Friday: I took the day off from preaching today and stayed home to clean and cook. I had invited a few of the friends over for dinner in order to get to know them better, and also a friend who lives in Cuenca who just arrived the night before from the States.
After cleaning, I ate lunch and made my shopping list for the grocery store. While searching for what I deemed to be "common" ingredients, I began to get very frustrated with all the substitutions and omissions I was going to have to make. Colby cheese, Monterey jack cheese, not available. Green chilies, not available. Sour cream, not available. Graham crackers, don't even get me started... I began to envision "weird" results for the dinner and felt a wave of mild panic and anxiety and felt a longing for home. Never mind that now I told myself, you're just going to have to learn to cook differently. I sucked it up and told myself it was an opportunity and chance to challenge myself, and I left the store.
Once home, I reviewed my recipes again, consulted with my mom for a few ideas on substitutions, converted measurements into metric, temperatures into Celcius, looked up adjustments for high altitudes and got to work.
I made the cheesecake first, then the Mexican chicken casserole, one regular and one sans chicken, substituting beans for my vegetarian friends, then the gin slush (with many substitutions), then Spanish style rice, black beans and guacamole.
We chatted throughout dinner and listened to one friend's stories from their recent visit to New Zealand. After dinner and dessert and coffee, we played Bible pictionary - always fun and full of laughs. The two families left, since they have to travel an hour to their homes, and 5 of us single girls remained. We decided to make it a "Girl's Night" and to stay up and visit with our friend from Cuenca as she would be departing early the following morning. So we headed back to my former roommates house and talked and watched movies all night.
Saturday: At about a quarter after six in the morning, our friend's taxi arrived and she was gone. We all went to bed to try to catch a little bit of sleep. After three hours, though, I couldn't sleep anymore and began catching up on my emails and such.
After everyone woke up, we then had lunch and I went home to get some things done clean up my house a bit.
I also decided to sign up with a company to do virtual assistant type work (though I'm still working on getting my teaching certification) and found it to be a rather detailed and complicated set-up process. Not to mention all the testing required to "improve" your profile and chance of getting hired. So, we'll see...hopefully I'll be able to get a few jobs out of it soon.
Sunday: Today, of course, was the meeting and afterwards I came home, tidied up a bit more around the house and then took more tests and worked on my profile for the online work. I also applied for a few jobs, I figure it doesn't hurt, though I haven't had my "verification interview" yet (scheduled for Thursday). I was pretty exhausted by the end of the day.
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