Ci-Ci-Ci-Cicada!

I have a Matryoshka doll key cover. It's so awesome; it covers my house key with its adorable, rubber body, giving my key chain a smidge of character. Unfortunately, it covers too much of my house key which makes it impossible to unlock the front door unless I remove the key completely. This isn't a problem until nighttime, when I'm standing on my porch with a swarm of light-loving bugs clunking into my face, the door, the walls etc. while I try to work the key from the holder and into the door.

Tonight, a cicada tonked and buzzed into my cranium several times. And while I was standing there screaming and cowering, reaching a hand towards the key stuck in the door, my friend Caitlin was standing on the driveway laughing at me. She waited for me to deal with the situation, which I did, and that was that. But as I'm sitting here, rethinking whether or not the matryoshka doll has got to go, I have to admit: it was pretty cool to see a cicada in action, rather than its pale remainder stuck to the side of a tree.

The point of all this, you ask?

I don't know.

What would Jillian Michaels say about eating marshmallows?

Seriously, I want to know; Not for personal reasons, of course. I am not, at this very moment, eating Toasted Coconut Marshmallows, one after the other.

No. That would be sick.

Anyway, we're in the twenties now in the Burkina Faso/Steven countdown; 29 days to be exact. It almost makes me insane to look back to the year 2008, when we were just beginning and there were over 700 days to the end of his Peace Corps service. At this point in the journey, it's fun to count days. I'll tell you what would not be fun to count: number of calling cards used, number of dropped calls, the number of times I've said "What? I can't understand you" because of shite-like phone service. Ah yes, it has been an experience abundant with numbers.

I'm pretty thankful for all of it. I'm certainly good at giving pat answers for why I SHOULD be thankful for his time in Africa whilst I hold things down in Kansas. But overall, I'm glad it's almost over. As Willy Wonka would say, "We've got so little to do and so much... scratch that, so little time and so much to do..." What I'm trying to say, is that it's probably time we had a fluid conversation, a high five, a night out.

Whoa. It's going to be something.

So now, I've got twenty-nine days to pack a bag for several, widely different destinations.

And... back to my marshmallows.