Maryann's Musings

   Over the last decade or so, our family has watched a lot of Christmas movies. We know the classics and the ones certain family members can watch without feeling sick. This year, I decided to take it a step further. Here is a compilation of our ultimate Christmas movie wish-list; it gets to be our watch-list! Some of these movies we have seen dozens of times. Others were recommended to us. (You'll also notice we have a thing for the Muppets).    I patterned the list to capitalize on variety. We have our 'Funny Friday' with the Santa Clause movies, and our 'Serious Sundays' with more meaningful movies, usually Christmas Carol themed.         We are especially excited to watch the new Grinch release because of Benedict Cumberbatch. Fridays in our house are Sherlock Fridays and we left off on a cliff hanger! You would not believe the patience this is going to take.  For all you How It Should Have Ended  and...

A red-frangipani flower (Plumeria rubra) in our yard    We made it!   Our family landed in West Africa on August 14. We have lived in our house (meaning slept in) for over a month now. Let me catch you up on all our news.   Thankfully both of our water heaters broke after  we had used them for a few days, otherwise morale would have been quite low. We are also grateful (especially us ladies) that our explosive gas stove has been completely replaced. After several close calls in the mornings leaving everyone slightly shaken, Mom and I drove to the store with measuring tape in hand to purchase one. It's Italian and quite nice. We have blown over five transformer fuses, cracked innumerable rotten eggs, but haven't fried any electronics yet. I'll let you know when we have fully settled in!   Have you ever wondered about communications outside of the US? We used to buy SIM cards when we flew into a new country. I remember Mom and Dad having a l...

   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 c...

  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 wri...

   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...

  MK's can be weird... and do weird things. The video below is no exception. The concept was entirely thought up by MK's, and must not be taken seriously. Please.  Be certain that behind every scene we were laughing ourselves silly and had a blast with every minute. But like I said, this is a complete joke. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it with a fellow missionary family. I am not going to write a witty ending to this post; the video must, and can, speak for itself. I will only say this: our family has some really morbid pastimes.

  With water swishing in the buckets on our heads and dripping down our arms, Tristan and I walked unsteadily down the rocky, dirt road leading to our backyard. Kicking the gate open, we trudged up to our 'reservoir' (a burnt-mustard, fifty-gallon plastic container).  Then we slowly poured our prize inside. Why? Because right now we don't have running water! Our routine has looked really funny the past few days: the water kicks on for literally five minutes and everyone runs around like maniacs filling empty buckets and washing their hair. So trust me, we all stink . This is how we take baths right now....  Doing the dishes and washing our hands is hard enough, but doing laundry is especially difficult. We have to manually pour water into the machine until it works. Drinking water is pretty much taken care of. We have a big bucket next to our sink filled with clean water. If needed, we just buy bottled-water or boil tap water for 6 minutes, although this is our l...

  As some of you may know, I babysit for an amazing family. That family recently had a 'business' trip up to the slightly mountainous region of the country I live in.  I would 'nanny' the kids while the adults took care of their work, then they would come and have fun with us. Great, right? Yes! One of my charges My other charge  The drive up was pretty enjoyable, and we listened to lots of music before we arrived. They even found me a theme song that included my name: 'More Than a Feeling' :)  This video is of an encroaching village, with one of the mountains in view.  When we finally arrived, we were stopped at this gate and then escorted to the Guest House. The Guest House   Everyone made us feel so welcome there! I have no complaint other than the bugs and the heat, but no one there was responsible for that :)  Once we got settled in, I was taken to my dorm-like room to meet one of my roommates. ...

  Bonjour . The reason I created this blog is because I love to write. I love to write about daily occurrences, my thoughts, what I do with my friends, and basically everything that goes on in my life.   As a young girl growing up overseas, I have had lots of incidents that a lot of people will never deal with. For instance, we have two faucets in our kitchen sink. One is "dirty water"; the other is "clean water." People from the U.S. are a bit startled by this.  Recently my grandmother was visiting from the States for the first time; she was staying in a separate apartment for the night. I was getting ready for bed when it hit me. GranAnnie was going to use "dirty water" to brush her teeth. The last time I had attempted this, I had become violently ill during the night, and overcome by nausea. My little brother and I shot across the seminary campus we live on to the housing section and furiously banged on the door. GranAnnie was unpacking and reachi...