Collier Family Reunion - March 22nd

Last Saturday we had a rare Collier family reunion. This is Joe's Dad's Mom's side of the family (I'm not snooty enough to say paternal grandmother). She had 12 brothers and sisters and then named her children after them, so it can get very confusing how everyone is connected (Which Uncle Tom?). We met in Nacogdoches, TX, and enjoyed a yummy potluck meal.

Joe and I had the fun part of the Easter Egg hunt - we hid the plastic eggs! Though I've done this many times, it was Joe's first time and he had fun. I only got action pictures of Peyton, the youngest child that can walk, because the other kids sped around like maniacs.

Joe hid three eggs under a pile of pine cones (yes, East Texas), gently placing each one for maximum coverage. A sweet little girl ran straight for the pile and with one swipe knocked the pine cones in all directions.

We met our newest cuz-nephew (what Joe calls his cousin's sons), Ethan. He's 2.5 months old and TINY! (I have small hands, and it looks huge in the picture!)Peyton was making funny faces at Joe.


Here are all the kids! Can you guess which 7 belong to the same mom and dad?


As has happened at every family reunion since December 28, 2001, I was asked when we were going to give the other kids another kid to play with. This time, the mother of 7 - all three boys in the picture, plus Harley, Allysa, and Peyton - asked me and the mother of Arian and Morgan (twins) about 3 minutes after I arrived. Before I even had to respond, the other mother said in a fairly light-hearted way, "Well, not all of us are as fertile as you are!" That certainly stopped that line of questioning! I had already planned to not bother people who I rarely see / hardly know with that question, but I hadn't thought of how hurtful it would be to someone who desperately wanted to be having a child but couldn't. I'm also glad we're in a family who aren't afraid to call each other out on that sort of thing.

March 12 - 16 World Travelers!

Okay, maybe we're just Southwest Texas Travelers.

Joe got back in town Tuesday and we cooked / ate dinner with some friends. I had to work on Wednesday, and Joe spent a lot of the day cleaning and unpacking. I got off work early and we left for Junction, Texas, around 4:00pm. We went to visit my grandmother who lives just outside of town along the South Llano River (her property is across the river from the South Llano River State Park).

Thursday morning we went to go feed the (three) cats, and found that the night before one had given birth to 4 kittens! They were solid black and cute. Momma cat made the other two cats keep their distance, but seemed friendly enough to us (she certainly enjoyed us petting her). In hopes of maintaining some sort of workout schedule, Joe and I went jogging not long before noon. When we got back to the house, only two kittens were left. Apparently the back porch was too busy to keep the kittens there and Momma cat was moving them. I tried to take a few quick pictures of the last two when Momma cat came back. I then switched to using the video feature on my camera, which explains the bad quality.

Grammy (her real name is Robbie)

Cat drama aside, it was a relaxing visit. We left Saturday afternoon early to meet some family in San Antonio. Lauren (my sister) and Kevin (her husband) moved there from College Station that weekend, and we met them there to help unload the moving truck and cars. They had a ton of help, considering it was an out-of-town move! My parents came down with them from Dallas (Lauren & Kevin had flown in to Dallas Friday from New York... they were closer to being world travelers, I guess) and helped load up and drive the truck to S.A. Two of their friends also helped load and made the C.S. to S.A. drive. Kevin's parents, uncle and cousin came from about an hour away (where the uncle lives) to help unload. I'm sure glad they had so much help - they were moving into the second floor. I was afraid it would be very hot, but the weather was perfect with a light breeze to keep it cool. The apartment complex is very nice and seems to be in an upscale part of town. We got back to College Station very late Saturday night. With the few hours we were actually in S.A., I forgot to take any pictures.

Sunday, Joe's parents came to see his soccer game. They stayed for church and a late dinner, so they spent the night and headed out when we left for work Monday morning. It was a short, but fun visit.

Songs to Live By

I was going through some Christian songs in my iTunes folder that had truncated titles, changing them to the full titles. Here are a couple I came across that were funny:

Wonderful Me
(Wonderful Merciful Savior)

Come Ye Sinners, Poo
(Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy)

Joe said Sam would have especially liked that last one. :)

Closer Skin

Last night Joe and I went out to eat at Casa Ole. Two women, a man, a girl and a boy sat at the table next to us. At one point the man (I think grandpa, maybe dad) turned to the girl and told her she should finish her food. The no more than 5-year-old girl told him that she wasn't going to eat any more because she wanted to be skinny.

I looked up (yes, my curiosity and surprise moved me past overhearing into definite eavesdropping) to see the thin as a rail child gently push her plate away. She was being quite pleasant, actually. The man was visibly as surprised as I was, and said something to her I couldn't hear. She replied, "I want my skin to be closer." Despite the mom shaking her head no at the man, he said what I thought: "What?" She explained by putting her tiny hand around her forearm and saying "I want my skin to be closer to my bone." The mom's not-so-subtle expression made the man drop the subject. My heart dropped with it.

I remember fun slumber parties with a friend in 6th grade - she was already a good dancer at the time. Our senior year I was Drum Major in the band, and she was Head Captain of the dance team. She spent the end of that year in a hospital. She tried to change her broad bone structure into a "perfect" dancer's body with a diet of orange tic tacs and a couple of diet cokes a week. With all the damage done to her body, her condition was critical and doctors said even if she recovered, she would not be able to give birth to children. (She's married now, and seems to be doing very well.) Memories like that flooded back when I heard the girl describe her ideal body.

There are a lot of ways I could go with this, but the strongest feeling I have is towards the mother last night. While she did not seem to encourage this attitude, she seemed to hope it would go away by them not talking about it. I think issues like these don't need to be ignored for one minute. Why would that mother look the other way while her daughter spouts out these lies? She wouldn't look the other way if her child started to run into a busy street! Maybe she doesn't know how to address it. Or maybe she's had trouble running into streets herself.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter, including those of you who are parents. Let's make a change and not have Joe be the only one who comments!

Lonely Toothbrush

I have a very lonely toothbrush! Ever since Sunday afternoon, it's just been sitting there alone, only getting out two or three times a day. Joe went backpacking / camping by himself (special thanks to the Cavins who let him borrow their gear!). He left Sunday night and planned to return during the day Wednesday. And he took his toothbrush.


He (Joe, not my toothbrush) was definitely a loner in high school and even college. He enjoyed spending time by himself in general, but especially to reflect / pray / listen. He now gets away for a couple of hours every week, but it's been over two years since the last time he went away by himself, and he felt like it was time. Sunday night Joe called from a pay phone to let me know that he didn't have cell phone service, but he made it there safely. He called again Monday mid-morning (using a generous someone's working cell phone) to let me know that he'd be coming home a day early! This happened two years ago, too. Though he needs time to himself, he now also needs time with others. :) Even though it's been good to spend some time hanging out with some cool ladies, I'm excited he'll be home today! Little toothbrush, there is an end in sight!

Happy Belated Valentine's Day

I just downloaded some pictures from my camera, and found some from Valentine's Day this year! Joe started cooking while I was still at work, and cooked a great meal for us. We had steak, cheesy julienne potatoes (those weren't from scratch, but very tasty), and Joe's Famous Corn. He also had bread and spinach dip I could snack on ahead of time. He also got everything we needed so we could make one of my very favorite desserts together - strawberry shortcake! (Believe it or not, there IS a heart-shaped shortcake under all those strawberries and whipped cream!) It was a great romantic night in.

Mandarin... yo momma or your horse?

I mentioned before that Joe and I are taking Chinese (Mandarin) classes together. Last night ended week 4 - so we've had 8 of the 12 lessons. This post is starting out semi-boring, but I have a funny treat for you at the end (no, stop scrolling! wait for it!). (note: We're learning Mandarin, not Cantonese, but our teacher refers to it as Chinese, so I'll use that interchangeably)

First, a little about Mandarin (from my limited understanding <- that's my disclaimer).

As we're learning, we read and write Chinese in pinyin, basically a phonetic representation of the words (using the Roman alphabet). This is surprisingly not that helpful - for example "zi" is pronounced "dsuh" (you pronounce vowels very differently depending on their location in the word and what other letters are around it).

We also learn to recognize and write the Chinese characters. Each character is a whole word and there are no pronunciation clues within the character. That's different/unique as far as my language learning because sometimes I can look at a character and know exactly what it means but have no idea how to say it in Chinese.

Mandarin has 4 tones. This means you say the same exact sound in different ways to mean completely different words. Listen to this for an example. The word is "ma" and means (in the order he says it) mother, hemp, horse, and scold. I'm not sure about Chinese, but Thai is also tonal, and I've studied it some. With Thai, native speakers do not associate the words with each other since it's an integral part of speech, just as we would not associate words like grant and plant (except for you teachers who use word families). So if someone said "I would like to grant this tree," it would lead to some confusion. A native Thai speaker has the same problem understanding what you say if you use the wrong tone, and I would guess it is the same for Chinese. A quick funny story about how the wrong tone can create problems. In Thailand, our American friend Jeff was introducing an older woman, let's say her name was Pok (I can't remember). He meant to say "This is Aunt Pok" (aunt being a term of endearment/honor), but he accidentally said "This is crazy Pok." Thank goodness she had a sense of humor!

One especially nice thing about Mandarin is that there is no verb conjugation. If you've taken a foreign language, you've probably spend hours memorizing "avoir: j'ai, tu as, il/elle a, vous avais, nous avons, ils/elles ont" or something similar. It's great to only need to learn one word for a verb, and that concept actually makes sense! In French you even have to have different words (articles, adjective ending, adverb endings, etc.) depending on the gender (masculine / feminine) of the noun you are referring to... Chinese is such a relief!

Okay, that's probably more than any of you wanted to know about our language learning, but hopefully you learned something, too!

Now for the fun (if you scrolled down here without reading the rest, know that Santa's watching). Our teacher gave us all Chinese names to use in class. Chinese people say their family name first, followed by their given name (the equivalent of our first name). The names our teacher gave us are supposed to sound somewhat like our real name. My name is Pi Kai-xi ("Pee" (rising tone) "Kie" (rhymes with tie, lowish funky tone) "she" (high tone)). Kai-xi is supposed to be close to Kathy, which is close to Kathryn. The three words mean Skin Generous West. I kinda like my first name, since (relative to China) I'm from the West and I try to be generous. Here's the good part. Joe's name is Pi Jio ("Pee" (rising tone) "Gee-oh"(falling sharp tone)). It means Skin Vulture. Isn't that awesome?!? Joe said it sounds like a rock band. We found out last week that the same pronunciation (Pi Jio) with different tones is the Mandarin word-combination meaning beer! While that might be slightly cool, Skin Vulture definitely has a ring to it.

EDIT - SHORT RANT: Most of you know of my issues with spelling and frustration with the English language (I still strongly believe that if English were to make any sense, the correct spelling of "apparently" would be "appearently"). While writing this I repeatedly spelled "pronounce" and "pronunciation" wrong. Seriously - can we have some consistency? Either take the "o" out or leave it in! No wonder I want to be fluent in another language!

Thank You!

I just realized that I never blogged a thank you to all the family that gave us (or Joe) money instead of gifts for Christmas and our anniversary! Joe has been watching the laptop market for a long time, and he found an excellent deal on a laptop at the beginning of January. Last fall he had also found a deal so that we could open a free Chase banking account (with direct deposit) and get $250 cash (as long as we keep it open for 6 months). Between that money and your gifts, we completely paid for our new Dell (Inspiron 1521) laptop! Here it is:
I've used it to be outside while categorizing what we spent in Quicken, and I can't count how many times Joe's used it when he has time to write and think Sunday mornings. We actually use it more than our desktop, though we don't have wireless internet at home. Thank you so much! It's great!