Thursday, January 11, 2007

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!!!



6 comments:

mr_john said...

Interesting idea... I should make a list of things I think I'm going to miss when I'm in Timor.

I think we're going to get VSAT because the Australian government doesn't have enough money to spend things on...

Rock

Trish said...

What's VSAT? I assume it's something good ...

Anonymous said...

"Snow: 10 hankies"

Yeah I miss it too and I'm still in Bloomington (it's been warm and wet here so far this winter).

-adam

Anonymous said...

yeah, I was gonna say... don't feel too badly about missing the snow 'cuz you'd be missing it if you were here too.

I'm not sure about the north country, but in boston we've had ZERO accumulation, and I think I've seen light snow fall only twice this season. it was almost 70 degrees all last weekend. the trees and flowers are re-budding, poor things.

Trish said...

Man, I hope that's not something we have to get used to in the U.S. I hear it was such a warm year, even the present administration had to admit there's something wrong ...

mr_john said...

It hailed in Melbourne on xmas day... But actually that's not that odd. Melbourne is famous for having utterly bizarre weather.

It was 40 degrees (celsius) a week later...

VSAT