The study strike is over!!

Yeah, I finally began to study today for the first time in days.  I was really unmotivated for a number of reasons.  But mostly because I'm a lazy miserable homesick brat.  It's the fourth of July tomorrow, and all my family is telling me there fun plans, and I'm so jealous.  I wish I could go to the barbeque with everyone, but I can't this year.  I'll say, I never really appreciated family gathering so much in the past, but I guess I'm starting to get a little sentimental as I approach my 30's.  Anyways, I've kept busy during my strike.

I baked a cherry pie:

I made my first Зелник со сирење (Pastry with cheese):

I discovered the mysterious hssss that made my husband think the a/c was broken.  After some investigating, it turns out that one of my canned cherry jars didn't make it and started to leak and release gas.  That was the hsss'ing sound.  Well, dummy that I am, decided to help release the gas, so that I could throw away the bad cherries and the jar exploded all over my kitchen.  I had cherries at least 4 feet from the crime scene.  In an attempt to hide the evidence of my housewife failure, I decided to clean the entire apartment from top to bottom.

Which was rather convenient, because afterwards, my husband called and told me that we would be entertaining guests that evening.  Which I did so, very successfully.  I say that, because I've had some rather terrible experiences in the past with entertaining Macedonians.  Like for example, not standing up and greeting the guests at the door, not walking the guests to the door or car at the end of the night, not making sure their drinks were full, not making enough food, or not having some sweet to serve with coffee, etc... And I heard about it from the husband or his mother.  I kind of developed a phobia when guests come over because of the damn formalities.  But this time, I decided that I wasn't going to pretend I was some native Macedonian housewife. Rather, an American who choose to live in Macedonia, that keeps a average clean house, is not working at the moment, is somewhat polite, and will make and serve food if she feels like it.  And it just so happened that I was in the mood for making food, and so I did.  My house was clean enough (actually cleaner than usual, due to the event that occurred earlier that day), I kept the drinks full as best as I could, and the our very small living room table didn't have an ounce of room for more food.  My husband was so pleased at the end of the night, and so was I.  But mostly, for not freaking out because I'm not perfect.  I mean, who set the damn standards in this country for hospitality anyways???  I think even Emily Post herself would struggle here.