Tuesday

These days I kind of feel like I'm getting through life one day at a time. I survived Monday with no referral, lets see if I can make it through Tuesday!

Yesterday was actually a pretty decent day. I was busy all morning and in the afternoon I had a meeting and came home to a message on my answering machine letting me know that Josh won the no cavity club prize at the dentist. Every time they go in for their checkups they get to be in the no cavity club that month if they don't have any cavities. At the end of each month they draw a name and the winner gets a prize. So yesterday afternoon I took Josh over to the dentist's office to pick out his prize. He got a little Lego set. Way to go Josh!

Then when we got home we decided that we wanted to go out to dinner somewhere for a family night, so we decided to try a new restaurant we heard about. Oh. My. Goodness. We went to a place called Tucanos. It's a Brazillian barbecue restaurant. They have a HUGE salad bar and then they have people who walk around the restaurant with gigantic rotisserie skewers of all different kinds of meat and they come to your table and carve off whatever you want. They had filet mignon and prime rib and bacon wrapped turkey and ham and chicken wings and grilled pineapple and a ton of other stuff. We all went home with very happy (and very full) tummies.

Today it's dark and rainy outside. I absolutely love rainy days, so I was happy to peek out the window this morning and see a storm brewing. There's just something I love about rain and thunderstorms. It makes me want to curl up and read a book.

Which brings me to my next topic! I'm reading another book today and this time it's something that might actually expand my brain a little more than Tori Spelling and Maureen McCormick did last week.

Last week I learned about what it's like to be a child star in Hollywood, and this week I've decided to research what it's like to live in North Korea. With North Korea being in the news so much lately, and knowing that we're going to be so close to it later this year, I'm starting to get curious about what exactly goes on there. I want to understand what it's like to live in a country like that, where every move you make is controlled by the government. The little I know about the country fascinates me and I want to know more.

So today I'm starting one of two books. The first one is The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea and the second one is The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. I still haven't decided which one I'm reading first, but as soon as I finish one I'll start the other one. They're both memoirs of people who spent many years in North Korea and managed to escape.

It's actually weird for me to think of how CLOSE we're actually going to be to the capitol of North Korea, where they're sitting there with their bombs. North and South Korea are tiny countries and their capitols really aren't very far apart. I'm a little nervous at the thought of being in South Korea, the object of their hatred, while they're threatening to blow things up. More than that, I'm a little worried about Clarissa being there. I just want to get her here where I'm much more confident that no one is going to attempt to blow us up.

So today I'll learn a little bit about life in North Korea. I'm guessing those books will take me a few days to read, so that should kill a few more afternoons. I'm determined to keep myself busy and keep my mind occupied until the referral gets here. The more time I spend with my nose in a book learning about something, the less time I have to obsess over the referral and the less time I have to throw myself a pity party. Every day is one day closer to Clarissa.