Checking In

Sorry I've been so quiet. I've been busy getting back into a school routine with the kids. There have been some extra challenges with that this year but hopefully it will all be smoothed out soon. I've also been battling some pain for about a month which was only yesterday diagnosed as pleurisy. I'm now on antibiotics so hopefully that, too, will be better soon.

Tomorrow Eric and I are leaving for a 5 day trip, get this: WITHOUT THE KIDS!! We are going to Bali and we are going in style. I am a little nervous about flying in light of the pleurisy, but hopefully all will be fine and sometime next week I will post some wonderful pictures.

Gates

Since moving to Taiwan I have seen a lot of cool gates and doors. I thought I would assemble the pictures here. Some are super cool, some are not. Several of the pictures have appeared in this blog before but not all.

I will begin with the grandest door I have ever seen. It is at the National Martyr's Shrine.

We go from very grand to very humble, though this is by no means the humblest. This is an ordinary door seen all around Taiwan.

Next, what I think is a rather pretty wooden door.

This next one is sort of a gate. It rolls down at the entrance to a shop in Danshui. It has been painted with a romantic sunset scene. I think they are stretching things a bit if they want you to believe this is a typical scene. To me nothing in Taiwan is ever this placid. But who knows, maybe if you're in Danshui at sunset... I doubt it.

The next is one of my personal favorites, which is why it gets two photographs. If I could take these doors home I would. I just love the wood carving.

Fairly grand:

Incredibly humble:

And many covering pretty much the entire gambit in between:

Most of these pictures were taken in Taiwan, although a couple are in Indonesia and one is in America. I thought I might have a contest and see if anyone could guess which one is in America. But what is a contest without a prize? I looked around to see if I have any cool Taiwanese thing that I could give away but I do not. Bummer, that would have been fun!

Not the Best Day

Soooo... we seem to have snakes. In our house. A short time ago we found the 2nd baby snake in 2 days in our house. I was not too terribly bothered when we found one, but two has me thinking that there must be a mother some place. Just when I thought I was getting used to things creeping around my house in Taiwan...now things are slithering around! At the moment I am feeling like this year cannot pass quickly enough. I am SO ready to go back to the States where I do not have to be constantly on guard against things creeping, crawling, flying, jumping or SLITHERING through the room!