Ugly Americans

It's a little more than three weeks until we arrive at our new home in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. The time is going by faster than I expected, but most of things that need to be completed for pack out have been completed. Some things still have to wait- I can't get the health certificates for Nara or Elizabeth from Aphis until 10 days before our departure. Our car won't ship until later in the month. We'll be buying our consumables that ship to post this weekend, along with picking out what will be shipped from storage to post. And we will likely get our visas on arrival to our host country. Yesterday we sent out three boxes in advance to post, with items we will need on arrival. The post's HRO has kindly offered to receive our incoming boxes before our arrival and arrange for them to be placed in our new home, which is very kind of him. Our initial pile o' stuff to be sent did not completely fill the boxes. Seeing the opportunity to jam all three boxes to the gill...

For a very long time now I have wanted to purchase my own stand mixer. And for all of that time I had my heart set on a KitchenAid planetary stand mixer, like Mom had. Because it never broke down, and basically did everything you needed it to (save for food processing). Let's face it, it's the Cadillac of the kitchen with that classic 1950's style. But stand mixers are not cheap, and they are more of a luxury if you don't plan on using them a lot, so I put off purchasing one for a very long time. Now that we are heading to Turkmenistan, and I plan on baking and cooking all the time, it's worth getting one- especially if I am going to be making loaves of bread on a regular basis. So I stared looking online, because I wanted to get the best price I could find for the larger capacity KitchenAid mixer and the attachments, because hey, why would I need to consider any other brand when I could get a KitchenAid and it would last a lifetime- right? Right? Apparently, somewh...