an accident waiting to happen

*i cannot, in good conscience, recommend that mom and dad read this one*

so now that i (finally) have a motorcycle helmet, i'm pretty much invincible.
also, i am becoming a master motorcycle rider.
the following 3 events made me really, really happy.

1. sunday, i had lunch with a friend, and afterwards, we decided to ride up the mountain to a village and then back down the mountain into town. i always love riding a bike, but that particular day, i was wearing a skirt, so i made the 45 minute jaunt sidesaddle - not my favorite pose. i think i finally mastered it though, or at least i figured out how to sit in such a way that my legs didn't fall asleep and my shoes didn't fall off. always good news. so on the way up the mountain, it got a little boring. so my friend, the driver, decided it would be fun to ride the straight stretches with no hands. it's pretty much just like riding a bike with no hands. as long as you're balanced, you just coast, no problem. when you're riding side, however, balance is a bit of a concern. but on all the parts with no hands, the bike continued on straight and sure. my friend's comment? "wow, you really figured out how to center back there!" my reply? "i have a helmet! i can do anything!"

2. i was at a dinner the other night with a missionary lady i know, and we both had to head to the same place afterwards, so i asked if i could just catch a ride with her. she appeared hesitant... she's not yet a particularly confident driver, and having a passenger can wreak havoc on your balance/steering. and plus, i'm bigger than her. i assured her that if she was uncomfortable with it, i already knew i could get a ride from someone else, but that i also had just purchased a helmet, so even if we crashed, it would be fine. she agreed. halfway to our destination, she yelled back over her shoulder, "i can't even tell you're on the bike with me! you're so well balanced!" that made me really happy. i don't even quite know why. i think just feeling like i did a good job at something so random was nice. and also, knowing that i wasn't making her miserable. we did make it safely.

3. on the way home from said destination, i caught a ride with another friend who drives a vespa, circa the civil war. it's an awesome piece of machinery, mostly because it never runs quite right, and therefore reminds me of my beloved truck. anyways, i think we got a little bored too, because on the way home we decided to trade views, meaning that he was looking backwards over my shoulder, and i was looking forwards over his shoulder and telling him which way to turn. in indonesian. it was great fun until we came across a family walking in the road and i got scared that we would accidentally run over a small child. so i made him turn back around. game over.

i'ma try and get my license soon.
and then maybe a motorcycle by fall time.
but don't worry, cause i have a helmet.

ballroom blitz

so i already thought that the end of the (school) year was getting to be super busy...
that has been compounded in the past few days.
please feel free to peruse my weekly schedule.
(but only if you say schedule like mary poppins would)

MONDAY
6:30 - 7:30 ~ Do SAT II Math prep with Glory.
7:40 - 15:00 ~ School
15:00 - 15:30 ~ Tutor Whitney
Evening-ish ~ Trade English for Indonesian lessons with Mas Andre.

TUESDAY
7:40 - 15:00 ~ School
15:15 - Done ~ Teacher meetings
18:00 - 21/22 ~ Dinner club

WEDNESDAY
7:40 - 15:00 ~ School
15:00 - 15:30 ~ Tutor Whitney
15:30 - 16:30 ~ SAT stuff with Glory
19:00 - 21:00 ~ American Idol with the Java Dorm

THURSDAY
6:30 - 7:30 ~ SAT with Glory
7:40 - 15:00 ~ School
18:00 - 20:00 ~ Solafide (English fellowship/Bible study)
20:00 - 22:00 ~ Dinner

FRIDAY
7:40 - 15:00 ~ School
Evening-ish ~ Usually dinner/karaoke/coffeeshop

SATURDAY
17:30 - 20:00 ~ House church
Afterwards ~ Hang out with friends

SUNDAY
10:00 - 12:00 ~ Church
12:00 - 14:00 ~ Lunch

OK... Also cram in there 1-2 other times to meet with Andre to trade language lessons (by the way, this guy is an Indonesian teacher by trade, and he's teaching me for free. All I have to do is help him with his conversational English - talk to him.)

And Pita wants to meet 1-2 times a week to trade Indonesian for Spanish.

Some of my really good friends run a coffeeshop and their one reliable worker quit suddenly, so I've volunteered to help out there as much as I can. I can't mix drinks, but I'm already a pro at taking orders, delivering drinks, cleaning tables, washing dishes, heating up cinnamon rolls, etc...

And I'm pretty much always in the middle of watching some TV series or doing a movie night with Peco and Yohanes.

Oh, and on the weeks when I play guitar for Solafide, we meet to practice on one or two evenings.

And I'm usually out of town at least one day out of every weekend, if not all weekend.

Plus, I'm trying to spend time with people who are leaving before/at the end of the year.

But am I complaining?
No. Not at all.
I like being busy.
I just hope I get enough sleep so I can be a pleasant person.
I apologize in advance if I'm not.
Eight more weeks!

baby names

so dad has assigned me the task of naming our new calf.
from 12000 miles away.
i was bad at names when i actually lived there.
it's even harder from here.
(i'm happy he asked me though)
so i enlisted the help of my students.
one of them, in what was possibly a misguided attempt to be helpful, logged onto babynames.com.
i was astounded.
keep in mind that it's a website for HUMAN baby names.
some names that caught my eye (and not in a good way):
cactus
padgett
zajac
pakuna
cache
tagdh
yaotl
edgardo
jagannath
kaipo
yardley
..... need i go on?
seriously?

let dreams be dreams

last night was a night full of strange dreams.
i only vividly remember two of them.

in the first, i have no idea what was happening...
all i remember is that the entire dream was in indonesian.
i dreamed in indonesian!
i remember waking up in the dark, and being so happy about that.
since my indonesian is still extremely broken, everyone in the dream talked very slowly.
about the speed at which *I* speak indonesian.
i thought that was funny.

in the second, i was cleaning up after the jakarta tsunami.
i don't know if you heard the news in america or not...
but an earthen dam in jakarta broke this week and basically washed away a part of town.
the last reliable source i heard said that 58 were confirmed dead.
in my dream, there were bulldozers just shoveling all the debris into warehouses.
i was a worker in a warehouse, and our job was to sort everything into 3 piles.
one pile was for mud and manure.
one pile was for clothes and usable household items.
one pile was for bodies and body parts.
i had to put 4 babies into the last pile.

i wish my dreams could have gone in the opposite order.
i might have woken up in a better mood.

aku cinta kepadamu!

yesteday in seventh grade math class.....
seth broke out into some kind of seizure dance and whitney called him weird.
seth responded passionately.

"oh YEAH?! well, that's just FINE with me! i don't even WANT to be normal! normal is stupid! you know what normal is?? being normal is going to a stupid office all day and filling out stupid papers, then going home to bratty kids. SERIOUSLY, that's normal life in america these days."

and then he proceeded to burst forth into song.
"white and nerdy" by weird al.

no chance for normal there.

to review for the next day's test, i had the seventh graders write their own test.

i collected and redistributed the tests, which they then had to do during class for practice.

i wrote a list of relevant topics from the chapter on the board and told them to make sure they covered them all sufficiently on their practice tests.

most kids had about 20 - 25 questions on their test.

a fair length.

soon hyung, however, wrote a 5 page 72 question study manual.

poor whitney got stuck with his test in the redistribution.

she refused to take it. but i convinced her to at least try.

poor girl only made it halfway through the first page.

bethanie, my 4 year old friend, drew me some princesses.

i think they should be characters in whatever tim burton's next film is.

but for now, they're chillin on my fridge.

and i laugh hysterically every time i eat.

ashley bought me some hoop earrings!

i got so excited.

i also got my pupils and irises removed.

just kidding.

i threw cat out of my bed 51 times last night.

i kept waking up to her chewing my facial parts.

lips, nose, eyelashes.

she also kept crawling under my blankets.

and then up my shorts.

you try waking up in the middle of the night with something alive in your shorts.

rough times.

too bad my bedroom door doesn't close.

i should put in a work order for that.

i think she needs people closeness though.

i considered throwing her out of the house altogether.

but she surprised me by only making messes in the litter box.

and she is quite clean.

good manners for a street cat.

so maybe she can still stay after all.

i've been adopted

the past 12 hours have given me lots of reasons to smile.
for one, last night, i got to hang out with several good friends at the coffee shop.
i got a free dinner (tuna noodles!)

i watched american idol with one-and-a-half americans.

i had an indonesian conversation with the jaga when i asked him about the very large dead snake laying by the back gate. (it was a viper and he killed it near my house. awesome. i have good jagas.)

when i got home, i found a box of lemon heads sitting on my table!

peco had been working at my house while i was gone and left them there for me (see below).

peco and yo came over at 8 to bake chocolate cookies!

we were sitting on the couch playing guitar and singing, when i heard a kitten.

there was a kitten at my door!

so i let it in. and it has adopted us.

i made a litter box for it, just in case.

and peco made a little house for it, which he put right beside my bed.

cat slept quietly on my couch all night long and tried to chew my toenails while i got ready for work this morning.

so maybe she can stay.

maybe.

many dreams have been laid at your doorstep...

today i was told that i look like the mona lisa.
and all i can think is, "man. all whiteys really must look the same to asians."

pi(e) day

you ALL should already be aware that last saturday was (drumroll please) pi day!
i would hope that at this point in our relationship you might have even celebrated it with me a time or two. if not, well, i'm sorry. there's always next year.

anyways, this year was my first year to celebrate it as a teacher.
there were pies. apple pies and chocolate cream pies.
and there were games. memorizing pi. designing a logo for pi. and writing a poem about pi.
the student who won the memorizing contest correctly recited pi to 150 decimal places.
impressed!
the seventh graders were the only ones who wrote poems about pi.
the entries go as follows:

"Pie is red.
Pie is blue.
It smells
And so do you."
- Zach

"I love pie, it's so fly.
I do pie, but sometimes it takes time.
Pie can be hard, pie can be easy.
Sometimes I think pie is cheesy."
- Isaiah

"I love pi
I see pi
On a pi day
And a pi smiles at me
O, your beautiful smile
Let your name be blessed."
- Soon Hyung

"The infinite number of pi
Takes time and love to memorize
If you care and if you try
You can truly analyze.

The first number is an executed eight
The decimal is the drop of blood
that represents its fate
On and on the numbers will flow
Until they reach their dying date

On that date the world will end
And pi will be no more
But don't cry yet, there's more 'round the bend
A heavenly pi - like never before.

If you wore the Greek letter pi on your head
You wouldn't make the ladies keen
And it wouldn't do to drop down dead
On pi day - March fourteen."
- Mary

(BTW, Soon won marginally by class vote. But I would have voted for Mary.)

home home on the range

home safe!

coming home is always good.
mango juice is always good.

work is not always good.
but it mostly is.

pi day is on saturday!
i hope you're ready.

a helping hand

so ashley and i have made it safely to bali.

incredibly enough, it was cheaper (by about half as much) to [1. walk a kilometer to the harbor 2. jump on a fishing boat to lombok 3. haul ourselves (with luggage) another half a km 4. wait 2.5 hours for a car and driver while chatting with the locals (until they all left for prayer) 5. take said car an hour south to mataram 6. jump on an airplane to bali 7. get a taxi to drive us 20 minutes to our hotel] than it was to just take a boat straight to bali. wow.

we had a little "incident" in the airport. we got there 1 hour before our flight and went to check in... we're pretty used to the process here in indonesia, and we never have any problems. this was not the case yesterday as we tried to secure our boarding passes. we had purchased our tickets through a travel agency on lombok, and they had given us the e-ticket thingys. ashley and i had identical paperwork, minus the fact that mine had my name and ashley's had hers. naturally. ashley went to check in first, and they promptly proceeded to tell her to leave her bags and follow them. slightly concerned for my friend's well being and expecting the same fate myself, i stepped up to the counter and presented the lady with my papers. i received my boarding pass nearly immediately. so i waited for ashley. 10 minutes went by. 20 minutes went by. at this point i was nearly envisioning her locked in an interrogation room somewhere having bamboo shoots shoved under her fingernails as airport officials tried to extort money out of her. (ok, so indonesia is corrupt, but probably not quite THAT corrupt.) so i sms-ed her. she told me she was just outside, so i grabbed her luggage and went to find her. apparently, the travel agent did something wrong and her ticket was void. some poor guy who spoke hardly any english was trying his best to sort it out. our plane was leaving in 30 minutes. now, i have seen God's hand at work in our trip thus far, working tiny miracles to keep everything going smoothly in a country where smooth is a foreign concept. as the man picked up a telephone to make a call, right there in the airport, i bowed my head and i prayed, "God, i don't know who this man is calling or if they can help, but i know that YOU can. You've worked so many miracles on our trip so far, and i pray that You would do one more. i ask that this one phone call would clear everything up, that ashley and i would be together on our plane to bali in 30 minutes. and thanks." i opened my eyes. he hung up the phone. he handwrote ashley a new ticket, and we got on our plane. (btw, the 30 minutes left us with plenty of time to find our gate - the airport only has 2. TWO!)

last night ashley and i went out for indian food (salatiga desperately needs an indian restaurant. or maybe i just desperately need salatiga to have an indian restaurant....) and on our jaunt back to our hotel, we were doing some shopping - window and otherwise. ashley was having a rough go of it, knocking clothes off racks, dropping things on the floor, etc. very not normal ashley. i, of course, was having a good time teasing her about it and pretending to be embarrassed to be seen with such a klutz. but the best was yet to come..... we were in a very trendy/pricey clothes store. ashley decided that she liked the tube dress on the mannequin in the window, so she leaned over to check the price tag. as she did, though, she managed to halfway disrobe the poor mannequin, as the dress slid down to her waist. i hightailed it out of there, and ashley followed suit. as soon as we hit the sidewalk, we burst into uncontrollable laughter. i, naturally, took a picture of the scandalous mannequin. ironically (or maybe horrifically) enough, it is an indonesian holiday this weekend, and so there are TONS of muslim people here from java on vacation. ashley's justification for leaving the mannequin half-naked in the storefront window of the second busiest street in bali? - "but i was only trying to help the muslims have a better holiday!"

i am still laughing.

home tomorrow!

wheels on the bus

so ashley and i have made it safely to the gilis.
we flew. we drove. we jumped a ferry. and now we're here.
finally.

it's pretty much great.
we rented bikes this morning and rode around the whole island.
beautiful.

our hotel is pretty sweet too.
we're paying rp. 85000 per night (about $7).
and we get a free breakfast and a bathroom with a shower.
but no sheets/covers on our beds.
awesome.

there's some awesome restaurants here.
last night, we ate indian.
tonight we ate at a russian restaurant.
figures.

tomorrow we're going snorkeling.
with sea turtles.
and giant clams.
in a glass bottomed boat.
pumped.

i have my own nickname on the island.
noodle head.
"i want to eat your hair!"
please.

friday we head to bali.
we can see it from here.
but to get there, we ride a boat, catch a taxi, get on a plane.
lame.

happy birthday, dad!
love.