Thinking Travel

Today…

Memories. As I type this I’m sitting at my desk in my just-a-little-bit-more-organized office. The windows are open, the ceiling fan is spinning, and I can hear Aaron digging away in the dirt of his latest garden project (more about that in a bit). Best of all I’m drinking an iced Senseo. (It’s hot and sticky today and our A/C is still on the fritz.)

Any time I drink iced coffee I aways think back to the summer afternoons I spent with my German host parents on their patio drinking what my host mom called Calorie Bombs. She’d leave the left-over morning coffee to cool on the kitchen counter. In the afternoon she’d slyly ask if we should have a Calorie Bomb and enjoy the summer afternoon outside. I always said yes because she made the best iced coffee ever – strong coffee with milk, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, topped with freshly whipped cream.

Nowadays I indulge in iced coffee any chance I get so I make mine skinny: coffee, ice, and skim milk. Yum.

Unpacking. This afternoon I unpacked a few more boxes in my office. I’d procrastinated because I thought I might paint the walls first. But things have gotten busy for both of us as work and we’ve had to be more realistic about what we can accomplish on the weekends.So for now I’m sorting my books into two piles: office and den (Aaron’s office, the den, has floor to ceiling built-in shelves). Only the books that relate to intercultural communication/training, travel, or journaling receive a spot on my office bookshelves. Everything else goes in our downstairs library.

Next on the agenda: Sort thru all of my paper (articles, grad school notes, diss stuff, receipts) and reduce it by half.

The Garden. Aaron is working on a new gardening project that has turned out to be a

tad more work than anticipated. I’m so impressed with his determination and when he’s

finished the side of our house will be lined with beautiful butterfly-attracting flowering

bushes.We bought several purple and white bushes and green and red grasses last weekend at Southern States and decided how to arrange them. Then Aaron got to work digging up the existing weeds and dirt. That’s when he discovered that the dirt is actually clay, which I’ve learned is very difficult to dig up, at least in our yard. So he’s getting quite a work-out today.

Dilemma. Aaron and I have a love/hate relationship with TV. I love it, Aaron hates it. ; ) No, actually, there are shows we enjoy watching (Lost, Ugly Betty, Heros, and of course anything on PBS) . When we were first dating we used to hang out at Aaron’s apartment on Sunday nights eating dinner while watching the Simpsons and the X-Files. That was back when we both had free cable. And for the record, I have to add that Aaron had a ginormous TV that took 5 strong men to carry (ok, maybe not quite that big) , while I was content with my sling-under-my-arm-ultra-portable 13-inch set. Then we both moved to apartments where we had to pay for cable and we both opted out.

We then spent the next few years TV free. And it was fabulous. Really. (This is coming from a TV-addict.) Then one Friday night while eating at a brew pub in East Lansing, MI, we found ourselves glued to a TV hanging from the ceiling. It was the opening ceremony for the Sydney Summer Olympics. A relative of mine was in the Olympics that year and I wanted to watch him compete, so after dinner we rushed to Radio Shack and bought rabbit ears for Aaron’s TV. And then we watched the Olympics non-stop.

Since then we’ve disposed of Aaron’s TV and have been using my itty-bitty TV. We didn’t want to deal with moving Aaron’s 5-ton set and since both of us were in grad school, we didn’t want another distraction. So we got used to hearing Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Locke and the gang, but not actually seeing what they were up to because channel 11 looked more like a colorful snowstorm than a TV show. And we didn’t think twice about watching movies on our laptops. We decided we’d buy a nice TV and DVD player when we bought a house.

So last night we checked out 21st century TV technology and found that we are completely out of the loop. But we’re not sure we care about being in this loop. I mean, I’m a Lost junkie, and I’d LOVE to watch it every Wednesday on a 40+inch Plasma so I could see all the details fraught with hidden clues and read-between-the-lines meaning, but honestly, I’m just as happy watching it nearly commercial-free on my laptop on Thursdays.

Neither of us want to shell out another $40+ /month to Time Warner for cable because Aaron won’t watch it and I’ll watch too much of it (it’s physically impossible for me to turn the TV off when HGTV is on). But it’s looking like we’ll need cable, direct TV or something similar in order to get HD on an LCD TV. And then if we want HD when we watch DVDs, we have to buy a special DVD player and an extra-special cable.

It’s not that we’re lusting after HD or an LCD…but we figure if we’re going to buy a TV we should buy a nice one. We just didn’t realize how complicated and expensive TV-buying had gotten. And with everything else we have to research and then buy, we’re not yet convinced that spending the amount of a nice trip to Costa Rica for a TV is going to add enough value to our lives to make it worth the effort.

Cantaloupe Cat. October, my brother-in-law’s cat whose living with us for a few months, is a very choosy eater. She has no qualms about letting us know when she’s less than satisfied with her meal. Recently we were becoming a bit desperate because she didn’t like anything we scooped into her food dish. Then one afternoon October sniffed, licked, then attacked a slice of cantaloupe on my lunch plate. As I held the rind she chomped and slurped with abandon. I had no idea that cats liked cantaloupe.