Because I Remember Almost All These Instances, and I Can't Love the Real World All the Time

Or:

"100 Reasons We Like Kirk More than Picard, Kiddo's Favs"

1. When Data died, Picard had a funeral. When Spock died, Kirk reconstituted the body, forced it's soul back in, and even got him laid along the way.

5. Kirk has caused computers to self-destruct by out-thinking them on three separate occasions.

9. Picard is from France

14. Kirk chastises omni-powerful super beings for not being polite to women

20. Picard's name is known and respected throughout Klingon space.
Kirk's name is cursed and vilified.

24. Picard quotes Shakespeare for fun. Kirk quotes Shakespeare to intimidate his enemies.

30. Kirk once said: "You're the Captain's woman till he says your not."

37. Kirk mocks Federation bureaucrats that he doesn't like and then proves that their aides are Klingon spies, just to make the point.

I take issue with:

43. Kirk repopulated the Earth's once extinct humpbacked whale species.

I think this was more Spock's doing than Kirks. Kirk just banged a blonde

57. Kirk fought the Greek god Apollo. And won.

59. Kirk's middle name is Tiberius.

66. Kirk chops his own firewood.

67. Kirk once led a Mafia take over.

68. Kirk would have slept with Beverly Crusher by episode two

87. 87% of all Klingon opera is about the singer's desire to kill Kirk.

88. The other 13% of all Klingon opera is about the singer's desire to be killed by Kirk in glorious battle.

96. "KHHHAAAAANNNNNN!!!!!!!"

97. Kirk blatantly disobeys one out of every five Starfleet orders just to remind them who's really minding the store.

100. Style: Kirk did it first, he did it better and he did it wearing gold velour and Beatle-boots with a space girl on each arm.

.

Now, I ask you, Chuck Norris fans, what have you to say for yourselves and your sloppy idols?

Frosted Glass

As a kid I was fascinated with frosted glass. Its glass -- but I can't see through it! I always wondered why it was called "frosted" as it was clearly, just furred, just brushed. Either of these options have been my mind's mainstays til last week while on hall duty in the high school.

Our school, like most around here, is run on a series of wood-burning, hot water boilers called sobas. and they tend to be unreliable and not terribly good at heating anything. The rooms are warmer than the halls, and the halls are warmer than outside, but its been sitting at -20 F for a week and "warmer" is on that relative sliding scale usually reserved for igloo terminology.

Igloos, by the way, are uninsulated, impermanent structures. Cinderblock walls with unglazed windows and no mention of tapestries at least cause me to think of layering clothes in a completely new way. However! The unglazed windows have become a thing of fascination for me! Did you know that if you press your hand, lightly, on a thickly frosted glass window, and take it off relatively quickly, your skin will melt the ice just where your prints are, so you are left with a police mugbook quality print in frozen condensation of 600 teenagers breathing? Its fantastic!

To make a long story short I have a flu like sickness confining me to bed. Mom's winter care package of DayQuil, NyQuil, long underwear, gorgeous thick socks, tea and poetry books has come at the perfect moment! Gods bless my parents.

I'm not the only one getting care packages either! (Franny, I wish you could have seen this) Today I didn't really teach my lovely second grade class... a woman came in with felt puppets and told a lively rendition of the nativity ending with "and that is why we get presents on Christmas! So here are your presents!"

Every one of these children who cannot afford to buy new copy books so I'm handing out typing paper and pens every class, was then given a shiny, christmas wrapped shoe box sealed with "Samaritan Purse" tape. Each package had a To/From sticker on it. The To was for Girl or Boy, tick this, this or this age.

If any of you (I know many of you do, cus you do it with me) ever put together a charity shoebox present and wondered if it mattered, if you'd bother again next year, if maybe you skimped and should have added a bag of cherry flavored cough drops or 2B pencils, wonder no longer. My kids love you. They love you like you will never know until your English class gets interrupted by true joy.

Inversal?

There is a definite difference between school systems in America and school systems here.

Scratch that, almost everything is different. All the same factors apply, but the way those factors manifest is completely different.

For example, textbooks exist in both places. In America every kid has one. Totchka. (Period, my russian vocabulary grows...) In Moldova, maybe most have them. Maybe some of those remember to bring em. Of those who do, maybe half of them have their exercise books as well in order to record the lesson. Of those that have both, half will be any state of repair and at least two editions will exist in the group or bunches of 6 pages at a time will be ripped systematically from them or... god knows what. I am learning grant writing. This will be rectified.

Another example is discipline. In America, it is enforced. In Moldova, it sometimes exists, and then a kids eye gets beat out of his face by another kid (in my single best behaved class I might add) and people are surprised.

The most interesting thing though, is that I live out in the country. My friends live in cities. Their students sound like images of angels eager to pour grammar into their hopeful and well fed ears. Mine, well, mine act like creatures from Detroit or Baltimore. The inversion, is this how America was 100 years ago? Were country school houses unmanagable and big town schools full of eagerites? How big does a city have to get before it gets its inner-ness?

National Wine Festival

As I have regaled you before, Moldova's big export is wine.

As a reminder, it is very different from whatever you think wine is. As is the attitude toward it.

I announced in one of my twelfth grade classes that I went to the national wine festival in Chisinau this weekend, and i was immediately asked what wines I drank, from where and what chemical differences there were in the making of each -- obviously the reason for there being no age where drinking is illeagal here is simply that everyone makes the stuff as well as drinks it, taking it from simple enjoyment to geniuine snobbish artisanship.

phew.

The festival itself was in a big park. Super frumos stands looking alot like parade floats were shouldering each other outta the way to toss dixie cups of whites and reds at us easy drunks. Also, there were bottles for sale. 5 of us went in on a 4 litre of nameless red, made two weeks ago. It was sweet and potent. It came in the biggest plastic bottle I've ever seen. It was worth every drop.

The other two parts of the festival were Arts and Crafts (almost bought some sheep skins, but am saving for a trip to Majorca in January) and Food. The food was fantastic. so many tasty kebabs... i bought a chunk of the most gorgeously seasoned pork bigger than my fist. Marinade consisted of a plastic 4 litre bottle of beer--the cap wasnt twisted off, just had a tiny hole stabbed in the cap for squirting. Rednecks, beware, Moldovans got youse beat for ingenuity.

As I was licking bbq sauce off my plate (bbq sauce was a total surprise, and a gladly taken one at that!) a Russian man began hitting on me (how do they find me? do I have a sign on my back: "speak russian? I don't! please, i wish to be picked up") and was saved by Matt and super fabulous Jon.

phew.

Slept on a balcony in some borrowed sleeping bags with the older experienced volunteers.... So fun.

I invited those knowledgable students to come with me next year.

Bedazzle Me Hiney

Moldovan women have exceptional fashion sense. One of the higher points of their taste runs in the Jeans department.

Watching girls my age and younger squeeze into these beauties of constriction defies flesh physics like the highschoolers of Dazed and Confused. Except they'd have to haul well water to shrink themselves into these bad boys, and knowing their faculties for work, I think they must have other means of magic.

Also, if it can be Bedazzled, it is. Shoes, shirts, bags, sleeves, socks, ass pockets, seams, jewelry, holes cleverly torn into advantageous thigh spots...

Which brings me to my point.

My jeans (procured in The Lost Dog from one of the Caitlins in exchange for a belt with a big big buckle) are very much not bedazzled and growing their own periculos holes.

Thankfully tomorrow is piata day. The bi-weekly outdoor market is descending and my partner and I don't have the first lesson... can we say open air shopping?

Photos will happen if I gain me a tight, shiny badonkadonk...

Wine Season

Today at lunch I drank 4 glasses of week old wine with my host family!

This is exciting for a few reasons:
1) My host family rarely rarely drinks (as in this is the first time)
2) The grapes were literally picked the week before last.
3) In the interim weeks the courtyard has smelled either of grapes or wine all day, every day!

Unfortunately I was not allowed to help. Maria, my mama gazda, explained that because I am a teacher, I must be mai frumos--more beautiful--and not stain up my hands with the several tons of grapes that were being processed a bit at a time everyday for two weeks.

Thats ok, I just kinda stalked Maria in the meantime, watching her do everything and asking absurd questions like "wow, NOW what are you doing?" or "wow! the grapes are boiling themselves!" So, most of the time it wasn't questions, just out loud and grammatically incorrect (I have the language level of a 5 year old) fascination with the whole process.

First we picked grapes for 10 hours straight, 2 days in a row. The bags lined the corner of the house under my window. It smelled sweeet every day and night as they waited for step two to finish.

Then we cleaned or made barrels. Think the size of an original VW Bug. And wooden, like what pirates keep rum in.

Then put a grinder on top of each barrel and dump grapes, vine and all into it, grind. Repeat until full. Cover. Leave for a week. there were 4 such barrels in the yard!

These barrells of squished grapes bubbled and fumed and fermented and smelled awesome...

Matt and Becca stayed the weekend here last weekend while this fermentation part was happening. I think they were sufficiently jealous/impressed with my sweet provincial life.

NEXT! scoop up a couple gallons of this mess into a small barrell with a crank on top and big bowl underneath. The crank squishes the grapes so all the wine presses out into the bowl when the bowl is full or the gallons are depleted empty bowl into the keeper vats which are far more modern and equipped with shininess and spigots.

These shiny ones are kept in the bechiul (pronounced bitch)and can be easily accessed whenever we need wine for lunch or dinner! woot!

Today's preliminary samplings were tasty tasty. Very sweet and faintly carbonated, really, the white was more like champagne! oh, so good. Especially with fresh sheep cheese -- so salty! very like Halloumi if you know this greek awesomeness!

Water... more please?

yo kids, those of you still doing this and caring to read mine!

This last week saw my worst day of teaching so far, and my best. I talked to Dad about it, it seems there it is endemic to the Ostergaards to be very good at a profession they don't much like. Like Kelsie and engineering, and now me with teaching. (Dad has had almost every profession on the sun during my lifetime).

The worst day was Wednesday. Long story short, I'm not very good at disciplinary action. Can't we all just get along? The best day was Friday. my third and eleventh graders have finally caught on to my teaching methods (high on grammar puzzles and interactive vocabulary, low on lecture) and love them. Second graders are not yet caught into the vulgar habits of adults.

Also in the week: I havent showered yet. Its cold and hauling water from the well is colder and time consuming. I will take my bucket bath tomorrow!

On this subject, no one considers how not to waste things until they have to go through a ten minute ordeal for what was once a half second habit. For example flushing the toilet. We at the Cires household have a flushable outhouse. This is amazing! however, we appear to be experiencing a drought or something because the wells are now so low the pumps cant reach the water level. Until it rains a bunch I am in charge of getting water for the toilet and my baths and dishes washing. Its good times, my biceps are super awesome toned! If anyone has a goldrush era wash board they aren't using in an old timey jam band.... I'd appreciate it!

As a result of this I am forming a natioal holiday devoted to bathing. When I return, there will be a day out of the year you cant reach me because I will be showering until the water turns cold, then I will eat some prepared food in my super well insulated and overyly plush, comfy bathroom as I wait for the water to reheat.