Going away

Well, it finally happened. After days, nay weeks, of threatening our sponsor with early withdrawal of the team if they did not provide any work for us to do, we finally got the go ahead to pack up and head home. It only took 3 ultimatums. So now we're going back a week early and doing work around the base. It will be good to have something to occupy our time. Just look at what we were reduced to here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXDOy8FZ-Ow

A thing or two

Just a few quick updates:

1: As planned, the half of our team that was working at Dorsey high school traded place with the half that was working for New City Parish. Its nice to get a break from the school but man is it dull here. New City Parish is a broken organization. They have no money, no motivation, and no clue how to get things done. Theres only so much an NCCC team can do to help, and these guys need more than we can offer. What a waste of time and skills.

2: I volunteered to help run a weekly afterschool course for 8th graders teaching them how to best utilize their time in high school to prepare for college. What they didn't tell me until the night before was that I was actually designing and running the course solo. Thanks for the heads up! So I pulled that one out of my ass and got to the middle school with Sandhya ready to go. Only 3 kids showed up, none of them had been to the initial class the week before, and all of them were 6th graders. Were you planning for high school (much less college) in 6th grade? I know I wasn't. These kids had absolutely zero interest in what we had to teach and I don't blame them.

CYFC, the organization that had me doing this project, is a good group, but they have their heads so far up their own asses that they can't see what programs are working and which ones aren't.

3: Only 2 and a half more weeks til we leave this miserable city and crappy project. I can't wait for spring break. Camping at Yosemite? yes please!

a linguistic sidenote

When I say the word "cockroach," I add an extra 'a' syllable in there. "Cock-a-roach." I don't know where I picked this habit up; its just the way I've always said it. It wasn't until I heard people out here saying it that I realized the extra a is not in the word, and most people say it properly with 2 syllables. Now the linguist in me can detect a very faint sound between the k and the r that just naturally occurs because of the way our tongues work so I can see how that could get exaggerated into a full extra syllable in some dialects.

The reason I bring this up is because the other night, I wake up to find a cockaroach on me. Yes, it was fucking ON me! Crawling around on my shoulder like he owned the place. In my panic I flicked him off in the direction of Logan's cot. Logan was awake enough to realize what happened, and now a minor freak out turned into a major freak out as our scampering around trying to stomp the thing woke everyone else up, who in turn were grossed out by the fact there were cockaroaches in our basement. It was quite a sight to see. Or hear, since the lights were out.

My you-tube training prompted me to grab my camera to record the incident. I'd post it, but you really can't see anything (no night vision or lights on this thing, after all) and the audio is NOT family friendly, so I think I'll just leave that one on the hard drive for a while. G'night.