Monday, April 05, 2010

The Calm Before the Storm

There wasn’t much on the agenda for today. I thought about having lunch at the fish market, and one of my year 13s from last year wanted to come by to work on her university assignment. Neither of those things happened. The student, who was supposed to show up at 10:00 this morning, texted at 10:06 to say her family was busy today, and she’ll come tomorrow instead. Fine. So I walked to the fish market, only to realize today was Aso Malolo, the day of rest after Easter, which means we essentially get 2 Sundays this week, and then we move straight on to Tuesday.

If there’s any argument for religious pluralism, there’s always someone to keep the shop open.

In any case, the rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I stopped in at the Peace Corps office, I found a wireless location to download some podcasts, I sat at the pool for a while at a nearby hotel, and I went jogging at dusk.

There were a few people here and there milling around doing as much of nothing as I was. Many of them were taxi drivers, desperate for a fare. The pizza place and the local bars were open when I ran past them this evening, but up until that point, Apia was a ghost town. I had little to do, and nowhere to go. It was a good day to relax.

That’s just as well because starting tomorrow things are going into high gear—especially at school. We’ve got 3 more weeks of classes before the midyear exams start, which means 3 weeks to whip my English and Science students into shape. I got to see the year 10 exam for English at the moderation meeting last Wednesday. It’s brutal.

Science isn’t much better. I have 3 separate units left to teach my kids in as many weeks: the respiratory system; microorganisms; and the first unit of book 3, which I haven’t seen yet.

I used to hate it in college when a professor would meander through the semester taking his sweet time, and then get to the last couple weeks of the course and move into warp speed. But now I’ve become that guy. Ugh.

I also need to do some home improvement work before I leave for Hawai’i in May, so that’ll keep things busy.

And as if that wasn’t enough, my natural gas stove ran out of fuel tonight, which means I’m going to have to beg my pule to take me across town to fill the tank, and then I’ll have to spend another hour at the office trying to get reimbursed.

I suppose it was good to have a day of rest today because these next 3 weeks are going to be long.

I hope you’re well. Pictures below.


Scout is starting to get a little more ambitious and daring in her gecko hunting. You can see the lizard she's going after at the bottom right corner of the poster on the left.


I noticed this at Farmer Joe last night. Note the row of white bottles on the shelf third from the bottom, less than a meter off the floor.


Here is a close-up of the bottle's label. Oops.

2 comments:

Amanda said...

Scout is super hard core. I hope you enjoyed your quiet time.

Anonymous said...

The samoan logic to the 'poison bottles' is that the little children don't learn english until they grow above 1m haha