. But regardless, we're both pitiful. Good thing we love each other so much. We treat everyday like our anniversary.

So, Happy Anniversary to the Dingbats who forgot their own anniversary:

A Big Ol' ThankYou

Thanks to all my loyal readers out there. Your support and advice for my goobered eye came rolling in from all corners of the world wide web, and for that I am grateful. I bypassed a trip to the doctor after all and am feeling good about my decision. I took heart in the words from my personal nurse (my mother) who told me to "quit overreacting" or "stop being so tragic." [The actual words were written in German so a bit of the meaning lost in translation, but I think you get the point.]
So again, thank you all for your kind words. I know I'm on the road to recovery.

Dr Google

This morning I woke up with this on my eyeball:



YIKES! Freaked me out, let me tell you. In fact, as I write this post, I'm having trouble looking at it. Need to write alot and quickly so the picture scoots up the page and I can stop staring at it. Oh, so gross.










Ok, that's better. [I very much doubt that when I actually post this sucker my little joke is going to translate onto the actual blog page, but whatever. For what it's worth, the image is no longer visible on the page I'm working on, and I'm in charge here and I say the joke stays.]

After flipping out for a few minutes (which including some high-pitched shrieking and dancing around, in between bouts of near fainting spells 'caused by looking at my little bloody eyeball patch which I sadistically couldn't keep from staring at even though it nearly made me collapse each time), my bleary-eyed husband (ha! he was bleary-eyed and I was bloody-eyed) stumbled out of bed and went straight to the computer to look up my symptoms (after looking at my eye first, of course).*

I'd never seen anything like this before in my life, especially not on my set of eyeballs. I just woke up with it. Weird. I immediately called my boss and told her I would be a little late to work, made my husband pull out the map and find the nearest hospital, and then I set about to self-diagnose myself.

We think I have this.

We eventually came to the conclusion that I was not dying, nor had a brain hemorrhage, nor did I need an immediate emergency eyeball transplant. I just needed to wait for it to go away. It doesn't affect my eyesight and I'm not in pain, so no big deal. I think. I did try several times today to go see my doctor, but he wasn't available. I might go tomorrow.

I sound very sane now, which is a good thing, but usually I give myself a MUCH, MUCH bleaker outlook. Which brings me to a little confession. I LOVE to roam the internet world anytime I feel even the slightest bit ill, scouring google for the answers to what ails me. Most of the time my diagnoses are terrible. (Oh, I can't believe I'm admitting this all to you folks on the world wide web, but keeping a blog somehow makes you want to be brutally and humiliatingly honest. It's a curse.) Over the years I've been one very sick girl, virtually speaking. This afternoon I delved a little deeper into my symptoms and, for about 5 minutes, was pretty sure I had bleeding peptic ulcers, the kind with few noticeable symptoms. I know it's a bit of a stretch to go from bleeding eyeballs to ulcers, but with google anything is possible. Perhaps the worst example was when I once decided the pain in my neck was a sure sign I had bacterial meningitis, when in reality I just needed a new pillow.

They aren't kidding when they tell you the internet is dangerous. One of these days I really will contract some crazy disease, realize the truth after an appointment with Dr Google, second-guess myself and think maybe I'm actually fine, and then wake up dead. You'll all be so sorry then, won't you?









*The most parentheses I've ever used in 1 sentence, and quite possibly my whole life. Sorry.

Ding Dong

Growing up my mom never let us make phone calls after 10pm at night. Or answer them. She just didn't think it was proper to call that late. I don't blame her. She did have 4 daughters, after all. It's likely with several teenagers and a couple of tweens in the house at once, the phone lines are bound to be tied up. To this day I'm still paranoid about calling people after 10pm--even if I know them to be night owls. And I would definitely never dream of knocking on someone's door that late. Well, unless they were expecting me, or if it were an emergency, or if there was going to be a beauty pageant starting shortly on some obscure cable channel and I had stupidly cancelled our cable package a few months earlier. (That's never actually happened, but it's got the potential to occur sometime during my life time. I have ever told you how much I love pageants? Um, of course I have.)

So when we get a knock on our door at 10:26pm on Sunday night (a sacred-never-leave-the- house- except-to-go-to- church-kind- of-day, according to my mother) it's a bit unusual. Not too mention that we don't really know many people in this city, so who could it be?!

It's the cable guy, of course. This is the third late-night house call we've gotten in a couple of months. I know that Hong Kong is an all-hours kind of city, but seriously, folks, who wants to upgrade their internet/cable service at 10:45 at night? Usually the conversation is pretty quick because a) we don't speak Cantonese, b) we don't have a TV, and c) we don't have a phone line. It's all over in a minute or two and Mr or Ms Cable-Guy is off to ding-dong our neighbors. But still, it's weird huh? Maybe there are only a few reps to cover the whole city and 7 million people can't be reached between the hours of 8-5. Or maybe word got out that we don't have a TV, so they keep sending reps at odd hours of the night in hopes of pulling off an intervention. It's still a shocker to the locals when I tell them we don't own a television. Who knows.

Sometimes this city just baffles me.

CPK

Last week TGI Fridays, this week Californial Pizza Kitchen. I think I could get used to this. I think I could also get fat. Don't know why most of my posts are about food. Maybe it's because I'm ALWAYS hungry.

T.G.I. Fantastic

A few night ago Matt and I went to TGI Friday's (yes, there is a TGI Friday's in HK) to celebrate our 9 month anniversary of moving to HK. Actually, before going, we debated whether or not we've been living here long enough to justify a trip to one of the most ridiculous bits of "Americana" found in HK. We decided we had. We were both craving American food too much to resist. It wasn't until after we sat down that we realized we'd been living here for 9 whole months. Wow. Time flies!

So far, so good. This city has treated us well. It hasn't always been a piece of cake [on a complete unrelated side note---some of my Chinese co-workers don't understand much of what I say, so when I speak, I speak very slowly and clearly, using simple English. The other day I tried to explain what it means to say something is a "piece of cake"--it was a disaster. First I tried to explain the word cake, which is impossible to do unless you try to explain other weird words like flour or muffin, or something similar. I think they thought I was an idiot...] living here, but I'm definitely not regretting the move whatsoever.

The only thing that is noticeably missing from our lives are alot of friends. Don't get me wrong, we've met some wonderful people here and are in the process of forging great friendships, but it's a slow process. I'm such a social person that it's been weird for me to not have a full list of girls to go shopping with or hang out with at any given moment. Even friendships with co-workers don't happen quickly. (Part of that is because of the aforementioned language barrier.) Often I just feel like an awkward foreign-exchange student who can't speak the language and doesn't know how to respond to cultural differences, when deep down inside I know I'm a social-caterpillar just waiting to blossom into a butterfly. Honestly, guys, I'm cool! Look at me! Please hang out with me. Errr...Nevermind.

But like I said, we're working on that. I just hope that my new HK friends don't read this and decide that I'm too big of a nerd to hang out with.

Anyway--I didn't mean for this to escalate the way it did. Mostly I just wanted to mention that I went to TGI Friday's and tell you that even though I went there, it doesn't mean I'm one of those silly Americans who craves ridiculous American food like potato chips, macaroni and cheese, nachos, corn dogs, etc. all the time. Those people are just not cool.

Cat-ittude

Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to take my cat to the vet in a large grocery bag on wheels? Well, it didn't work.

Filler

I'm just writing this post as a filler so that my crabby rangoon homepage fills up and I don't see that Chicken Fried Steak taunting me from a few posts below every time I login. The more I write, the sooner it will pop off into the oblivion of the next page. Oh, it makes me sooooo hungry.