Meanwhile In

I've decided that I will probably never actually do an updated, coherent, cohesive, 'up-to-this-moment' post, so I might as well just do one of the normal kind and hope it fills in the gaps. As some of you should know, I have now moved to my second family. They consist of my very lovely host mother, Lucha, who is a teacher (although not at me school. I think she does grade school. Brave woman.); my host father Pablo, who is a cop, and also very nice. He wants to help me with my Spanish (oddly, my accent, the one thing I was best at when I got here has been slipping without my realizing it). He will probably be in my good book for pretty much ever, since he was the one who told me very seriously that, after much consideration, he thought I was about 85% fluent. I don't know if I agree with that, but it was such a nice thing to hear from anyone anyway. I have 2 host sisters, but the one I actually knew before and was really looking forward to living with, Melissa, just started university. In Jalapa. So, I won't see her anytime soon, darn it. The sister I am living with, Ingrid, is 14 and in high school (prepa) too, but not my school. Also in the house is my host brother, also named Pablo (he shall be reffered to as Pablito for difference). He is actually a lot like an 18 year old Tristan, except with fewer video games. And he's at least borderline nice to me at all times. And he can drive. So not like a real brother at all. Hi, Tristan! There's also a semi-constant parade of non-residents coming through the house and essentially behaving like they live there. I will now endevour to introduce the most important ones. Anouk, y'all should know, is our 16 year old German exchange student. This was her last family (she's now with her second, which will be my last), but she comes through every couple of days. For the next month or so she's on crutches, too. She fell while helping give her new host sister a bath and fractured her foot. Louis, who is a relation of the family (just don't ask me to explain how). He's in his 20's and currently studing for his taxi drivers (driver? driving? friggin English) license. He shows up and hangs around, helps carry things, does odd jobs. Mari, who is la muchacha, which is someone a lot of people around here have. Sort of like a housekeeper/maid, but the relationship is different. I can't really explain it, it's a Mexican thing. I have learned a couple new things here. Never use the middle burner on the stove unless you want to wake up the whole neighborhood. Never leave your personal bar of soap in the bathroom overnight. Never assume the message will get there if you have to pass it through more than one person. Never, ever go near the dog when he has been anywhere near the fish pond. And never assume you killed it the first time (see yesterday's post). I've also done some new things. I've watched Fellowship of the Ring on HBO and said all the lines. With voices. I found an alcoholic drink I love. It's some kind of cocktail that tastes like a Dreamsicle smoothie. But with alcohol. I accidentally set fire to a role of toilet paper. No one died. Shut up. Now, life goes on, uniterupted. The original point of this post was to comment on exactly how wacky the world is nowadays. Here's some stuff that happened this week, just to prove my point: Traffic rumbled to a halt in Cambridgeshire, England which seems to have involved a truck exploading. I can only figure the traffic was stopped because everyone got out to watch the road being covered in a snow of duck feathers. I'm serious. A little closer to home (or at least to my home), it snowed in Juarez, Mexico for one of the only times in recorded history. Now, it may seem like the slight dusting they recieved might be a little wussy to the northern Americans (get it? get it? bad geography humor) who are being buried under mountains of snow and cold. But for those of us down south who have never even seen snow, take it from someone who has been trying to explain what real cold is for 6 months, you gotta see this to belive it. So, when the almighty snowstorm of the north sprinkled over the border, bringing with it 9 degree temperatures, life shuddered to a halt south of the border, and the Governor declared a state of alert. Hundreds of homeless people who would, in normal circumstances have been fine, migrated to shelters to avoid the cold. Planes stopped, schools closed, power died, streets were deserted. Weird, huh? Also, the oldest woman in the world, 115-or-so-year-old Eunice Sanborn passed away in her Texas home this Monday. The world will mourn her passing. Next up, Georgia's Bess Cooper. What is it about the South? And this has nothing to do with the week or really, life in general, but here's something that should make starving college students very happy.

Note: I recorded a 10 minute video of me going around my new house, but when I tried to download it from my camera so I could upload it here, my POS computer decided it was a good time to update and restart my camera interface application without prompting me, which not only locked up and then crashed the system, but appearently corrupted the file on my camera. So, I will be going home and re-recording it to try again tomorrow, and just hoping against hope it hasn't corrupted the actual camera chip or something, like it did it my flashdrive. Boycott Dell.