When you know you're doing a great job

I've been teaching remedial English for three months now. It's been a challenge but I feel like I'm doing a good job. And then I get this for a one paragraph essay on health...

"What are some ways that people stay in shape?

The people can write the shape of your face and color of the shape. Shape is what you like or what is the beautiful in your eyes. The color in your eyes is beautiful. Shape for something beautiful. The Shape of the house. The shape of the earth and the globle warming. The something you buy the shape you looked first. Then you liked it. The shape look like a square or a blue sky."

Actually, now that I've read this paragraph a few times, I am starting to see some sort of logic in it. It's like a secret code. This student is trying to tell me something, and I'm too stupid to figure it out. The shape of the house. The color of the shape. The shape of a blue sky. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

When it rains...and other cliches.

So I guess that Trieste and I are on the same wavelength about the blog situation and how it's been a long time. My only contention with what Trieste posted was the caption next to Kolonia. Kolonia is that small and beautiful and if you come and visit us we will take you to our lagoon side villa where we have a Dolphin for a butler and Sea turtles will sing you to sleep.

Actually we as in I have taken to calling Pohnpei Temptation Island but not for the reasons you may think and not for reasons that I'm going to go into right now. Mysterious enough for you?

ON TO THE NEWS:
News item number one: We think the trade winds have started up but we've thought that every few weeks because it'll cool off to 80 degrees and seem like it'll snow any second and the next day it'll be one hundred with humidity.

News item number two: A few nights ago we went to see our host family for the first time in a long time and we got to watch a disney channel show which took me an hour to figure out. Here's what I learned... teenagers are awkward and gross and Miley Cyrus is Hannah Montana but with a wig or something. Floyd "Oh my god I forgot" Doses who is our host brother quoted both episodes of this strange show from beginning to end. Every time I looked away he hit me and told me to watch. That guy is a riot.

News item number three:
Stop what your doing, stop reading this and wasting time on the computer. Get in your hot little hot rod and drive to the nearest dairy. Ask to speak with the owner of the dairy and make sure it's a mom and pop operation and not some weird multinational conglomerate of dairy cattle owners who live in France or some bullshit. So ask to speak with the dairy farmer and when he comes up, kiss him or her right on the mouth and say "thank you for making cheese and milk and sour cream and butter that isn't expired." Because when it all goes to shit and we don't have fresh heavy whipping cream year round, you will wish that you had. That being said our saintly friend Mike brought us Tillamook Sharp Cheddar cheese and sour cream from Guam! I don't know how that happened...and frankly I don't care. Was it sustainable?...hell no... but I ate a cheese sandwich and put sour cream on my lentils so I'm all good.

Well...that's it.
jp

Some photos of things we did a long time ago

A while ago we mentioned that Lenard, our favorite baby, turned one. And we loved his party. We had "Phillipino style pig," which means we ate a whole pig, and all the youngest kids (and Jonathan and Trieste) got a big kick out of the creepy face, which was thus:

Don't feel bad if you look at that and don't immediately think "food," or if you think other things also. It's not that you're not cosmopolitan or culturally sensitive enough. We all loved the pig head. AJ got entertained by his mom for awhile by getting whirled in near the pig face and then pulled, screaming and laughing, back away from it. That might have been my favorite part. Anyway, shrieky pigs' heads can be entertainment AND food, is what I'm saying, as long as you're not trying to be cool and culturally sensitive. Obviously, Jonathan and I took photos of the food and shrieked along with AJ, so we were being neither.


I keep trying to upload a close-up, but the Internet and/or Photoshop won't let me. So you'll have to Photoshop it yourself. We should have a contest! Who can do the most creative/creepy thing with a close-up photo of a pig's head? The winner gets 10% of my daily salary and blog glory. And maybe a special spot in heaven for entertaining me while I'm this bored.

Here is Lenard playing with the toy we got him for his first birthday. It's tradition, we found out, to give kids clothes on their first birthdays, so we committed a mild faux pas by bringing him a Strawberry Shortcake jingly ball. But the ball was fun.

Oops! No photo of Lenard for you! It won't upload.

A while ago, Jonathan and I also took a boat trip along the length of the island. Here is Kolonia from the lagoon:






Kolonia is bigger and dirtier than it looks from the lagoon, but not much bigger.

Here is what we look like at the end of a day on a boat:

I am not trying to do anything, by wearing a towel on my head, other than keep the damn sun off my exposed skin. The sun is just so much background info until you come to the equator.

I will try to upload one more photo. This is Sokehs Rock, the "Diamond Head of Pohnpei." Pohnpei draws lots of comparisons to Hawaii, which is awesome. Anyhow, Sokehs Rock is really pretty and you can see if from EVERYwhere, and everyone loves it, just like Diamond Head:

I don't think the photo will upload...Maybe from school, maybe next time.

This past weekend Jonathan and I went with a few friends to a fresh water waterfall...It was a double waterfall, with a 20-foot waterfall falling into an almost perfectly round pool that was ideal for swimming in (and jumping 20 feet into), and then from there it fell another 35 or 40 feet to another pool that was ALSO great for swimming. The best thing about these waterfalls is that they are within walking distance of our house. I'd show you pictures but 1) our friend lost his waterproof camera in the lower waterfall, and 2) they wouldn't upload anyway. But it was a good day. We invented a new game, called "Throw a Rock at a Rock and Try to Make it Hit Another Rock." We played it for a long time. We also played, "See What Trash You Can Find at the Bottom of the Pool." We found a car battery and a lawn mower motor; that was also fun. Too bad we couldn't find the camera.

The last few days since the waterfalls have been a struggle between life and death...When we first moved here, our Field Director told us that there was "a lot of life." This means, really, there's also a lot of death. Two days ago a dead cockroach fell out of my coffee pot first thing in the morning. Yesterday a gecko caught a cockroach and left its parts all over the living room. This morning a swarm of ants managed to kill a roach and they're still dismantling it in the hallway (far be it from me to interfere!), and this afternoon Jonathan accidentally shut another gecko in the back door. It crawled to the window, stuck itself to the sill, and then it died, still sticking to the window. Awesome. Also! The constant flood in our kitchen and hallway (did I tell you about that? Our hallway and kitchen are constantly flooded--I mean, they splash. It's because our fridge sucks, but our landlord insists it's because I don't stay home and clean enough) has proven to be an ideal place for mosquitos to lay eggs. We are now tormented, all night, every night. Tormented. I've bleached the floors twice in two days, and it's helped moderately. Any advice?

That's it! I've been trying to upload this blog for three days. That's why it's so long.

Love,Trieste