Good Weather

I survived. And I learned a new word, sort of. Last Thursday all the schools were closed on account of a cyclone. The word cyclone sounds cool and conjures up images of Dorothy and Toto swirling away, but other than that, I didn't really know what it was. Only a few students decided to brave the weather and come out. From my sixth level class, two females came and they tried to explain what a cyclone was. A little unsuccessful, but we had fun. Later, one of the seamen said that a cyclone was an area of low pressure. That I could understand. Cyclone and anti-cyclone. Them be kewl werdz.

On Thursday, the main thing that I noticed was the wind. In the office I could hear the wind shrieking from outside the double paned window through the door on the other side of the room. Also as I was walking to school something started falling that was a little more similar to snow than what I've seen before. Hail isn't too uncommon - with some of them being doozie size. This time the hail was soft, like mini-snowballs. They were about the size of the little white thingys that are in potting soil. I tasted one along with my scrumptious apple delight I had just picked up at a bread stand. It was cold.

Friday passed mostly without incident. As I was waiting at the bus stop for my evening class, it began to snow. Big, wet flakes. At first I thought it would stop in a few minutes, but it kept on going. When I entered our class around six, it had stopped with no accumulation. But when I exited class a little over two hours later, there was accumulation - albeit only a centimeter. On the hike home, I saw evidence of the cyclone. Most of the billboard signs were lying on the ground in various degrees of smashed. A big tree had fallen over, and several large branches from other tress lay haphazardly strewn around. With a light snow covering it looked really pretty, so I decided to get up as soon as there was enough light Saturday morning and take some pictures.

More snow had fallen by the time I got outside, so except for a few tracks, the world was white. Still too early for any good pictures. Then it started again. The refreshing crunch, crunch, crunch under foot (followed by the occasional crunch, crunch, slip!) was superb. I stayed out for maybe an hour or so making a bunch of bad photographs of 2 cm of snow. But I had fun. And I saw a bunch of frozen ducks trying to sleep. That was nice.

My Saturday evening was once again spent in the Concert Hall. The program began at six, which didn't leave very much time for me to get from school to the hall. Especially since I got off one stop too late. I found myself in the same neighborhood as I was back on the earthquake day, but I knew my way out this time. Arriving with time to spare, I was surprised at the audience. Last week's jazz concert was packed to the max whereas this weeks organ concert was practically empty. Vasily Dalinsky is based out of Moscow. Overall, the concert was decent (for an organ concert). I like some of the quieter sounds the instrument produces, but it is really lacking in the oomph department. He played a Prelude and Fugue by Buxtehude. The main thing I remember about Mr. Buxtehude from music history class is the way his works are catalogued. JS Bach's are BWV, and Buxtehude's are BuxWV. Nifty, huh? Speaking of Bach, the concert concluded with his Toccata and Fugue in d minor. Maybe Dalinsky was trying to outdo himself in the speed department, but in my opinion this came at the expense of the music. After the first measure, I had a nasty taste in my mouth that only worsened as the piece progressed. To be fair to him, I did enjoy his start slow and get fast approach in one or two atypical places, but on the whole it was not a rendition I am glad I heard.

The organ concert was about half as long as the jazz concert, so I got home at a reasonable time. I called my grandparents to see how they were doing but got the answering machine. To my surprise, they phoned me an hour later. After we talked for maybe ten minutes G'Ma said that she had called my mother to find out how to reach me. And that the calling card numbers my mom passed on were really long. Now it made sense. She was calling me using my calling card. That's not a bad thing, it just seemed a little funny to me. I told her I'd call again on Thanksgiving Day after I got home from school and we said goodbye.

What to do on a crisp Saturday evening? Ahhh, the ever present friend Mr. Tube. Took in one rather interesting Russian movie. The basic story line is that there is an author that reporters have a difficult time getting close to. So one attractive reporter poses as a school girl studying at the university. She ends up becoming friends with the author and discovers that he has his twin brother locked up in the basement. The twin is blind and crippled, but incredibly gifted at writing. So he sits in chains if you will and dictates novels onto tapes. Mr. Famous Author then transcribes the taped novels and makes millions. Weird, huh?

Sunday morning I looked out to an even thicker blanket of snow. Still nothing to write home about, but sufficient to blog on. Sleeping in on Sunday till noonish, I only cleaned my apartment and cooked a pot of potato soup before it was time to return to the Concert Hall. A mezzo-sopranist and guitarist from Lithuania. The first half was classical guitar works. I really enjoyed everything about the dude's performance. But the people behind me were loud and annoying. At one point they loudly opened their box of candies and then tipped over their glass bottle of something. That accompanied by the lack of sound proof walls which allowed in a perpetual car alarm and a pack of dogs having their fun with some poor creature added a certain something to solo guitar repertoire.

After intermission the singer sang several Spanish songs. I was familiar with some of them and enjoyed her rendition. As a singer, I think her voice is okay, but not something I would listen to everyday. However, at the bottom of her register she has a very sonorous quality that I particularly relished. On occasion she would speak-sing something and that was even better. I think her mouth was too big in proportion to the rest of her face. During her songs, I couldn't help but think of a Mrs. Potato Head Doll. Then came on the Russian songs. The first two weren't particularly good, but then either she got into it or I got into it because her true colors really came through. For an encore she did a little one minute alp-like yodeling piece that I can't remember the name of. I thought that it would sound very good as a trumpet fanfare.

Home again, home again, jiggidy-jig. Since my Thanksgiving Day won't be quite the same as the one all you blokes back in the States celebrate, I figured I'd have Thanksgiving Week instead. After an hour or so I sent out the first batch of thank you emails to friends. The main purpose is to let people know of my new address, but it is also an excuse to catch up with some people. If Thanksgiving passes and you don't receive an email from me (and you really want one), post a comment.

Hopefully the small snow I experienced this weekend is only the beginning of more severe weather to befall the Kaliningrad region this winter. Time will tell.

Update: I must be getting old because I left out one important part of the concert.

As I was leaving the concert hall, a monstrous eight foot snowman greeted me. In my house the boy to girl ratio is slightly lopsided. Therefore, when snow comes to Columbia, MD, snowwoman grace our front lawn. It is fairly easy to make snowwoman with only extra snow, but how does one create an anatomically correct snowman? In Russia they use beer bottles. I found it a little strange that the bottles of choice were Miller Genuine Draft and not something more 'Russian'. The snowman was actually very nice, despite his manliness, although I wasn't positive what the second bottle was - his nose, or in his mouth.

NaNoNoWriNoMo

With this post I am falling out of the NaNoWriMo competition. (Post title means National Novel No Wri' No Mo') I still like my original plan and think that it would have worked quite well. Except the first week I didn't teach so my schedule was a little looser than usual which interprets to I felt lazy and didn't start for the whole first week. On the upside, I gathered a lot of stories from my students. Some of them are unbelievably hilarious. It would be a pity to loose them, so although I won't reach the 50,000 word cut off by a long shot, I will be writing a few short stories. Then as I get a chance I'll edit them and serve them up for your reading pleasure.

I had many plans for last weekend. Of them, I honestly don't think I finished even one. But I did have an enjoyable time. Saturday I arrived halfway through the lesson study. I tend to do that because listening to two back to back talks fries my brain. I can almost manage one and a half, but even that depletes my mental resources. Following the main service I had planned on heading over to the office and printing out the handouts to be used at the afternoon English class. Except that one lady came up and grabbed me to show me something. Her name is Olga and she was my translator. As we were walking to the place she wanted to show me, she explained that from now on she would not be helping out as translator. Her reason was nice enough I suppose - she thinks that the way I run the Friday and Saturday extra classes are better than the way others have in the past. I make her job unnecessary. Class moves along fine and when somebody doesn't understand something there are others who do and can explain.

After a short five minute walk, we arrived at an old Catholic church. After the war the place was in pretty sorry shape. I forget when, but I think that it was in the early 80s, it was restored to be a concert hall. Now the building houses the Kaliningrad Philharmonia and is the location for a number of concerts. Olga invited me to attend the concert that evening, and I decided to take her up on the offer figuring that she must have some friends that could sneak her in for free. Agreeing on a time to meet, I high-tailed it for the nearest bus stop to try and make it to the office. When I hopped on my bus and sat down, I was surprised that somebody came up and started speaking English to me. It was a nice Polish dude named Gregory. He had tried to invite me over to his apartment for lunch before but I had been busy. Now, looking at his watch, he figured that I would have time to stop by for 15 minutes worth of tea. I politely declined stating that I really had to make copies. He understood, then mentioned that Kristina was with him and would be there for tea. Now that changed the story! Just kidding.

As I got up at my stop, Gregory and Kristina were getting off too. Surprise, surprise. Certainly I could find the time to just walk with them the five minutes to the apartment, right? Well, I supposed I could manage that. When we got to the outside of his building, he thought that perhaps I could come up for a brief 5-minute tea. Okay, I thought. After drinking his tea and learning what was on the menu for lunch, I thanked both of them and politely excused myself. Running to the office, I made my copies and was only a few minutes late for my 3 o'clock class.

As we were walking from the bus stop to his apartment, I was not an active participant in the conversation, but listened with some interest. Gregory teaches German at the same school where I teach. He actually works for the school teaching schoolchildren while I work for a company that rents a few rooms in the school. In any event, I had met and spoken with him before. His upbrining and moves between various Polish and German cities left him fluent in both languages in addition to English. Right now he is living in Kaliningrad to improve his Russian. Back to the walk from the bus stop. As I was listening to him speak, I was amazed. He was speaking at a rather nice pace with a native speaker. How cool is that? Then came the clincher for me - he was using the Russian equivalent of the word which correctly. This word gives me problems because it has to agree with a couple different words in the sentence. Lesson learned: it is possible to learn the Russian language.

After arriving back at my apartment and eating more macaroni and cheese I began the first draft of the last post (which was deleted accidentally when the computer did not wake up from sleep properly). About 6ish, I left to meet Olga for the concert. Not knowing exactly where the closest bus stop was I stayed in the van too long and ended up running to meet her. The concert was the second installment of the First International Kaliningrad Jazz Festival. Seemed like it would be interesting. We sat above the stage because all the seats in the hall were sold. The first three groups were decent enough - they were small combos. A couple keyboardists were quite good, but overall nothing out of the ordinary. After the intermission came the heavy hitters for the evening. A pianist from Moscow named Daniel Kramer and an organist whose name escapes me. The concert hall's name is the Organ Hall on account of its very nice organ (although the roof is a little bit low to do it justice). Maybe I'm totally unaware of jazz trends, but when I think of jazz music a large concert organ is not the first instrument that comes to mind. So I was a bit skeptical. Mr. Organist started out their half of the program. From where I was sitting, I he was maybe ten feet away at the console, so I had a pretty decent view. I think they decided to put his piece in at the last minute because as he walked onto stage he yelled over his shoulder to the pianist that he would be three, maybe four minutes and no longer.

The unmistakable first chords of Bach's Toccata from that famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor shook the building. I didn't particularly care for his interpretation that much. After maybe the first ten measures, his feet started vamping on this funky bass line. That was interesting. Then a few measures later the whole piece morphed into an organ rendition of Caravan. I was surprised at how well those two pieces worked together and how the timbre of a large organ fit the mood of Caravan. After the predicted four minutes passed, the piece ended. Now the piano man joined the organ in a piece that they had clearly just talked through back stage and not rehearsed much in the hall. I liked it despite the rough edges due in part to the distance between the piano and organ and lack of visual contact which led to imprecise entrances and so on. Overall it was very obvious that Mr. Kramer had enormous technical and musical prowess. However, I didn't much care for his verbalizations during the song. As he got more into it he sang what his right hand was doing. This coupled with his metronomic foot provided quite the picture of a crazed musician. Maybe he has just lived in Moscow for too long, who knows? (Pardon the cheap joke at all you Muscovites out there, I couldn't resist) After several more pieces and then a few encores by Kramer the last combo took the stage. I have to give a big thumbs up to the vocalist. She sounded American, which is a big thing for a Russian singer. From what I've observed, if a native Russian person can speak English at a very high level with only a small accent perceptible, when singing all the un-English pronunciations return. In addition to pronouncing the English words to my liking, she had a gorgeous voice, and helped convince me that the females grown in Russia are, on average, more beautiful than those from other parts of the world. Maybe the reason is similar to why the vegetables are so big over here - Chernobyl!

On the long side for sure, but well worth my free ticket. As I spoke with Olga before the concert I discovered that she was able to get me in because she worked at the Philharmonic. She is a pianist and plays for many of the children's productions the place puts on. That could be nice because now I have my 'season pass' if you will to all concerts at the Organ Hall. I think the next one I'll be able to attend is a concert of authentic Russian instruments. That means I get to hear the famed balalaikas. Oooh, ahhh. Somehow we missed our ride so walked for the nearest tram stop. I think it was almost 11, so the trams are few and far between. We ended up walking all the way back home. Along the way she asked if I was determined to learn the Russian language. I evaded the question and said that I've learned a lot of new words or something like that. She persisted and asked again. I don't think I ever did give her a straight answer, but the question has hung with me ever since. Am I determined to learn the Russian language?

Judging by how much effort I've put into it thus far, I would honestly have to answer a resounding no. In retrospect, knowing enough to guess what people are saying and grunt a two word response may not have been the best thing for me. Everybody tells me when they first meet me that I speak excellent Russian, and I think I let this go to my head. As a result I haven't been putting in the personal study time with new vocab, grammar structure, and reviewing those lovely endings and when they get used. With nearly three months of my twelve month stint finished, I have to say that my progress has been marginal at best. If I hope to be more fluent than when I left home, I need to put forth a Spartan effort for the remaining nine months. Am I up to the challenge?

I called a few people when I got home Saturday night. May I take a moment and hail the marvels of Skype. For a little over one dollar, I was on the phone for about an hour. My computer to real live phones in the USA. That is a sweet deal as they say. Using my cell phone to call somebody in Kaliningrad costs 7-11 cents. Transatlantic connection for much less than my neighbor is a bit of a marvel. The downside was that my head didn't hit the pillow until a little past four. So much for my plan to be out of the house at 6 on Sunday. Instead, the phone woke me about 11. It was Sasha telling me where to meet him for a ride to the Harvest Festival. All the virgin sacrifices in the spring and bacchanal parties in the fall are still in full swing over here in the Motherland. Actually they aren't, but it does paint an interesting picture. Every year the local Adventist church has a little fall festival for people to invite their non-religious friends and colleagues to. I arrived late and probably missed an hour or so of the program. It was pretty lengthy - maybe 2+ hours. During it, the tiny kids put on a skit, soloists sang songs, and poets read their poems. There are a few new pictures from the gala event available here. The grapes they had at this were amazing. Sure, they had seeds in them, but they were succulent to say the least. Not too sweet, not too sour, but just nice and mild and mmm-mmm good.

After the service, I spoke with several of the people my age. Here is a picture of Elena and Valya - two Russian girls. Elena has an incredible set of lungs. Really. She sings for church maybe every other week. I recorded a few samples of two songs she sang on Sunday, but when I listened to them, they did not do her justice, so I won't be posting any links for your listening pleasure. Whenever I get a decent recording, I'll be sure and serve it up. Valya has been the secretary at my work for maybe a month. How do you say this nice and indirectly...she plays a mean game of solitaire on the computer. But she is nice. In one of the lessons I teach the reading mentions different ways that help people when they are learning a language. One of the negative ways you can aide somebody's learning is to raise your voice. I think it is rather humorous that she uses this method with me. Honestly, it does get a little annoying to be semi-shouted at whenever I clearly don't understand what she tells me, but on the other side it is something to smile internally about.

An interesting thought struck me as I was riding back from the festival - it was the first time I'd been out of the city since arriving here on the 6th of September. Over two months and I've probably not traveled outside of a four mile radius. It was really refreshing to get out into the country. I wasn't expecting to feel as good as I did. Back home, on a normal day I drive at least 50 miles a day, if not closer to 80. Considering this, it makes sense that on some level staying in one place for so long would cramp my style. The country provided a welcome change of scenery and, for a change, the weather was excellent.

Before I sacked out I turned on the tube and The Nutty Professor was at the "Hercules, Hercules" family gathering. I think it is more funny in English than Russian. I watched for maybe a half hour. The very sexist comments of Eddie Murphy came in handy Monday evening at the free talk session. Only males attended and some how the topic turned to phrases (bordering on inappropriate) one might utter at a fine female one sees strolling by. A few of them had tuned into The Nutty Professor, so this made my job a little easier.

Arnold and God

August 18, 2003. Сергей (Sergei) enters a dentist office in Metairie, Louisiana - someplace in/around New Orleans. His boat leaves in a few hours, but he received permission to have one of his teeth outted. Only the nice dentist wouldn't do it. "Good tooth," he said. "Two days and I can have you fixed up real nice." A lot of good that will do for the next two week voyage to Africa with chickens. He was nice enough to prescribe some free pain killers which I'm sure was appreciated. And the receptionist allowed him to have the current Newsweek edition.

Friday evening after buying milk and a few things on the way home from school, I was looking forward to an early bedtime so that I could get up and do the transatlantic thing. After checking my email, eating a little more macaroni and cheese (the pan I cooked last Sunday is almost gone - maybe by next Tuesday), and semi-readying myself for bed I picked up that rogue Newsweek and read a few articles. Interesting in a way - the American magazine travels to who knows how many countries and finds its way into the hands of an American.

I've actually never seen any of the Terminator films. Considering the effect they have had on American pop culture, I should probably do that someday. I think my knowledge of Schwarzenegger is limited to how to spell his last name. This was quite a feat back in the third grade - my best friend knew and since I couldn't let him outdo me I learned how. The cover article of the August 18, 2003 Newsweek was about Ah-nuld and whether he had a chance to become governor of California. I suppose that is old news now, but the information contained in the magazine was pretty fascinating. Now I want to see his late-70s documentary Pumping Iron. It seems like it could be one of those diamonds in the rough for teaching a few years down the road. I particularly enjoyed a colleague's quote: "I admire him. Arnold’s not someone you like. You either admire him — or you hate him."

Finishing Newsweek, I picked up a religiousy book off the shelf. It was by Clifford Goldstein, an acquaintance of mine from back in Maryland. I consider him to be in a special class of personal mentors, if you will, that have an incredible depth of knowledge not bounded by their specialty. A mere 142 pages later, I understood the third chapter of John's gospel in a different way. Yes, the popular football sign John 3:16 is found in this passage, but the context is that a respected religious leader secretly believes that Jesus is who He claims to be, but cannot risk ruining his fine career so meets up under the bridge on the far side of town at midnight to avoid being seen. Jesus cuts to the chase and lays out why some downright smart-as-dirt people will be aboard the boat for his kingdom while their pastors and religious leaders won't.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was born on the wrong side of the tracks at a bad time. Yet he has risen to be a significant guiding force of the world's sixth largest economy. That is pretty amazing. Of course, so is winning the Mr. Olympia title seven times. He is the epitome of American ideals. A nobody can become a somebody, if s/he tries hard enough. Possibly the climb up the social ladder can be written off as 'knowing the right people,' but chiseling one's body into the massive beast as Arnold has only comes with excessive daily effort. The Newsweek had a picture of the think tank war-room where the Schwarzenegger advisors conversed. Around the room were numerous photos, trophies, and statues memorializing the man. Any snot-nose wimp can look to Arnold and find an incredible role model, an example of one hard working - and succeeding - dude.

The essence of Jesus' midnight conversation is that in order to get your ticket to heaven (and a really long retirement), all you have to do is admit that you don't know how to run your own life - that you don't know what is best for you. It's the next step that gets me. You have to turn the reins to your life carriage over to the Creator. If you buy into the notion of a Creator and Forever Friend and all that stuff it really shouldn't be that difficult to do. Unless the word independent is in your vocabulary. As illusory as it may be, I tend to think of myself as a pretty self sufficient dude - I've put myself through college with very little debt; I am involved in a semi-long (1 year in two weeks), albeit long-distance at the moment, relationship; I have a computer, apartment, well-paying job (considering cost of living), and a good amount of free time on my hands to boot. And I did it by myself. (Now I just need to get some muscles, make a few movies, and move to California, right?)

Totally unexpected, but my readings complemented each other rather nicely. Two methods of success. Strength and self-dependence. Weakness and total dependence. The contrast between what every American strives to achieve during their life and the essence of Christianity are at odds with each other. And although I can understand and agree with my head why the Jesus way is better, my heart is with Arnold. Hopefully, "I'll be back" before it's "Hasta la vista, baby."

Technophilaelic Orientated Posting

I enjoy washing dishes, but Cinderella can keep the down on the knees floor scrubbing job for all I care. Oh well, my apartment does look a little cleaner now. I'd venture to say that it wasn't this clean when I moved in. Also decided to rearrange the kitchen. While not good for lots of people, I have only entertained one other person once. So I'm not too worried about the bachelorish feel. And besides, I like it.

This evening I showed lots of pictures from home. I suppose I should go through and delete a bunch of bad pictures and ones with family members loafing around the house in their underwear. But everybody loves to see a nice undy shot once in a while. Actually, probably not. I scarred several people for life.

This morning I was awakened by the phone. It is actually a very interesting feeling that I've not had the luxury of experiencing prior to Russia. In both rooms that I've lived in at home, I have not had a phone line in my room. That coupled with the fact that all three cell phones I've owned have had horrible reception in general, and in particular in my room, I have not been roused due to rogue phone calls. Alas, Russia brings with it many good and bad things - a not always good one is the phone calls. This morning it was nice, and I was sort of expecting it. I told Anastasia to give me a buzz around 6 my time. We chatted about who knows what for nearly three hours. Before you go whipping out your calculator to figure out how much she'll be in debt, she was using my calling card. The rates to Kaliningrad aren't astronomical, but compared to what net2phone gets you other places, they aren't cheap either. I think the rate is 18 cents a minute. Which is why I started looking for something less expensive. Everything seemed to be pointing to Skype. I had kinda-sorta used it for computer to computer calls and with the latest version for Macintosh, calling from computer to landline is supported. Wednesday evening, I gave it a whirl. I called the voice messaging system that my folks have on their phone and was going to leave a message. Unfortunately, the DTMF tones didn't work correctly and after three tries I gave up. But for 3 calls to the US totaling maybe 5 minutes I was only charged 7 cents. That was cool. So I called a real person. My old cell phone. And from my perspective it worked great. I could hear and understand everything the other person said perfectly. The other party did not have the same experience. At 0.017 Euros a minute it had all the makings of a happy (cheap) solution. I think the issue is my connection to the internet. At home I top out at 33.6, with 28.8 being a more regular occurrence. As I was watching the amount of out/in data while on the phone, the amount coming to me was always greater than the amount headed out. Judging from this rather imprecise measurement, I blame the modem speed (or lack thereof) for my telephony woes. To make matters a little worse, I took my laptop to the office today and connected - at 48 kbps. That means that my spliced/diced telephone wire in the apartment is to blame. Perhaps this is a good excuse to get broadband. With prices starting at $17 a month, it really isn't too expensive. I suppose if it cuts down on my phone bill of family/friends calling it would be a smart move.

Not much else is happening. On my vacation week I ended up visiting zero museums. I walked home from the office following the tram route one evening and stopped in a few stores. Bought a mouse to go with my keyboard. My mini-me mouse was getting to be too much for my hands. For maybe three weeks or so I've been having a nice amount of pain associated with typing/mousing on the computer and writing in general. Perhaps my years of horrergonomics (nice word, huh?) are catching up with me. As a result the past few weeks have seen me purchase wrist rests, rearrange the computer hutch, and consider learning the Dvorak keyboard layout. The closest success I ever had with Dvorak in the past was convincing brother number two to rearrange the keys of an old keyboard so that he could learn to type fast and efficiently. He played around with it for a week or so, then stopped if I remember correctly. With the advent of IMing he went from a hunt-and-pecker to a super-de-duper-four(or maybe five)-finger-wonder. I maintain that next to my mom (who has played the piano for 59 years), he can type the fastest out of anybody in my family.

What else can I say? At this very moment I am ~5 000 words behind in my novel. My plan is to only write on the week days of November. On the first week 1k words, second week 2k, etc. This puts me finishing my pile of rubbish with four or five days to edit and revise. I had wanted to set up a small blog so that people could read my prose as it evolved, but decided against it. Depending on what form it is in at the end of the month, I may post it someplace. Provided I ever start, I will be using the project to acquaint myself with LaTeX. I've heard computer dorks banter on and on about why everybody should use TeX for everything, but have never had the time or interest to learn. With my fairly recent conversion to OS X, I've lost the best (in my opinion) word processor to grace the face of the planet to date - WordPerfect. For simple documents, any text editor does the trick, but when I want something more than text, WP gets the nod. Now I achieve this via VirtualPC on my iBook. It is not, as they say, very quick. Usable for sure, but not what I want to live with for the rest of my computering days. Hence the thrust to learn LaTeX.

After a suggestion and some thought, I will be rearranging the troypix site. From now on, the albums added will be date wise, sorted in reverse chronological order. This will make it simpler to see what I've just experienced. I would like to also have a few albums sorted more categorically. I'm not sure exactly where they will go yet, but they will be clearly marked as FAVorites, or something to that effect.

Happy All Saints Day!

A day late, that is. I suppose it is high time I return to this venue. After a rather unexpected absence of over three weeks I am here to stay (until I get lazy again). Over the next few days, I will be finishing up two or three entries and then post date them. Keep your eye peeled for entries after the 10th of October.

My birthday went well enough. I received several nice gifts - an A4 size framed picture with small pieces of amber attached, a small amber sailboat, a box of chocolates, a card, and a picture book of Kaliningrad. Each member of my family sent a card with me for me to open on my birthday. This evening I stopped by the post office on the way home from work and picked up a package that my Grandma had sent me from the US - it was another birthday present. I suppose that means that I have received everything sent my way except for the two cards from my girlfriend.

Today I started interviewing students again for the next semester at school. Only one slightly annoying thing happened. One of my star students (NOT!) came to sign up for the next level. I told him that he didn't bother to come to the last few classes and take the final, so based on that and several other reasons (minimal attendance, zippo comprehension) I thought he should take the same level over. What I wanted to say was that he should enroll for the level prior to the one he took, but didn't. Anyhow, he didn't want to retake the level, so advanced. Probably shouldn't be saying this in a public forum, but every ruble matters, so we can't turn the students away. Seems like a crock to me, but perhaps it will shock me into the realities of a public teaching profession. No Child Left Behind means that they all advance, right?

For the past two hours I've been baking a cake. It will be edible, but I messed it up royally this time. I actually made the same cake for my fellow teachers when we celebrated my birthday. After a really rotten day at school I arrived home and stayed up till 2:30 baking a cake. Brought it into school and we only ate about a quarter of the cake. So then the secretary and accountant divided the remainder and took it home with them in their ever ready plastic bags. At the time it perturbed me that they were walking off with my labor of love (er, um, experiment is more like it). After a little while I was glad I didn't have to eat so much of the cake as I had had more than my share of the batter and it was a little dry to boot. Anyhow, today I tried making the cake in a different shape so it would fit into my tupperware container for easier transport. After botching the first layer of six (and proceeding to gulp it down), I made it through the remaining five, but don't have a very good feeling about it. Oh well, I enjoyed my collection of Seinfelds while baking. Kosmo Kramer is my hero. Someday I want to be as cool as he is.

The realization struck me either yesterday or today that I want to do too many things. From my 39 item todo list for October, I finished 13. I suppose a third isn't all that bad, but that means two-thirds didn't get accomplished. The reason this came to mind was that on my vacation week (this week), I thought of going to a bunch of museums and seeing Kaliningrad a little better than I've had a chance to. And I still have yet to set foot in a museum and here my week is nearly half way over. On one hand it is good to have a dream and something to strive for. Yet on the other, it is nice to posses the capability to set realistic goals. I wouldn't worry too much about it though. Good things come in unexpected forms.

The only other news is about my NaNo. It is now day two and I have not penned anything. That means I'm two thousand words behind. My strategy is to only write on the weekdays - 1 thousand words per day the first week, 2 thousand the second, 3 thousand the third, and 4 thousand words each and every day the fourth week. That gives me the weekends off to do something else and regroup for the next week and a few extra days at the end of the month to give a read over the whole hodgepodge and make a few changes. At first my idea was to write short stories, but I think it will be a lot more engaging for my nonexistent readers (and therefore challenging for me) to create one big story. Tie the characters lives together in a mixed web of something or another that we call reality.

And here we have it. The end of the post. In it I will comment that those of you whose email I have (and whom I want to be able to contact me in the future) will be receiving a note from me soon. Midweek last week I received the nice email saying that accounts of inactive students will be deactivated around the 20th of this month. Email will still reach me until mid-March when the next sweep happens, so don't fret too much about me not receiving your valued communique.