New digs, new job

Happy Thanksgiving everyone~ Although by this time of night, I imagine everyone is quite stuffed and thoughts have turned to "Black Friday", at least for some of my audience. I hope everyone had a great holiday, of course, Thanksgiving is not celebrated down here, but Marianella and I will be hosting a Thanksgiving dinner the weekend after this one to commemorate one of my favorite holidays. Fortunately, the standard menu for Thanksgiving is pretty easy to do in Peru as all the food items (except stuffing) are staples of the Peruvian diet. So, it's time to catch you up on what's been going on in our lives. The big news is Marianella and I found our own apartment (or departmento) recently and moved in one week ago exactly. The apartment is located in an area of Lima called San Borja, a very nice suburb that we were hoping to find a place in. We found that apartment hunting was quite competitive in our price range, and after enduring some frustration for a few weeks, we were able to land this apartment. As stated, it's in a very nice neighborhood, within a short walk to restaurants, parks, and other businesses, yet pretty quiet and very safe. An interesting aspect of renting an apartment in Peru is that few apartments come furnished and the ones that do tend to be very expensive. So, we were left to furnish our apartment and Marianella was ready and willing. We all know how God created the world in 7 days-well, if he ever has a big project like that again and needs to contract out for an interior decorator, I'm going to suggest my wife. In less than a week, we have our refrigerator, oven, living room set, dining room table & chairs, TV couch, TV, DVD, office desk, and office chair all bought and tastefully decorating our home. While we do miss living with Marianella's parents who treated us so well and spoiled me so grandly in our first three months in Lima, we are excited to have our own place again. In addition to the new apartment, I also picked up a new job since I last updated you. I was hired to be a copywriter for an online sales company based out of Detroit but with an office in Lima. One of the nice features of the job is that I am able to work from home, so I like that quite a bit. The items that I have written about so far are items such as massagers, sweatshirts, backpacks. . .for you Seinfeld fans out there, my friend Merry from Woodbury H.S. compared me to Elaine when she went to work for J. Peterman. I'm not quite that poetic yet, but so far I am having fun with the job. The other big news for us is Marianella and her job. For those of you who didn't know, Marianella has been working as a first grade teacher at Markham College, an English speaking private school in Lima. She was originally hired to be a special ed. teacher, but found out when she was still in Minnesota that they needed her to teach first grade. Arriving mid-year she stepped in and has performed quite admirably-so admirably in fact, that on Tuesday she was offered the position of head of the first grade team! Pretty impressive stuff for someone who's only been on the job for four months, but as with me, she wowed them from the start evidently. My only concern is that she's going to get a big head and start bossing me around even more at home, but I think I'll be able to manage. We're both quite excited about the honor for her. Alright, that is all I have for you right now. Once again, Happy Thanksgiving, I hope to give you another update before Christmas arrives, along with pictures of our new casita. Take care~Tim