Wassup

Kill a minute or ten.

For a few summers of my teenage years, my dad, sister and I would go with some family friends to Lake Powell to camp, boat, relax, swim, eat, etc. Looking back on those trips, I recall the steep, sandy red canyon walls that made winding rivers just wide enough to let a boast pass through and create some astounding echoes, the way the sun bounced off the little waves of water and reflected itself back out onto my face, burning even the underside of my chin, the feeling of sandy grit in my hair, on my teeth, coating my skin and never fully washing out and the wobbly woozy feeling of jumping from the boat to the shore after a few hours at-lake. I like those memories a whole lot and I often wish I could revisit them, not just in thought, but actually travel through my mind and go there and feel the grit covering my skin and see the vibrant red canyon walls and shout, in unison, "Bless you!" to a far off stranger's sneeze that echoed over and over and over. But I also know, while I was there, I counted down the days until the trip was over. It was the first thing I did every morning, as the people around me started unzipping their sleeping bags and stumbling about and murmuring, with the hazy gray of early morning starting to turn yellow, I would count. We got here 4 days ago and we'll be here for 15 days all together. That means I only need to go through 11 more days of this. "This" being much more difficult in my mind than it actually was. I have never been able to figure out why I don't enjoy things as they are happening and only when it's over do I look back and think "that was really cool". As you can probably guess, it's something that I think about here and tell myself to be cautious of. Don't focus on the things that seem unpleasant because they're meaningless, focus on what's making this worth it. Years after Lake Powell, I can hardly recall the foul taste of warm lake-water koolaid, our only beverage (other than wine), or the never ending itch of mosquitoes and wind-burned skin or the seriously queasy effect of choppy water or the annoyance of a sand filled sleeping bag. They are memories that surface when I dig deep enough, but when I think 'Lake Powell', I think of those towering red walls and never ending echoes and sneaky sun rays.

Wassup. Whenever I want to say "what's up", I think to myself "wassup", which was a logo printed across a girl's shirt at Lake Powell. She wore the shirt every day and one afternoon, one of the guys pointed at the emblem and shouted "WAY SOUP!". We were eating soup for lunch and the saying stuck in my brain. It's funny how one little incident can give words a new meaning that no one else would understand.

What's up: the immediate future.
I'm on quasi-vacation now. Almost officially. We're doing the first step in the frog study tomorrow night (listening for the frog calls at our study ponds so we'll know which side of the pond to check for egg clumps) and because I'll still be here, I told them I could help out. But the frogs are only active at night right now, so we'll be stumbling around the reserve, which confuses the heck out of me during the day, in the dark. With headlamps and Wellingtons. With 45 ponds to check in a 4 kilometer radius, it's going to be a long night. Unfortunately, I'm going to miss the rest of the study because of the below activities. But I helped them set everything up and prepare, so I feel ok with taking off.

On Monday I'll leave for our mid-service conference in Sinaia, which means I'm half way done with life as a PCV. Although I was talking earlier about counting down the days, I've stopped counting the number of months I've been here. I think that's a good thing.

The conference ends on Thursday and on Friday I leave for Greece, returning the following Thursday. While there, we'll spend a day in Athens, 2 days on the island Naxos and 2 days on the island Santorini. Pictures will abound, I assure you. The day we get back, I have my mid-service physical and dental check up in Bucharest. Woo. Then it's back to work on the 20th.

What's up: the recent past.
Yesterday, Friday April 3rd, all applications for SPA (Small Project Assistance) grants were due. At 5pm. I turned ours in at 3pm. Phew. I haven't said too much about it because I honestly wasn't sure if we'd get it done. The way things work around here is to wait until the last minute and then take care of everything. Luckily, I had finished nearly all of the writing, it was just scrambling around to get price quotes, donations and support statements from the project's participants, which was up to my colleague. I sincerely am impressed at the amount he was able to do in one week, on top of his normal job. We'll hear back from the SPA committee on the 17th. It's the main thing I've been working on for the past month and last night I slept soundly, which hasn't happened in a very long time.

A couple of weeks ago, the English teacher who occasionally helps me with the drama club asked if the club could do something for a conference that was coming up. I said yeah, as long as the students showed up regularly enough to put something together and they seemed into it. So we set to work on a couple of fairy tales - Little Red Riding Hood for one group of four and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the other group. The way it worked was as one person told the story, the other three members acted out the words with pantomime. At some point, the narrator would go off into a strange tangent or start telling a different fairy tale, and one of the other three would kick them out, take their place and continue the story. It turned out really well and little did I know that the conference, which was on Wednesday, was for all English teachers in Covasna County. After the students performed, several teachers came up and asked me for more information about incorporating drama into their class room, which is totally awesome. I'm going to send them the manual I've been working out of. I'm really proud of and impressed by the students. It was their day off from school, as a teacher conference day, but they were still excited and happy to show up and perform in front of dozens of teachers. I lucked out by having great students to work with and unexpectedly having access to every English teacher in Covasna County.

Funny how things work out sometimes.

What's up: right now.
It's sunny and warm outside and I already took a jog and a walk today. I think I'll read for a while and bake some cookies. Not to mention snack on some Mini Eggs. Which I received in a package. From my awesome mom and sister.

Lucky, lucky.