whew.

15 December 2009

What a week and it has been. And it is only Tuesday. Sigh. Actually I will post this tomorrow, when I go to the city, which I guess makes it Wednesday. I am doing a mid-week city trip for a few different reasons. One, Katie told me that I have a package! I’m super excited. I don’t know which package it’ll be because I am expecting several, but this will be one of those rare occasions when I won’t mind a surprise. Two, I have to buy more yarn. I’m crocheting a blanket. I finally just finished making 35 10X10 inch squares. My host sisters and host mom helped me to arrange them tonight into a design. We spread them all out on the living room floor. I need more yarn to put all the pieces together. It’ll be my first big project, and I’ll get to cross “crochet or knit a blanket” off of THE LIST. Three, I’ll get to post this blog, and hopefully read some emails.

I guess I should explain the “what a week” comment. Let’s see. Sunday, I washed laundry. You remember how I said a while ago that I would never let laundry go more than three weeks? I lied. Again. Big time. I washed clothes before I went to Bishkek for training. As a recap- that was the second week of November. And I haven’t washed clothes since then. Sigh. I tried, believe me, I did! But between the snow and my house being under construction it just hasn’t worked out. And, in addition to having six weeks of accumulated laundry, the washing machine didn’t work. So I had to wash and rinse all of it by hand. It took FOREVER. And for those of you who have never done laundry outside in freezing temperatures- it is about as much fun as it sounds. And, I don’t think my clothes hanging on the line will ever dry. My shirts literally have icicles hanging off them. I brought in a pair of jeans to hang inside and could hold them by the belt loops and have them stand out completely parallel to the ground. I took pictures because it cracked me up.
Yesterday I woke up and then got sick. I don’t know what was up. I luckily made it outside. Luckily, because cleaning sick up off the carpet is a pain in the butt here. I didn’t go to my only class, and slept for a really long time. I guess it was something I ate. Maybe the homemade cheese? I dunno, but it came and went in about four hours, they were just a miserable couple of hours.
Today was a rough day at school. I started at 8 and finished at 5:45. Even my counterpart said that today was a hard day. My good classes were being bad too. We did have a breakthrough though, with the homework issue. We had about an 85% homework completion rate before we missed about a month of school. But they are slipping back into their old habits. We combined the not-doing-homework-thing with the we-don’t-have-a-class-in-our-room-to-be-responsible-for-cleaning-it-thing into a new rule. We have a rotating schedule, and whoever doesn’t do their homework in the day’s scheduled class has to clean the room. It works out well.

In other new from the past week:
I ran out of peanut butter (sad face)
I did not get a banya (sadder face)
I finally figured out the perfect ratio of cocoa powder, powdered milk, and sugar to make a good hot chocolate mix. (happy face)
I watched The Boondock Saints every. single. day,. at least it is a good movie. (background- I usually end my day by watching a movie in bed until I fall asleep or the power goes out. I copy one movie at a time from my external to my desktop so I don’t have to keep my external plugged in, and I haven’t felt like walking all the way across my room to get my external to plug in to get a new movie this week.) I think I can just about quote the entire movie now. haha (“we’re kinda like seven eleven. We may not always be doing business, but we’re always open.”)

Well, I’m probably gonna go attempt to heat up some water so I can wash up before the electricity goes out.

Miss you
Love from Kyrgyzstan,
Jess