Chocolate is truly amazing

Seriously. I was never a big chocolate fan in the US. To be honest, I wasn't much of a sugary snack person in general. I loved and preferred the spicier, salty and more bitter alternatives. That's changed a bit here. Perhaps it has something to do with the difficulties I find in having a regularly balanced diet, or the constant and unforgiving heat that affects me here every day (as I write this, it is currently 95º with a high expected to be around 98º). By the way, we are in the beginning of the Cold Season. So, to summarize. Chocolate, especially Milk Chocolate, is absolutely amazing. I'm blessed enough to have a refrigerator (not the norm), which means I can also freeze my chocolate to make it even more heavenly.

I mention chocolate so much here because I recently received a care package from a friend, which included Hershey's chocolate bars (the mini kind).

So, I'm still writing away with NaNoWriMo, and as is like to happen, my story has taken a very different turn from what I originally intended. I think I mentioned a few things about the story when I first started. How Mike (that's the protagonist's name) was going to be a Peace Corps Volunteer and so on. Well, Mike decided to become a Marine instead. He had a rough time prior to joining the military, so I can understand his decision. It was the right one for him. But now, he's gone and got himself taken hostage (he was deployed in Iraq--as a side note, doing research on military bases and tactics while living in a 3rd world country made me significantly more worried about my own well being than what it would have had I done the same research, or even more exhausting research, in the US). This doesn't bode so well for our hero, and I have no idea where it's going to go (yay for the rush of NaNoWriMo). Luckily, if all else fails, the story is written in 3rd person and I've recently introduced a new character, Captain April Davees, a Marine pilot who's more than intriguing enough to carry on the story. Anywho, no matter what happens to Lieutenant Michael Randall, the Captain will be having an increasingly larger part of the story as it goes on. Currently, I'm a little less than 1 day behind on NaNoWriMo (a spot I've stayed consistently at for about the last week). I haven't started my writing for today, so my current word count is 22,561.

I know I haven't written a lot lately, but if it helps, I've thought about writing a lot.

I lost a day when the elections happened (that's when I got behind on my word count), because I was at an expat's house (have I mentioned this stuff already?). There were probably 20-30 people there. All of us drinking wine, beer, soda, whatever and eating pork (oh my God, the pork was so amazingly good--it's also something that most Malians won't eat because of religious reasons, which makes it hard to come by). The house would easily have been a multi-million dollar house here in the US. It was pretty amazing. Anywho, we stayed up all night and watched Obama's speech on a big screen projector outside. Which didn't happen until something like 4 or 5am my time. Like I said, it was late. I was tired. And I didn't exist the next day. Not even a little. BUT, we all had an amazing time watching the election. There were lots of tears and calls home to the US and Malians cheering. It was very interesting to see the excitement from the Malians as they watched the election. The cheers and even the nervousness along the way. If you ever doubt that we live in a global community, just watch a US election from a 3rd world nation. You will see very clearly that we are, in fact, intrinsically linked to the rest of the world. And Obama, whether you like him or not, most certainly represents hope to other countries. His election inspired a world of people over here, and I don't mean US expats. It was something special to watch, and it actually made me proud to be a US citizen.

I've also been watching Battlestar Galactica again (I love that show). I'm anxious for the final episodes to start, which I know won't be for a little while, but still. I'm anxious. Speaking TV, I've been mostly keeping up with a few shows. Four, to be exact: Heroes, Chuck, Smallville and Supernatural. Sometimes, it's hard to find the episodes because they don't last long on most video streaming websites (and living outside the US, I'm incapable of watching the official streams from the network sites--it's... frustrating). For example, I've not yet found this week's episode of Chuck. Hopefully, I'll find it this weekend. I actually tried writing NBC once several weeks ago, but their response only proved that they didn't even look at my question (it literally had nothing to do with what I asked). Anywho, of the shows I'm keeping up with, Smallville has been surprisingly good this season (probably the best season in a very long time) since they're finally having Clark start to assume the mantel of Superman (at least kind of).

Enough rambling, this is writing I could be doing for NaNoWriMo!!!