We wake up to the sound of rain. We’re tired, we’re exhausted, we welcome the idea of a quiet day at home. In fact, the kids have been asking for this exact thing for weeks.
I make pancakes for breakfast, as I picked up a mix at the store the other day, and I makeshift my whisk out of four chopsticks held closely together. It works, sort of, and makes for a mostly lump-free pancake batter. Because our frying pan is smaller than I’m used to, I have to cook them one by one. It takes absolutely forever. The others are done eating by the time the last one goes into the pan, and I have breakfast alone.
I did buy something kind of cool by mistake our first week here! I bought a jam that says “no added sugar” right on the front, but I didn’t notice. We always have some sort of jam in the house, but this one is sweetened with fruit juices and fruit concentrates only, no artificial yuck nor sugar added other than fruit. It’s plenty sweet enough, and makes breakfast a smidge healthier.
The morning is so relaxed! Téa does art while listening to an audiobook (yes, I got her hooked), Maylin tries to colour for a bit, then Joe has her doing some printing exercises. Both girls do some typing games on the computers, and I blog. Or try to blog. At the moment, uploading pictures for the upcoming four blog posts means I have to take a screenshot of the pictures I want to use, then crop the screenshot, upload it to a cloud drive, and then generate a code from there to embed into the blog. Sound complicated? It’s not really, just soooooooo time consuming!
We are having issues with photos on the blog, as in I’m uploading too many. We’re running out of space, also I have an iPhone, and the format doesn’t always play well with other machines. The idea strikes me, and I play around with my phone settings, and I think I may have found a solution! But I need to take a test picture. Téa is instantly there, posing for me to take a picture, and voila! My phone now takes .jpeg photos instead of .heic, and it seems to have solved one part of the equation!
Joe makes fishball noodle soup, a Hong Kong comfort meal, available at just about every tea restaurant around. The home made version is just as comforting, and a quick bowl of food when we need it. Did I tell you? I’m the breakfast cook in this family, and Joe cooks most of the other meals. The dishes are usually mine, because I like the way I do them more than the way Joe does them…
After lunch, we have one task, and only one task, really. Joe is heading to the post office to pick up a box. We have more stuff now than when we left Vancouver, some clothes, but mostly toys. We have made the decision to ship a box ahead to Canada, so we don’t have to carry things we don’t need around the world any longer. When we left Vietnam for Hong Kong, we paid for so much extra luggage! Partly because we were taking a very “cheap” airline (didn’t end up being cheap at all with all the stuff we were bringing), but also because every little toy the girls talk us into takes up space. And weight! We already purchased one extra suitcase back in Osaka, we are NOT buying another one!!
While Joe is gone, the girls and I are trying to go through our things. I have the biggest suitcase open, as we left all the non-essentials in there when we unpacked our clothes and school stuff. There are gacha toys from Japan, souvenirs from Thailand and Vietnam, we’re also packing away the girls’ New Year vests, and a few other things we no longer needs.
Joe comes home with a shopping bag full of bakery treats, but no mailing box. Turns out, on Saturdays the post office closes at 1pm, and it’s now 1.30pm… Ugh! Oh well, we bag up all the stuff we’ll be shipping on Monday, and zip the suitcase back up. The two big suitcases have to live under the livingroom window to be out of the way, the apartment is not all that big.
Our one and only task for the day was thwarted, and I’m busy screenshotting, cropping and embedding images for the rest of the afternoon, all so I can continue blogging. I’m still behind since the last outage, and would like to catch up, eventually. The girls play, craft, read and watch a movie. Joe works on editing his videos and creating posts and emails for his business.
At dinnertime, Joe puts together a tomato egg meal, another HK comfort classic. Scrambled egg with tomatoes over rice, with a side of gai lan in oyster sauce. After dinner and dishes, we continue our Inside Out adventure with the second movie, and wonder what the third movie could possibly be about…
Just letting you know I haven’t commented because I was behind on your blogs because life got in the way. Now, I’ve caught up so I’ll be commenting again. I will say some of your vegetarian meal choices sound delicious.