Funnyquote Friday

A good-humored prod made at me on the interwebz the other day:

"Woo Peace Corps! Even lower down the
totem pole than UNDP!!"

I agreed to puppysit for a friend while the Ross Veterinary students are on break.  My new charge is a three-month old island Rottweiler named Ty, who is planning to adopt a Peace Corps couple as his guardians.  But until then, I am the one responsible for pulling the little twerp's nose out of every avenue for mayhem and destruction it can find.  And we both seem to be doing an admirable job of living up to our roles.

I'll be so happy to unwind this weekend with no more thoughts towards these application assignments that have consumed my time and will for job searching the entirety of this last month.  I have completely finished all four deliverables, (1.5 page Statement of Purpose, 4 page Procedural Recommendation, 4 page Application Review, 3 page Performance Analysis) but the damage has been done to my central nervous system: my brain is fried, and I intend on getting back to full strength with a weekend of R&R.

I enjoyed my first mango of the season this morning.  Bright yellow with dark spots means it has fully ripened, and I'm looking forward to the multitude of similar offerings from the mango tree at my office all this month.  In due time, the flamboyant trees will start to fill their canopy once again with needles, creating a large shady haven below their branches that enjoys a 10° cooler atmosphere than the air around it.  Also looming on the metaphorical horizon is this year's hurricane season, when the tourists stop coming and the midday rains and gusts come instead.  My understanding is that scientists are anticipating a light season this year, though judging by their recent gaffes, (at least as far as St. Kitts is concerned) we have every reason to take this year as seriously as any other.

This evening is set aside for seeing off a fellow volunteer who is heading back to the Midwest via Puerto Rico.   She has come to be a good friend of mine, someone I admire for her poise and droll disposition as much as her charm.  I wish her good fortune and faithful friends who were as thoughtful and inclusive to her as she was to me.

Funnyquote Friday

The NSTP's registered students in the A Ganar program hosted the children of the St. Christopher Children's Home, an orphanage for homeless children in West Basseterre, to a special luncheon as part of their Food Preparation Course's community service mandate.  The result was a snazzy white-tablecloth affair and a fully catered meal of fine Caribbean cuisine.  The kids had a good time getting to ride in the bus to the Challengers Community Center, then rub elbows with the older girls in the class serving as hostesses.  In fact, one particularly flamboyant girl was having fun chatting with A Ganar Instructor Ms. Gloria Mills, and teaching her to sing her own made-up songs.  One included, "My name is Erubo Nikki / My name is Erubo Nikki" to a tune that almost immediately got locked in my head.  At Nikki's insistence, Ms. Mills tried her hand at the tune as well.  Nikki patiently waited while Ms. Mills got the gist of the rhythm, but when she could hold it no longer, she protested, to everyone's great amusement,

"Hey, you are falling out of tune!"

More of the usual here.  If not for the measurable progress in my workout routines and my fictional baseball team, I would probably go crazy from boredom.  But I'm continuing to stay busy – in fact, school starts back up next week, which means I will be on the hook once again for maths tutoring at Beach Allen Primary come Tuesday.  They will be focusing on readying students for end of course testing, known here as the "Test of Standards" for grades 3-6.  So any progress I can make in students' understanding of traditionally difficult topics (e.g. fractions) will hopefully go a long way towards their performance on these tests.

I've been working on another extensive themed post, and haven't got around to finishing it yet, so that's why the delay in posts this week.  Because of this, I didn't get a chance to mention that I experienced a new island first on Monday: I got stung by a centipede!  Yes, a baby centipede found its way under my pillow one night, and when I shifted my arm while half asleep, I apparently confounded the little bugger because it saw fit to use its self-defense mechanism and sting me.  I was lucky: it caught me in a very insensitive part of my body, and led to no actual swelling – just a slight pain that went away overnight.  Though, to be sure, since I was now wide awake and subject to a difficult prospect of falling asleep with the thought of bugs crawling around uninhibited in my bed, I took an hour to collect myself, and proceeded to replace the sheets the next morning.  All in all, a pretty decent way to deal with a threat I had been warned of since day one of PST, and I'm all the more glad that now I can say I did.

Funnyquote Friday

Overheard at Easter Monday activities at the ferry terminal:

"Boy, I wish my camera had a phone on it right now."

Last week I promised myself and you, my readers, that I would try my hand at a 10K / 6 mile run very soon.  I got up the energy and the nerve on Thursday, when I ran all the way from my apartment to the airport roundabout on the east side of town, and all the way back.  By my reckoning, it's almost exactly 3 miles one-way, and a small but noticeable vertical displacement.  Furthermore, I forced myself to start out at nothing faster than a 10min/mile pace, and was able to maintain that the whole way; my final time was 1:00:09.  A perfect 1 hour of running!  My first 10K!  I was very proud, and not at all exhausted afterward – just far hungrier than usual.

A Ganar paperwork, data entry, filing and sorting and retrieving files at work is getting pretty dull.  At six months out from Close Of Service, this is where the typical Volunteer begins to ask questions like, "Am I doing enough to support my NGO?" "Am I involved enough in my community?" and "Will my organizations be able to carry on the work I've done after I'm gone?"  As I suspect is the case with other Volunteers, I am reluctant to seek definitive answers to these questions, already aware of their likely outcomes.  Instead, I continue with the day-to-day and try to give myself something positive to look forward to on a regular basis, which feels like I'm ignoring the real meat of the problem sometimes.  I hope this doesn't come back to haunt me in job interviews...

You know, self-efficacy used to exude from me like sweat after a run (refreshing and natural, but borderline antisocial to some persons more stiff-necked than myself), but the combined experiences of switching my major of study, cancelling a wedding, and fruitlessly searching for a job for 18 contiguous months had effectively curbed that.  So it's been a nice change as of late to experience some reaffirmations of my potency: starting on Monday, when I was getting chatted-up by a very attractive local chick; then on Wednesday, when I achieved 100 pushups over 5 sets for the first time; then again Thursday, when I ran 6 miles uninterrupted for the first time; and lastly, I guess I should include last week's response to one of my applications that wasn't a rejection letter.  Aside: at what stage in my job search do I have to be to not be emotionally affected by typing that I'm receiving plenty of rejection letters right now?  The mature stage, or the jaded stage?  It feels like more of the former, so I'm going to stick with that.

Oh, and some people still don't understand why I was scared of E.T. growing up.  Those people can read this comic.

Happy Friday the 13th, everybody!