Summer Kickoff Adventure!

One of our meals, NAAN PIZZA! Not very the healthiest, but made at home.

Once again, I find myself in the middle of horse country! I'm pretty much doing the usual (only we're trying to eat out less and healthier- I even got John to try cauliflower the other day. What!), but it's June now, so it's a bagillion degrees and the air is humid and thick. I tried to go to the park yesterday to read outside while John went to work, but I gave up on my walk from the house to the car. The air is hot and thick which makes breathing just a chore. Every time I go to the east coast during the summer, I always pack shorts and tank tops, but I forget how truly awful it is to be outside, so I end up being cold because everyone spends all their time indoors where it's air conditioned.

I'm not naked.

We did actually go outside this weekend though: we pool-crashed one of John's friend's apartments! One thing they have a lot of here are pools. It's probably a combination of a lack of natural bodies of water and that it gets reliably hot enough every day during the summer, that nearly every apartment complex has a pool and probably a good number of single family homes. John just got a water proof case for his phone so we tested it and his phone still works so that's good. Our fingers got too cold from the water after a while that we couldn't use the touch screen, and the case got foggy over the lens because the inside of the case was warmer than the pool. We snapped a couple of memorable ones still. John didn't wear sunblock against my advice so he looks like a lobster now (on his shoulders and back). It's sad because he is in pain, but funny because his biggest worry is having his friends realize he is not invincible.

There's a couple things here that they don't have here that I am already missing. The first is little coffee shops. I've totally been spoiled rotten in Seattle with a coffee shop on every other street corner! Yes, I realized this before, but I didn't realize the magnitude of how much Starbucks is taking over the world. I searched for "coffee shops near me" on my phone today, and I got 3 Starbucks and a Jamba Juice! Starbucks is convenient and you know exactly what you're getting, but I try to go to mom and pop coffee places as much as I can. But I had no other option so I'm sitting in a Starbucks right now after buying a lemonade and getting a refill of water, using their wifi for 3 hours. Was it worth the $3? I'm still not sure...

The other thing they don't have is Asians. Not that it matters- it's just an observation. Yesterday, I was sitting in the cafe at Barnes and Noble using their free wifi when I saw 2 twenty-something-year-old Asian girls. I even did a double take because they stuck out so much, which made me realize that I stick out that much. It's probably because I don't actually see my physically body and face walking around here in this environment. I haven't felt discriminated against, but I have gotten long stares from elementary-school-aged children on 3 separate occasions in the past 2 days. I really don't mind as long as no one is being mean to me!

Can't wait to go outside again.