For the sake of hot lemons!

This morning I learned how to use a score keeping system for the Macau Speech Contest, since I will be scoring. Thanks to my experience with Access, it was easily understood. Maybe that class in college wasn't so pointless after all.

I graded essays from the Nursing School's writing class today. They were simple subjects like careers, best friends, letters to companies. Each was around 250 words, but I got so lost in some of them. I didn't know whether to correct the pronoun, the verb tense, or what they meant in some situations. Obviously if you change the pronoun it changes the meaning, etc....but which word/words were the mistakes and what did they actually mean?? It was a slow process for me because I'm a pretty intense editor anyway (ask my friends whose papers I've edited), but I was able to relate because I'm horrible at making sentences in Mandarin Chinese. My teacher used to always hand them back with lots of scribbly cursive-esque handwriting of characters I couldn't understand, but there was lots of red and arrows. Oops.

Tonight was our first Cantonese language class. Our teacher is nice and it went well with the exception of Lauren making me laugh almost every time I went to speak. Golly, I like to laugh too much. We had fun though. As the teacher was teaching us the word for Hong Kong (pronounced similar to heung gung), Lauren told me we were learning the word for 'toilet' because the character for 'heung' meant 'fragrant.' She was right that it meant 'fragrant,' but wrong because it meant a pleasant smell. Our bathroom is the farthest thing from that right now--no fault of our own. I guess the trade off of the 21st floor is less cockroaches for worse plumbing issues. I would prefer the stink. On our way home tonight we crossed the path of 2 cockroaches that were about 2.5 inches long each. Those things seriously freak me out. Ehhhg. I'm not afraid of bugs, but they're just disgusting...so thankful we don't have them running around our apartment...that we know of.

Last week I bought lemons--they come in packs of 4 at the grocery, so I ate one a day for 3 days and then got kind of burnt out for a bit. I let the last lemon sit for a few days, and today I knew if I didn't eat it I would waste it. What to do? Hot lemonade. Yes. Hot water, a whole lemon, and a teaspoon of sugar later you've got a weird masterpiece guaranteed to boost the metabolism. Voila! This, my strawberry-jam-jar-turned-candy-dish, and my milk-bottle-turned-pen-holder/piggy bank/paper clip holders are making me look more like a 20-something penny pincher (or MOP pincher?) than ever before. Ahhh, this is the life!

Thus, when life give you lemons, boil water. :)