Question. What kind of bear is best?... False. Black Bear

Despite my track record of delicious culinary concoctions, I totally biffed on the funnel cakes that Erin and I attempted tonight. The deck was significantly stacked against us; our pans have horrible hot spots, the stovetop heats unevenly (not to mention it shocks the crap out of you if your feet aren’t insulated), not enough oil to fry in, and the mysterious ‘extra Jamaican liquid.’ What is this mysterious extra liquid? Well it seems that every recipe I make seems to contain too much liquid, even recipes I have been making for years. For example even when following pancake batter recipes to perfection they always require almost ¾ of a cup additional flour to attain the correct consistency. You may be saying that I may not be paying attention to my measurements or have lost my edge. But I say nay. Some inexplicable phenomenon is hell bent on foiling my food production. The most logical explanation, taking into account my recent Jamaican assimilation, is that a family of recipe spoiling ‘duppies’ (aka ghosts) are conspiring against me. Other possibilities to this ugly problem are; our proximity to the Bermuda Triangle, an unexplained weather anomaly, or Erin is a double agent (the prospect of a subversive, rabid KU-fan alliance partner unnerves me a bit). If I ever catch any of those damn duppies in my kitchen, they will lament they day they only half died.

***Warning: Actual Job Updates***
I am sure many of you have read Erin’s adventure at the kindergarten, despite your lack of blog comments. Anyhow we reached a compromise with our supervisor and starting this week, in addition to our after school activities, I will be teaching Spanish to 4-5 year olds. While I do this Erin will attempt to do some reading activities with some of the struggling kids. I am envisioning teaching simple concepts like colors, days of the week, and months of the year. Hopefully I may even get to simple sentences, “hello, how are you,” type of thing. I envision this being supertastically difficult as most of the kids don’t know colors, days of the week, and months of the year in English. Keep your fingers crossed.

Speaking of not writing blog comments… I have come to the conclusion that those of you who do not leave comments are bored with our blog. Thus I have decided to incite furious rages and write the first of my incendiary blog passages... The following passage from the bible has been brought to my attention numerous times, most recently this weekend, and I feel compelled to share it with you. The passage is from 2 Kings 2:23-24 (I used the New International Version). It goes as follows:

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. "Go on up, you baldhead!" they said. "Go on up, you baldhead!" 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

Really? Bears? WWJD? Would the big guy in the sky really endorse this? Please discuss.

---Patricio Sans Frontieres---

p.s. Man has never been to the moon… the video was a Hollywood fakery.
p.p.s. The Great Pyramids of Giza were built by aliens, aka the Greys, aka extraterrestrials, aka the Vulcans, aka 13 of our ex-presidents (Nixon, Garfield, Tyler, et. al. were most definitely not from Earth)

How would I describe myself? Three words: hard working, alpha male, jack hammer. Merciless. Insatiable.

Wow. I realize that Erin and I are not necessarily competing with my sister’s blog, but good grief has everybody checked out the new pictures she posted. My niece and nephew namesake are pretty flippin’ adorable. I suppose I may be somewhat biased as they are my blood relatives, but there is still no way that blogging about the ups and downs of Peace Corps service can compare. I feel like a b-list actor whose movie is opening up the same weekend as Spiderman 4 and Ocean’s 15. Anyway for those of you who haven’t checked out my sister’s blog it’s sweetcaroline05.blogspot.com. On to more somber things… I suppose if the US economy is going into recession I probably won’t notice it much living in Jamaica on 17 cents a day. Though there is reason to hope, we might be getting a 4 cent/day raise!!! Erin and I plan to take our newly found wealth and throw that $14ish/year into a smart assortment of stocks, bonds, and other tradable commodities. I hear gold does well when the dollar is weak. Also, no post-WWII recession has lasted longer than 15 months and it seems that oil prices fall significantly for years following a US recession. Not that we should lose focus on implementing viable petroleum alternatives. I am a bit worried that we might return to a dipping economy based on some of the plans I have heard coming from some of the frontrunner presidential candidates. It seems silly to me to essentially have two schools of thought and to have them align with the US political parties. To see a prime example of how rigidly sticking to one school of thought or the other is a foolish venture, one can look at the epic battle between gradualism vs. catastrophism. Evolutionary biologists (along with geologist, palentologists, and other specialties) have long swayed one way or the other with gradualism gaining the upper hand (until fairly recently). Sure it seems life (sediments, fossil record, etc.) will change slowly over time that is, until someone discovers that a comet/asteroid smacked the crap out of the Earth leaving a 120-mile wide crater and catastrophically altering the planet and all life on it. It seems with most things, the truth seems to lie somewhere in the middle. Life will continue to evolve slowly over a vast period of time at least until the Earth gets another cosmic bitch slap. So to the partisan politicians and their all or nothing economic plans, I say to you ‘Booooo!’ I have followed US politics more in recent months and feel well versed in the various nuances more so than any other time in my life yet I feel seriously detached. A double sword that is, the feeling of detachment, on one hand I feel as if I have taken a step back and have gained another perspective. But on the other hand detachment is not a word I feel I want to associate with any of my beliefs, political or otherwise. Combining these feelings with working with the Peace Corps (a hugely superfluously bureaucratic federal government agency… despite its hippie connotations) tempts me to upon my return to the states to live off the grid and send donations to assorted pro-anarchist organizations. I assume living off the grid essentially means to live the life of a dumpster cat. Speaking of dumpster cats… we have inherited one and we do our best to feed it our leftovers. We loving named her Oscar the Dumpster Kyaat. I suppose one could argue that the life of a dumpster cat has great variability. Oscar gets mere table scraps and roams the wild while Shebadda the Dumpster Kyaat lives indoors with us and gets premium mercury free tuna. Not to mention a great wardrobe. I may rethink this living off the grid thing. Off the grid or on it, at least I know I can still lift weights miles from any gym with the weight lifting sacks lovingly sewed and bestowed upon me by Grandma Mescher. Many thanks Grandma! Well thanks again for tuning in to the latest edition; I am going to play with my sack(s).

Eins..zwei…drei…
Patricio


This is Oscar the Dumpster Kyaat with a friend. Oscar is the cat on the right.

This is Shebadda the Dumpster Kyaat sporting a dashing Easter outfit.

Playing with my sack(s).

I am not great with kids, but I want to get better.So I put out a bunch of extra candy on my desk so the kids will come talk to me.

I taught kindergarten today. It went about how you would expect me teaching kindergarten to go. Only worse because I am in Jamaica, where all the pikni dem think it is fun to hug the white lady and laugh when she starts yelling in her funny white lady accent. I am in no way intimidating to 5-yr-old Jamaicans. Also I went into the classroom thinking (okay really just hoping) that I would be assisting another teacher and not be left alone with no lesson plans and 15 expectant children. Really I would have been excited to have anyone else in the room with me. Although any time another adult entered, it was to restore order to my extremely unruly charges, and that was quite embarrassing. But I was alone, with no instruction and no experience teaching--all day--a class of the wee ones. We colored a lot. It wasn't my idea, they just got into the coloring books and it seemed easiest to go with it. Unfortunately, they are 5, and have no attention span so coloring dissolved into fighting over crayons and ripping up the coloring books. We tried learning about the number 4, but some of the children held up 6 fingers when I asked them to show me four, and I couldn't let it go, so they all started acting out once I made them stand there with their fingers held up for 5 minutes. Simon Says worked for about 10 min, but they didn't understand the whole concept, we played a revised version. I tried reading to them, and that seemed to go the best. Except one or two children would interrupt me and I would react instead of ignoring them. I think my biggest problem, aside from lack of preparation, was that I wanted them all to behave perfectly. But there is always one. Always one. Mostly I spent hours running in small hopeless circles trying to get them to put their shoes back on, sit in their chairs, put away the objects they were thiefing from the teacher's desk and cabinets, quit hitting the girls, stop screeching. Towards the end, they were making huge dog piles on the ground. I attempted to pull these apart, but it was difficult as they were extremely wiggly. It was a colossal mess, folks. On the upside, I did not get hit by any rocks, but I did suffer from a few blows with a stick. I find this especially irritating as I lie to keep the children from getting spanked, the least they could do is not hit me. I mean, come on. I reported my failure to my boss and everyone in the office seemed amused. I don't know why because the children got zero education today. Zero. Some of them think 6 is 4, that is a terrible sign. To top it off, on the way down the hill (a journey I make twice daily) some guys decided to call out to me. This happens regularly, and I am more tolerant at some times than others. Today was not a tolerant day. I choose to ignore their ridiculous hissing (who responds to that, seriously?) and so they resorted to yelling, 'whitey', 'sweetie,' 'sweetheart' and other such nonsense. I paid them no mind at all--it was easy enough as I was brooding about my laughable teaching skills--but my stoic response seemed to irritate them. Then they called me a 'bad ass mother _____.' I'm not sure what to make of this. I know they were making fun of me, but I prefer to be compared to Samuel L. Jackson rather than called 'sweetie' by a gang of creepers. I gotta say though, my day ended on a high note with well behaved homework completers and I stayed busy so it wasn't too bad for a Thursday.

Well it is a little chillier than I had thought. So I have fashioned my hat back into my pants.

So sometimes we have cable. This means that I occasionally spend my evenings rotting my brain watching the terrible, soul-destroying crap that is on television these days. At the moment, the new American Gladiator is gracing the screen. It features warriors like Venom, Adonis, and Jeff. Jeff? No one named Jeff is going to beat someone named Adonis. I think my least favorite shows are ones that involve trashy people fighting strangers for the love of a famous stranger. On Rock of Love, they invited the girl’s parents to meet Bret Michaels. If I ever hit rock bottom or have a lobotomy and decide that that is the course on which I wish to take my life, please, do not endorse my decision by appearing on the show with me. Geez.. You know what show I do enjoy? The Playboy show. Those girls are funny. Holly is my least favorite. Aside from the fact that they have to share an 80-yr-old boyfriend, they get to do some amazing things. Tonight they were detained by police trying to visit the Prince of Monaco. So I suppose I should qualify that this is a perfectly tame show on E! and it’s real name is The Girls Next Door. It’s not indecent. School has started again. The children were a bit sore that we weren’t up daily during their winter break. I didn’t bring our bag of “incentives” (okay, bribes) one day and they were pretty pissed about that too. They’ve forgiven us though and we had a bevy of little homework completers every day. We have been keeping ourselves busy with PC paperwork. Every few months we have to fill out these long forms. They want numbers, but the numbers are totally arbitrary because everyone is doing something different. Volunteers the world over have to fill out these forms and it all gets condensed into a 2 paragraph report typed up by a Senatorial aide. We’ve adopted a dumpster cat. It is gray striped with a white belly. It likes to curl up on our porch chairs. We feed it on the steps, it is not allowed in the house. I don’t think it would let us get close to it anyway. If we have neglected to feed it, it will come and look forlornly into our house from the back door. We keep changing its name. The name I feel most appropriate is Fillippe, but Patricio vetoed it on the grounds that I already named the bird that used to live under my truck Philipo. I’ll try to get a picture of him. I just keep losing the camera. We should be home in March for a couple of weeks. Woohoo. We’re ecstatic, you should be too. As regards our return to the states, Patrick would like to request that whoever meets us at the airport bring along 1 cold Budweiser and 1 cold Sam Adams. I would like to request Maggie.