It’s t minus 30 days till Brendan and I return to sweet home USA. To force myself to endure retrospection and appreciation I will post an anecdote per day and secretly hope my doing so will be rewarded with the feeling that time is passing quicker.

So, smell that? It might be your luck changing! If, you subscribe to Taiwanese culture, which views a squishy step in fresh dog poop to be a prod to buy a lottery ticket and smile all day.

I found out about this view after I crabbily joined Brendan on a walk before breakfast and stepped in a huge pile of the warm stuff. I shared the story later to my students as part of my diatribe on how everything had gone wrong that week. (Same week my facebook was spammed with thousands of Sim City comments on my photos.)

They told me to buy a lottery ticket as soon as possible. I didn’t. But it did make me feel less gross and more accepting of the splats and tubes of terds that speckle the streets and sidewalks here.