Toby has been cruisin' for a bruisin' for twelve years. And I am now his cruise director. And my name is Captain Bruisin'.

If Erin and I did not use quotes from ‘The Office’ to title each blog, I would have entitled this blog:
I, Lead Paint and Technicolor Boogers, I

For those you with a keen eye and quick wit, you probably noticed that this title is in fact a palindrome. And despite Matt’s insistence that palindromes are kryptonite to gypsies, they, in fact are completely harmless when they are also onomatopoeias. And since all palindromes, like my title, are also onomatopoeias (I can provide citation for this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalindromesareinfactOnomatopoeias), I am completely safe. Assuming Matt is not reading this blog… the only real literary danger to a gypsy is the dreaded Semordnilap. Damn you !Stressed Desserts! OUCH! Oi!

Anyway… Erin and I left to go up to the orphanage today around 8 o’clock. We got about 100 yards from our house before “Pssssst. Psssssssssssssssssst! PSSSSSSSSSSSSSST!” Ah, the sounds of a Jamaican flirting with Erin. My first instinct in this situation is to get mildly offended that 1) this dude would blatantly come on to Erin as I walk next to her and 2) that Erin would choose dirty, toothless bum-guy over yours truly (the “psssssst” is very common amongst cat-calling Jamaican males and I am not implying that all those who pssssst are dirty, toothless bums). However my second instinct is to walk over to the guy and explain to him how incredibly idiotic he sounds making that noise. I am pretty sure that making the deflating tire sound at a passing woman, American or otherwise, has never gotten anybody laid. Also calling Caucasian females “Whitey” (pronounced Whyyyy-teeee) hasn’t either. (I can provide citation for this too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/actinglikeObtuseRacistAssholedoesn’tgetyoudates) This has to be frustrating for our special likkle fem-Nazi and I don’t blame her.

The rest of the day was spent at our village laboring for Labor Day, which I am assuming is really is a day off of school to repaint and landscape said school. I immediately claimed painting the monkey bars and “swing song” for the two of us. I dunno why they call swing sets “swing songs” but I like it. I chose this chore because clearing bush (our other option) sounded like the set-up to a dirty joke. Also it sounded hard. Mainly, I never get to paint. My family thinks I am a terrible painter and so instead of teaching me to paint to their standards, they just never allow me around a brush. Not that I can blame them, my lack of patience comes from somewhere. This is Erin now, P.S. I was pretty pleased with myself until I realized we’d have about 20 “helpers,” and our work included scraping old paint off what had to be 2 miles of metal pipe twisted into some sort of playground rubix cube with small putty knives. The scraping alone may have been daunting, but really it was the band of eager 8-yr-olds clamoring for a chance with the putty knife that made this chore more challenging than I originally supposed. There were chips of paint (probably containing lead) flying and sticking to our arms and faces, getting snorted up our noses (thus Patrick’s rainbow snot) and meandering down our windpipes. We decided to only let the children that helped scrape wield paintbrushes. Even with all the commotion, it was easy to tell who had scraped as they looked like they had some sort of rare disease that produces multi-colored sores all over the hands and face. Most of the children only wanted to paint until they actually got a chance, and then realized it was work and lost interest, luckily. However, we never had a shortage of workers. Sometimes I get the eerie feeling that there are no adults in the village. You’ll see scores of children running about maniacally, but no one over the age of 12. It’s spooky. Today was kind of like that. I did see plenty of people over 5 ft, but they all seemed glad to have escaped the assistance the children were so eagerly offering us. So Patrick and I trudged through the day, lone supervisors over a herd of children armed with paintbrushes. Now that I think about it, it went pretty well. Despite the bottle of spilled kerosene oil and the ice fight at the end, there was only the usual whining and bickering. It did take us about 7 hrs to do something that should have taken 3 (and we still have to put the second coat on!) but no one tried to paint anyone else. Oh, they were covered in paint anyway, as they tried to reach through freshly coated monkey bars and sit on paint cans, but it was the result of an honest desire to work and not the remnants of a paint fight. I have some lovely pictures and video to commemorate our toils, but our camera broke! I’m pretty sure it got infected with some sort of high-tech virus (for more info see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/brokenGypsyCameraforSale).

This has been Erin and Patrick with your Channel 1 News investigation.