Why G-d?

Why do I write "G-d"?

I found an article that explains it much more eloquently than I've been able to yet.

Read it here.

추석 Traveling: Recess

Part of my Bulgarian adventure was entertaining some kids during recess so their teachers could get a meeting in.  This was a lot of fun, although I don't think it would have been, had I not been teaching for a year already in Korea.  I especially enjoyed the name that every child in the place called me, quite excitedly, I might add:  Anna Banana.  See, Anne is a rather unusual name for them, so they had started to side with Annie, but I nipped that in the bud and switch them over to Anna.  Anna Banana just naturally had to follow.  Of course.  

In Korea, I am 앤, sometimes 앤나.  In Bulgaria, I am Анна Банана.  I'm beginning to think my high school Spanish teacher was mistaken when she said that you keep your name wherever you go in the world.

Since I realize how long my post was yesterday, I'm going to shut up now and let these pictures do the rest of my speaking for me.  They're really quite good, if I do say so myself, so, please take your time on them!

What goes around comes around.

Aside from this being one of the most brilliant music videos (Yes, it is linked to the title of this post.) I have ever seen (topped maybe only by Thriller), it is also a very true statement.

One of the most infamous stories in my family is that of my first words to my maternal grandparents.  My pop-pop had a habit of calling all little girls "Pumpkin."  Honestly, now I think it's quite endearing, and I partially regret my steps against it, but when I was very little, I HATED being called anything other than Anne (R-dot).  (My mom would like to interject that Pop-pop was calling my Annie, which I do hate and would prefer people to refrain from using in reference to me.  That is all.  Moving on...) Therefore, the first time I worked up the nerve to talk in their presence, I walked in and said, "MY NAME IS ANNE!," to which they replied, "...okay."  They called me Anne ever since then.

Well, I've posted several times about the kid who always yells, "TOE-MAY-TOE!" whenever he sees me.  I've taken to calling him Tomato, as a type of a term of endearment.  It occurred to me that he seemed to be slightly disgruntled at its use, and I tried to tone it down, but it slipped out today, since that is what I associate him with.  Being outside of school grounds at the time, he turned to me and rather forcefully said, "Teacher, my English name is Brian.  No more Tomato."  (I can't help smiling, even as I write this.)  He then turned to his friend and said, "His English name is Vic.  No more Tomato."  By this point, I was laughing out loud, but trying to control myself.

"Okay," I said. "No more Tomato.  See you later, Brian, Vic."

I can't even feel bad about it, and I really don't feel bad about giving my grandparents a hard time anymore (for several years, I had worried that I had offended them in some way), because now I am certain that they were more amused than anything else.

Do you have any fun stories like that?  I'd love to hear them, as I love to laugh.

(I'm including Thriller in the viewable section of this post, as Michael Jackson is still ranked higher than JT in my book, although not by much, but until JT's genius outranks MJ's, this is the way it will be.)

Oh, and by the way... Brian turned to me as I was leaving and said, "I do really like tomatoes, though."  "I do too, Brian."  :)

PS.  Don't forget to be praying for my Compassion Kid.

It's unavoidable...

It's pretty much as unavoidable as Darth Vader being Luke's father: My name is "Anna" while I'm here.  Somehow, they got that one into their heads, and, even though I've corrected it, it still gets written that way in every paper introducing me.  I sang a solo in church this morning (on request), and this is how I was introduced:

Hopefully, you can see that.  My name is near the bottom.  Anyway, all day when I introduced myself, I was corrected.  So.  I'm Anna.  Great.

Anyway... this is a picture of the couple I flew over with - Lisa and Cameron.  We'll be joined by another couple tomorrow.

 Annnnd, this is a picture of me enjoying really yummy Korean food.  Koreans LOVE taking photos, so, unfortunately, I had a bunch of water in my mouth when this was taken.  Fortunately, I still managed to look cute.

 Finally, I saw this in the mall the other day.  It made me really happy, especially since it was moved to cover all the Yankees gear:

So there you go... this is a quickie, but I think it's still a goodie.  Enjoy, and leave me comments with what you want to know about!