five on friday

1. I got tired of looking at the blog I created almost two years ago. My blogging intelligence has increased ever so slightly since then, so I sat down and got busy on a new header, footer, etc. I'm still putting finishing touches here, but this is the gist of it! Hope you can stand to look at it for a while, because it may be another two years before I change it.

2. We had our first National (someone from India) over this week. Jason met Rakesh doing trainings in a town near Bhopal. It just so happened that Rakesh was heading through Bhopal on Monday and Jason invited him over for lunch. I sweated over it briefly- wondering what sort of food to fix. This was his first time to eat American food. We kept it simple with grilled chicken sandwiches, homemade french fries, and baked beans. We finished it off with brownies. He ate and had seconds. The best part was we got to practice our Hindi for over an hour since his English is very limited! Good times.

3. Max surprised us this week with a wall mural. It's not his first attempt at wall decorating. He worked on erasing it for approximately 3 seconds. Lucky for him, we are hoping to paint the walls soon!

4. One of the things I'm learning in India is how to enjoy fruits and vegetables when they are in season. We don't grow things artificially on this side of the world, so when they are gone, they are gone until next year. I thought my luck had run out with strawberries but our sweet "fruit guy" found us some that were still in pretty good shape. $16 dollars later I was at home washing, cutting, and freezing 16 containers of strawberries. Hopefully these will tie us over until they return next year!

5. And yesterday I'm pretty sure I turned 32. I find it funny how your perception of what is considered "old" changes with each passing year! 32 looks more like a spring chicken to me! In fact, in my mind, 32 still looks like this:

I'm looking forward to many more birthdays to come!