Maryann's Musings

   Minecraft Parkour is my new video game pursuit; basically you jump really high, really far, as fast as you can. There's more to it, but that's the general idea. I can say in all fairness I am terrible at it. Every afternoon when I cash in my thirty minutes of Video Game Time, I sit or stand and hop around on the same sequence of blocks until my fingers ache and my hand is sore. I spent an entire turn doing one jump a couple hundred times (which means dying a couple hundred times) until my muscle memory learned to time all the variables just right. It's difficult, but fun.      I am not overly philosophical or preachy - or maybe I try not to be. However, while I sat pressing the jump button (space-bar) repeatedly, my mind wandered, and I began to think about making mistakes in real life as compared to Minecraft Parkour. The exceedingly used (though true) sayings about trying again, getting up when you fall, and learning through your mistakes all came to mind. I am

  Over one hundred degree temperatures, 90% humidity, and a beautiful double layer cake with fluffy white icing oozing out of the middle from the extreme temperatures. This is just one part of my experiences cooking in West Africa.    Every soup, every pancake, every biscuit, every baked good is an adventure. I have had many absolute fails that I was extremely upset about.  These fails now make a good laugh and an interesting story.    The difference between cooking in West Africa and America is this: ingredients available. Yes, there may be chocolate chips at the store every three months if  you are willing to pay $20 for the little bag.    I don't use chocolate chips. I don't use whipping cream. We don't put cheese in our Macaroni&Cheese. We don't use smooth, processed peanut butter because it is too expensive as an imported item; we use the more challenging natural peanut butter 😡 from locally grown peanut fields.  (No Peter Pan, no Jif). In fac

  I call Imogene, 'my early birthday present from God.' Ever since I was 4 years old, I desperately wanted a cat. Every little girl needs a cat, right? I extensively researched the different breeds in our encyclopedias and read the Little Golden books we had about cats cover to cover until I could almost recite them from memory. For a while, I was very much obsessed.   But I never did get a cat of my own until this year. My dad told me over and over, "We can't pay for a cat, we'd have to vaccinate the thing, no telling where we could find a good cat in West Africa, we'd have to feed it, it'd get sick, what would we do with it while we are on furlough, et cetera and so on," "Yes, Daddy, but they're soooo cute!" ...I can't count the number of times we had that conversation, but I dropped it after a while because Dad was right.  Last month, Tristan and I went to a retreat designed for  MKs . I had an incredible time.  Poor

  I last posted in May. I didn't realize this until I looked on my blog page today. In July I was very active, but even when I did have free moments, I avoided my blog using inspiration as an excuse. I am a firm believer in never rushing a written work and always working off of an inspiration. But, for me, it can be very easy to fall into the rut of procrastination using that philosophy of inspiration as an excuse.  In truth, there has been much to be inspired by around me if I had only sat down for an hour or so to wring it out of my brain. School has (surprisingly) instilled a work ethic in me that I am (hopefully) going to hold to.  After a little coaxing and some sacrifice on my part, my little brother Aidan and our friend Jackson agreed to work together and every other day give me a topic that I will have to blog about. I made them promise that it would not be gross, disgusting, or weird.  I hope that this will push me out of my comfort zone in both writing and dead l

   You know that you really want to watch a movie when you sit for five hours through all the glitches, halts, and messy internet bandwidth to view it. As soon as I heard that Disney was about to release a live-action Beauty and the Beast film, I told my family, "I have  to watch it." Now I have not only seen the movie,  I have listened to the soundtrack uncountable times and can almost list the entire leading cast from memory.  Aidan, Christianna, and I watched it online. For every five seconds that we watched of the movie, there were ten seconds of loading... loading... loading... We still enjoyed watching it, though! There were a ton of funny film stills every time it was stuck and we could voice our opinion about the plot, special effects, or acting during the pauses. I was immensely pleased with every casting decision, especially Ewan McGregor (Lumiere), Ian McKellen ( Cogsworth), Luke Evans (Gaston), and Emma Watson (Belle).   If you are expecting

  Life is busy, and sometimes I don't always have time to write blog posts because nothing extremely interesting is happening. I have been having a great year so far and have great expectations for everything that we are going to do as a family. Here are some little pieces of news from our household:    Our rabbits are healthy and thriving (not to mention grossly obese). We have eight bunnies at the moment: S'mores - the 'alpha male' of the pack, a sourpuss and softie at the core; Honey-Bunny - the mommy, a very sweet thing; Gorgon, Destroyer of Carrots  (Jackson's rabbit, can't you tell?) - Gorgon is the big brother, and he is the only one who is fit and agile; Root Beer, Cinnabunn, Coconut, and Ghirardelli (like the chocolate brand) are the quadruplet babies who are all in their adolescent slump and moodiness stage. Finally, there is Cappuccino, who was a gift from another family and is to some extent an outcast among the bunny family.  We recently

The group, with ugly I-just-woke-up-why-are-you-taking-my-picture-Mom faces.😎   I feel as if a lot of my posts begin with car trips. It seems that every time I get excited about one of my blogs, I have to start with a road trip. This was actually a pretty fun road trip, though. It was our second car adventure with Aunt Danna and Jackson, and they always spice up our lives😊  On this escapade, we were driving up country to see another MK that lives about seven to eight hours away from us. None of us had ever met him. All we knew was that we were going to a river, eating dinner at their house, and playing X-box Kinnect. This trip was mostly for the teens. We have our original trio of Tristan, Jackson, and myself, but our family had the pleasure of bringing along Yilin (or Lin) with us. Welcome to the group, Yilin! I hope our craziness didn't scare you. 😛 After we sat in the car for 8 hours, we got pretty silly.   By the end of the car trip at about 7:00 pm, we h