More from Angela – does Don post at all??

Just when you thought you’d heard enough from me, here I am again with some small items of interest. First, Don is adjusting more to the life of leisure and he is brewing ideas for a blog, so don’t worry, he will be back! He takes more time, but he has higher quality posts, right?

I love having a smaller house, it is waaayyyy easier to clean. Why did I ever want a mongo house? It was so large I hired someone to clean it, I never wanted to do any cleaning. When we were there and the house was for sale, what a nightmare to keep it clean (don’t ask about if the house sold yet). This small two-bedroom plus one other room house is perfect for cleaning. One day Don will do the bathroom—the only one we have. The next day I will vacuum the main room. Third day he’ll sweep up the kitchen. Next day we dust. You get the point. In the span of a week, we’ve kept the house clean and it was a piece of cake, like a total of an hour for the whole thing!

The food here is definitely prepared differently, mostly with a hell lot less sugar. It is so noticeable: peanut butter, cookies, canned goods, breads, muffins from the grocery store. It is instantly noticeable, especially if you’ve recently gotten a sweet at Starbucks in town. We got chocolate and caramel muffins at the grocery bakery yesterday (just one each, and they make muffins in normal muffin sizes!) and bit right in, you would think chocolate and caramel would be almost too sweet to eat. Not if you don’t load it down with sugar!! It was so good and you could tell it wasn’t weighed down with the sweet stuff, so maybe a few pounds will come off even if I have a muffin every now and then.

I bet none of you heard the big political news last week from New Zealand, but the Foreign Minister of New Zealand, Winston Peters, had a 30 minute meeting with Condi Rice. They sat in that photo op area with two chairs and the table between, fireplace behind and did the photo stuff, but I am also guessing none of you saw those photos! It was big news here, his whopping 30 minutes, to discuss working again with New Zealand. I guess decades ago New Zealand pledged to be a non-nuclear country and since that time the U.S. hasn’t worked with us on foreign issues. BUT, guess who’s desperate now for foreign friends . . . and here’s a hint: it’s not New Zealand.