Lana and I have had the pleasure of meeting Bill and Eve here in Taiwan.
Amongst their many fine traits (which include a passion for the kingdom, transcranial doppler ultrasonography expertise, spanish fluency, a love for motocross, physical assistant/nurse practioner certifications, hilarious ford festiva stories, and rhinocerous beete larvae caretaking - to name a few), they also have enriched our life experience with the following sweet quotes. I am a bit dissapointed because I didn’t start writing these down until the day before they left Taiwan, so only got a few from the conversations we had then…
“the frozen chosen” (as in lifeless church members)
“wrong as a football bat” (self explanatory
“hot as a two dollar pistol” (as in pretty lady)
“opera singing in a fire hose” (as in overwhelmed)
The kids and I went hiking at the Da Keng scenic area about a week ago. Da Keng is about 20 minutes from where we’re living - a steep 20 minutes on the 50cc scooter. Malachi takes the back and Maliah the front, with me wedged between them working the controls. Malachi and Maliah have some sweet helmets, and they really liked gaining speed on the flat stretches to carry us into the hilly parts.
On the way up to Da Keng, we hit a few sections of road that the scooter almost had to be off-loaded to keep it moving. At one point, we decided to stop for a bit along the side of the road to get a drink. No sooner had the kids disembarked, then I see three dogs racing up a side lane at us at top speed. Not wanting to wait around to see if the dogs were friendly or not, I told the kids to get back on the scooter and we kind of limped off up the hill. The dogs gained on us for about 50 meters,
Lana has been working away with Malachi on homeschool, and he tracks progress very closely (e.g. he knows he is 77% complete with Language Arts, but only 34% complete with Math for the year). Because of all of the activity surrounding school for Malachi, Maliah wanted in on the action. So Lana starting working with her, as a supplement to Chinese preschool, going over things like reading the alphabet, numbers, etc…
One of the things Lana went over with her recently were rhyming words - like “sky / why.” However, Maliah didn’t really get it, and after a few examples, they called it a day. A while later, Maliah came running back into the room where Lana was, and said “Mom, mom, I get it! Train - brain - they both start with the same number!”.
Anyways, the second level of indirection struck me funny and I thought others may get a kick out of it too…
