The List

Before we left Bloomington, I made a list of things I thought I might miss. Now that we've been here a while, and a new year is beginning, I figure it's time to see how strong my powers of prediction were. I will award hankies on a scale of one to ten to represent how fervently I wail for each item.

I was going to make a little hanky icon out of the image above, called Sketch of Queen Victoria's Handkerchief, which I found on the British Library website, but A: you lose the impact if you shrink it down to icon size and B: Blogger was being a big pain about it.

So here's my list from March, and my ratings of how much I actually miss each one. Friends and family are off it, of course, because you are in a totally different category of missing.

1. Drinking out of the faucet: 3 hankies. While I love sticking my head under the faucet, I can live without it. What I do really miss is potable tap water. We have to keep resupplying ourselves with big bottles of drinking water for the dispenser, and it always runs out at a bad time.

2. Eavesdropping: 2 hankies. Comprehension is still a challenge, but I can make out enough Indonesian to keep me interested.

3. Blue cheese pizza from Rockits in Bloomington: 7 hankies. We can get pizza here, but it tends to be all boutique-y, with stuff like sesame seeds, cilantro and worst of all, tuna on it. I long for a good working-class blue cheese pizza.

Local pizza chain, Papa Ron's.

4. Snow: 10 hankies. Ouch.

5. Oatmeal: 0 hankies. I still eat oatmeal every morning. The quick-cooking kind is readily available, and there's no need to cook it. Who wants a hot breakfast when it's 90 degrees out? Just pour on some milk and you're set.

6. Being able to buy something in a drugstore without a lot of pointing, pantomiming, and mispronouncing things out of the phrasebook: 1 hanky. It's pretty rare for us to have major difficulties in a store these days.

7. The Monroe County Public Library: 3 hankies. Indonesian teen novels are still keeping me pretty well entertained.

So there you have it! As I said in my original post, you may know what you love, but you don't know what you're going to miss. Sometime I'll draw up a list of what we DO miss, and I can tell you what's going to be at the top: a fast internet connection!!!