I'm petrified of nipple chafing. Once it starts, it's a vicious circle.

Erin and I have spent the morning cleaning our pad and running to the grocery store. It fails to amaze me the randomization that occurs when stocking Jamaican grocery stores. It is utterly unfeasible to plan to make any recipe because without fail the grocery will not have one or more ingredients. I should be used to this by now… my life is one America’s Next Top Chef task after another, at least when it comes to my culinary endeavors. I believe that meal planning in Jamaica would be daunting for even a highly trained chef. It is not that we are trying to make exotic, Emeril BAM! recipes like a turducken stuffed Amazon river bass in a Sri Lankan cinnamon white wine reduction garnished with rare Peruvian orchids. We sometimes go weeks without mainstay components like milk, sugar, garlic, eggs, etc. This not to mention the price of most produce has risen three fold since our arrival on island (with no raise in our living allowances). Needless to say recipe development is sketchy at best and sometimes we must get creative. What is the maxim I’m looking for…? Oh… Necessity is the mother of invention. I get that, but it doesn’t reduce my desire to hit up a Whole Foods upon my visit to the states in March. Along that line and at the request of my mother, here is a rough list of the things E and I wish to do while we are home. We realize that we have a lot on our list and if everything doesn’t happen we won’t be in the least bit hurt.

Where/what we would like to eat
-Granite City
-Steak ‘n’ Shake
-Margaritas (Bob-dre is in, any other Taco Tuesday takers?)
-La Bodega (I think Sam and Matt call this one)
-Stroud’s
- Ixtapa
-Sheridan’s mmmmm
-chocolate bag
-ice cream ice cream ice cream
-nice fruit
-ribs and German tater salad (G-ma Mean and Uncle Squirrel make the best ☺)
-flourless chocolate torte (P is going to make these last things, he just needs people to enjoy them)
-chili
-stuffed mushrooms

Also we need to stock up on some things like socks and olive oil. So if anyone is down with a Target/Costco trip we’ll be making a couple of those as well.

We’d love a trip to the bookstore, and some good coffee.

We’re going to need to enjoy lots of good beer, preferably while watching basketball. I dunno if anyone is down with helping us do that…

With everything, the more the merrier. If you are super excited about any of the above let us know via phone, email, or blog comment. We are also open to any additional ideas.

Good Night and Good Luck!
Patrick with input from Erin

p.s. Why does Snoop Dogg always carry an umbrella? Fo’ Drizzle
p.p.s. Great news! No longer do I feel the need to beg for blog comments. Leave one, don’t leave one, I could not care less. I (we) still enjoy your input but the new feedjit widget lets me know our blog at least gets some traffic… big brother style. The fact that a couple people are reading is all I wanted to know anyway. Plus I like the flags.

Who are the twins? Um, to be delicate, they hang off milady's chest. They make milk.

Happy Mardi Gras! A nice quasi-religious holiday of over-indulgence (king cake, booze, boobs, beads, boobs, boobs, New Orleans) that, this year, coincides with ‘Super Tuesday.’ The Super Tuesday political storm has steamrolled over every media outlet and in my opinion has led to a severe over-saturation of the candidates, the ‘issues’ and even the political process itself. I credit the argument that as Americans we should want as much information about the candidates as possible in order to make the most informed decision come ballot day. However this line of reasoning comes with certain ingrained fallacies… that the general public will absorb and use the abundance of information and that the information provided on the most accessible outlets are accurate and unbiased.

The journalistic media is shaded to the wills of media corporations and tycoons, Rupert Murdoch, et. al., and largely by the reporters themselves in whatever shtick they operate. The saving grace is that there is enough exposure leaning one way to counterbalance exposure to the other. There is no getting around biased opinions of the journalist, and I am not sure the general public is savvy/motivated/intelligent enough to sort through to the facts regarding the candidates. It blows my mind that American politics has fallen to those with enough money to pay for the best advertising. Do we really want the same marketing process that sways which fast food we raise our cholesterol with to help sway our vote of the next commander-in-chief? I have reconsidered the electoral process in recent days after watching CNN, FOXNews, MSNBC, and others interview street people to get their opinions of national political happenings. I assume news stations interview at least a couple people and choose the best ones to air (Jen, you can correct me if I am wrong). This scares me because so far I have seen 5 super ignorant people vomit misinformation for every one halfway competent response. I realize the inequity associated with the electoral college, but it comforts me a bit knowing uninformed clowns don’t have a direct say, technically speaking, in the outcome of an election. Not that leaving it up to our currently elected officials is any better. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Anyway I just felt like voicing my extreme displeasure with the stupidity of recent interviewees and my wish to karate chop their minds. Also this continues my streak of discussing things a well-mannered individual never discusses in a public forum. Last week religion, now politics, maybe next week’s fodder should be economics.
Today was my first day teaching Spanish. Surprisingly I think my time spent teaching ‘head, shoulders, knees, and toes’, “my name is…,” and the color ‘red’ all in Spanish was highly successful. My victory is probably a direct cause of my relating to the kids--which correlates as a reflection of a possible infantile regression and a similar sense of humor. Anyway I was fairly discouraged when I left the classes to go help Erin in the library. I felt like I had little control of the class and despite enthusiastic participation by the kids, they learned nothing. But during our homework sessions a few hours later, one of my little pupils came in and pointed to her head and said “bay-sa,” as in the Spanish word ‘cabeza’ (head). That’s pretty close right?! Anyway that made me feel pretty good and like my day was worthwhile. Celebrate the little things, I guess.

Have a good night all you party people.

---Patricio sana in corpore sano---

p.s. Holy balls what an unbelieveably awesome Super Bowl.
p.p.s. I am glad all of you got such a kick out of the photos of me in earlier times. I am just glad I have proof that my dashingly handsome mug is really my face and not some Dr. 90210 patchwork. That’s right… you can’t make a nose like this.

And the best way to start is to hit... Start. And up comes the toolbar. That's what she said.

As most of you probably know, I suffer from lepidophobia. I know. At times it is nearly debilitating. Like when a bird-sized moth flew into our friend’s house. I tried to hide from it while the boys (who were also freaked out, I might add, with good reason, the thing was a real-life Mothra, its nasty body was the size of a fist) attempted to usher it back into the Jamaican wilderness. Someone finally had the presence of mind to turn off the light, and Mothra went in search of brighter bulbs. I did not sleep all night, thinking that every bug, lizard, and frog bumping into the walls was Mothzilla, returning to exact its revenge on us for swatting at it with hats and dirty t-shirts. This happened months ago and I am still a bit shaken. Anyway, I’ve always been a bit ashamed of my inability to deal with the appearance of grotesque flying worms. Today I was vindicated by SpongeBob. He and Patrick (the starfish, not the lovable human) were terrified when a butterfly got loose in Bikini Bottom. The whole town was thrown into a panic until the Texas squirrel thing came and captured the monster in a jar. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed watching cartoon characters in an uproar over a “harmless” creature. SpongeBob and I both know that the scaly winged terrors are far from innocuous. If you disagree, then you should google “fear of butterflies.” There you will find long lists of losers who have formed help pages and internet support groups for those of us who keep constant vigilance for moths and butterflies. I must say that this didn’t make me feel as good as the cartoon did. I know I am irrationally afraid of creatures that most people find “pretty,” but I see this as quirky rather than weird. Especially since I embrace slimy scary animals. This makes me more interesting than pathetic like the people I googled, right? I may also be a bit scared of cats, but everyone knows they are spawn of Satan. So they don’t count. Man, Bret Michaels likes the hussies. He definitely sent the prettiest girls home first, and kept the scrappy, wily, streetwalkers. Maybe that is why he is so unlucky in love. I guess you guys are probably more interested in what is going on here in Jamaica rather than in Bret’s love mansion. We were able to watch the Super Bowl. Power only went out twice and then only briefly. However, we did not get most of the commercials. Instead, we got the same three terrible Coors (yuck) Light commercials…in Spanish. They looked lame, but maybe they were hilarious, how would I know? Pretty excited about the Giants winning. Both P and I called it. It was a wonderful end to a lovely day. We may not have had cake, Ma, but I did make Patricio a whole batch of cookies for his very own. Now, 12 hours and half a tub of cream cheese mixed with most of a can of chili later, he is incapacitated on the couch. We did make an excellent dinner including surprisingly delicious Swedish meatballs and mashed potatoes. Funny story, P was in the back seat of a taxi when two other Jamaicans got in and forced him into the middle seat. The driver looked over his shoulder and began laughing hysterically, managing to stammer gleefully, “oreo cookie!” Heehee. I will conclude this decidedly hodge-podge email with yet another abrupt change of subject. So I don’t know if you all have looked at P big sis’s blog, but you should, the kiddos are pretty darn adorable. Apparently, Caroline’s baby brother is a bit of a chunk. Perhaps, but as chunky as his uncle?! You be the judge. (This is Patrick at 3 months, by the way.)


Although let's hope little James Patrick doesn't share Uncle Patrick's awkward stage. What was he wearing?

I'd like to sincerely thank my source for these priceless photos!

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.