G did awesome at her first day of school yesterday! I am so thrilled. It's such a relief to have that behind us. When we went to pick her up the teacher talked with me for a few minutes and said that G was happy, engaging, wanted to be line leader, participated in story time and (last but not least) played Mother Hen to the other new little girl who was very apprehensive. I could not have asked for a better report. She is already talking about going to school "forever" and D wants a backpack and a hat just like hers. I think I can exhale a little bit now.

Today when I dropped her off her teachers were both waiting by the door. One with a bottle of hand sanitizer and the other with a temporal thermometer. She was very excited all morning and basically ran the whole way up the hill to school. I was holding her backpack until she saw some of her "friends" wearing theirs and then she wanted to wear it. Cute.

There are workers doing some repairs on the water pipes near our building today. There was a sign posted last night warning us that we'd be without water from 9am to 5pm today. Really? It's a good thing we had already planned a morning excursion to go shopping for another dehumidifier and we already agreed we'd be eating lunch out. By the way our water is good here. I had read during my research that the water was fine to drink but I didn't have my hopes up. After living in Florida where the water is so disgusting and knowing the climate here is similar to that (but here it's way way worse in the humidity department I am realizing) I didn't have my hope too high. But it's fine. Which is great--saves us money and the effort of hand carrying store bought water home.

Going to the mall was an event this morning. We took a 25 minute bus ride to the "outlet" mall in Tung Chung. I hadn't been there before so it was nice to get there and see it. Unfortunately they had no dehumidifiers in stock at the home appliance there today. So we remain moist.

I am feeling challenged. Food is expensive and I don't have much storage space in my small fridge. Fruit needs to either be refrigerated or consumed pretty quickly. I bought 3 oranges last week. Three days later I had one orange left and noticed only after I picked it up that it was way too squishy and covered in powdery white mold on the bottom. In three days?!?! And I am really finicky about my produce--I know it was fine in the store.

So we are forced to shop almost every day. Menu planning has really never been my strong suit, but I really feel like it's a life skill, or at least a financial skill, around here and I need to work on it. I do not want to have to throw food away because it sits out one day too long.

I bought a miniature pineapple a few days ago. I had never seen a pineapple so small. Think the size of a grapefruit if you just reshaped it to be more oblong like a pineapple. It was about $1usd. It is the best pineapple I've had since eating pineapple in Hawaii. Super good. And the limes! Oh wow the limes are special too. And there's so many different kinds of onions... And I got a little container full of tons of Thai hot peppers (the red ones you see swimming whole in your Thai food sauce) for less than $1 and they are something else! HOT.

Tonight I am going to attempt homemade corn tortillas so we can make tacos with the Australian ground beef we bought. They don't have (or I haven't found) authentic masa harina to make bona fide corn tortillas. I did find Bob's Red Mill organic corn flour and I am going to attempt a flour tortilla recipe using the corn flour. We'll see what happens. They do have packaged tortillas here. They only come in packages of about 8 and they are full of preservatives. Not what I would have bought at home. Oh and they cost $4 usd for this package of 8. I'll make my own thanks.

I think I need to invest in some sweatbands for all this cooking over here. In Oregon it was a great way to get some secondary heat in the house during the winter. Here it's just a necessary evil.