My wife's a genius...

...and so she figured out how to enable me, Jeff, to post without using purple text. Thus--perhaps for her benefit only--here I am, Ms. Muppettt!

Well, we were looking at memorabilia from our missions in Costa Rica today (that, and several pictures from Flickr that people had taken in Costa Rica--funny how the Americans always take pictures of beaches and bars [usually while hammered] and how Costa Ricans take pictures of churches; what's that say about our youth's culture [or the ostentatious lack thereof]?). We really, really want to go on a mission together. We'd even go into the jungle, a la the missions we served when we were young and our immune systems throbbed with the strength of diesel generators. My machete stands at the ready; I want to go (maybe to Nicaragua this time; maybe Guatemala; maybe Moscow, since we're eager to learn another language).

On that subject, I almost got to learn Portuguese this past term in school. I can read a lot of Portuguese as it is, and I can understand about half of it when it's spoken. Thus, I'm hoping that I should take to it. (I know that, at least a few years ago, the odds of going to Brazil on a mission were about 20%, along with the Philippines at 20%.) Plus, that Portuguese sausage is really, really good--although they serve that in Hawai'i as well, so my chances for eating that are higher than the percentage you'd associate with...never mind.

Of course, the mission will have to wait until the children are out of the house, so I imagine that we'll be leaving for someplace foreign the week after our last child enters college. (They can spend Christmas with a sibling or a roommate or something. Heck, the kids could, conceivably, spend holidays with us in the mission field, but that might distract us from the work.)

Since senior missionaries have a bit say in where they're sent, I think that my current list of mission destinations would run as follows (in no order of preference):
1. India
The land of my forebears! Did you know that I'm part Asian? Yep! I'm part Indian and part Sumatran!
2. Portugal
We could learn another language, and I've heard the country is lovely.
3. Nicaragua
We served with many Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, and they're wonderful people.
4. China
Good food. (Yes, that's a joke.)
5. The Middle East
Not a country, no. But I'd really like to go to Iraq, believe it or not. You know, back in the golden era of Baghdad, the caliph spread the maxim, "The ink of scholars is more precious than the blood of martyrs." Nifty, eh?

And so on. Frankly, I'm pretty easy when it comes to mission calls--it's hard to argue with their source.