Terrible Terrific Mondays

Mondays.  Most people hate them.  The weekend is over and reality begins again.  Work starts.  I have a love/hate relationship with Mondays.  I wish I could love them completely, BUT something always happens to make them a little less terrific.

Mondays are the day that I get to sleep in, in my own bed.  I have no obligations until 2:30 and even then it's just one class that I have to teach.  One class where the lessons plans are guaranteed to be done 4 days prior so there's no need to do any prep that morning.  I usually get my weekly groceries that morning and attempt to grade my biggest chunk of papers after class.  Not a bad day.  Should be a happy day for me.  Something always seems to happen that day that is completely out of my hands.

A few weeks ago: no water for 3 days that started on Monday.

Last week: food poisoning.

This week: I got up around 9 (which never happens here anymore), made chocolate oatmeal (yup), and then right when I wanted to go hop in the shower... POWER GOES OUT.  That means no hot water for Hailey and also a pitch black bathroom which would be terrifying to take a shower in.  Also, no internet so no communication w/ home - sorry for disappearing while we were chatting, mom.  I thought 'oh no, I'm not doing this again' but luckily the water was still working.  So I made a pretty successful produce run - I got me some corn, mushrooms, cucumbers, eggplant, and broccoli - and then had a lunch meeting.  To add to it, it was super cold this morning.  Couldn't boil water for tea, couldn't take a hot shower, couldn't heat my cute little Hello Kitty hot water bottle pillow thing.  Sunlight sounded nice... but we ate in the shade.  HA!  Anyways, had a nice lunch, talked about some upcoming events, figured out how I want to run my finals, got my papers to finally get my visa fixed soon.  Twas a good lunch.  Power came back on when I got back to my apartment around 2, but still no internet.  No biggie, I had class.

[Right before class I got a call from some random lady wanting me to tutor some children she teaches.  She asked if I had free time this evening to get together to talk about it.  She offered milk tea so I agreed.  But I knew I would have to say no to the tutoring and I really don't like having to do that.]

Got back from class and started to get some stuff ready for dinner (which I'll explain in a minute) and then BOOM no water.  NOT. EVEN. A. DROP.  Seriously? Earlier that morning I had this feeling that I should fill my teapot up just in case something like that happened but, like an idiot, I didn't do that.  So I'm making my knock off Olive Garden salad dressing and chopping up some of todays veggies and I have nothing to do dishes with (not like that part really made me sad).  The worst part about not having something is that the fact that you can't have it makes you want it so much more.  I didn't need the water then, it would have been nice to get my dishes rinsed, but knowing I couldn't wash my hands, do dishes, take a shower, all of that was just frustrating, especially on top of the lack of power earlier in the day.

So I made my dinner.  Salad (a first in this apartment because lettuce isn't always available and I'd never made salad dressing) and garlic-brown sugar baked chicken (easiest thing ever, takes 20 minutes to bake and it's super scrumptious).  It was one of the best dinners I've made here so that made me really happy.  I almost sliced my finger off though and that wasn't too exciting.  Luckily I only sliced the tip of my nail off.  Now Evan is convinced I'm going to kill myself in the kitchen while we're on skype.  I promise that will not happen.  I had to eat fairly quickly because I had to go meet this random lady.  I was pretty excited for milk tea though.  Asking someone to go get milk tea is the equivalent of going to get Starbucks.  I like milk tea SO much more.

So I meet this woman, and her friend, and she says, "Let's go to my car."  I kind of thought this was some kind of kidnapping done really gracefully, but then I realized this is China and she just told me how young and beautiful I looked and people don't kidnap you after saying something like that.  (I think I'm tired and that's why this post is strange).  We went to this place called 'Yesterday Once More' (seriously).  I'd been past it a few times but never gone inside.  BEAUTIFUL! I felt like I walked into a nice American restaurant.  Strange feeling.  They played some Beibs, T-Swift, Selena Gomez and some other pop-y American music which I appreciated.  We got some youzi cha (grapefruit tea) which was DELISH and some weird, yet incredible, pumpkin things.  Of course I took a picture because that's what I do (yay iphone camera).

How adorable are those little tea cups? 

Basically they asked how busy I was and I explained that I teach about 12 hours and have 4 tutoring gigs all throughout the week and I'm actually pretty busy.  They said they needed someone during the week, preferably the daytime.  I said Wednesday or Friday morning worked for me.  Then they asked how much I want to get paid.  I hat when that happens.  It's like when the parents ask the babysitter how much she gets paid an hour.  I don't care.  You just pay me what you want to pay me.  Tomorrow I'll get a call and find out if Friday works for them and if it does, I'll be teaching another 40 minutes to more little kids.  It's really not much to add.  They know when I'll be on vacation and when I'm leaving and they are fine with it all.  So now I can add one more thing to my list, but I got to fit it into my schedule so I'm pretty happy.

Mondays.  Always something to tweak my happy day... but then something great seems to happen to make Mondays my favorite day.  Every day is kind of my favorite day though.  I think I set myself up pretty well when I came here and I've learned to focus on the good things more than the bad things.  I know I have my moments and my days, but I try to end each day thinking of why it was a good day and I usually have something pretty great to end each day with.  Today: new friends, good tea, great dinner, unexpected skype date, a hot shower, and the possibility of more little kids to love on!  Good day!

PS: Water came on when I was almost done cooking dinner.  YAY!