amalgamation.

Here I am standing next to the water filter waiting for my nalogene to be filled (what I like to call 'making water') and I can hear Nan upstairs filling the bucket, also known as our laundry machine. It is times like these when I become, for one quick minute, aware of how many things I think are normal when in regards to the 'real' world (America) they are absolutely absurd.

It seems this monsoon season our house has been host to wildlife after wildlife (not including the mold growing on the walls). The most recent installment has been mice. As in numerous. At first I was sure I was simply hallucinating again, seeing little black blurbs running around the periamter of the room testing my geometric ability of shapes. When Nan finally mentioned that she thought she had seen a mouse, I became a bit more certain it had to be the truth..either that or we both were going a bit insane..
One night I went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I turned the light on and saw the devil eating our precious cheese on the floor. This solved it; yes, mice were a definite problem. And what did I do? In true Emily Shriver fashion, I pretended it never happend.
Flash forward two weeks. The house begins to smell a bit and occasional squeaks are heard from behind the fridge. One night Saroj tells me that she tried for an hour to catch the mouse so that she could "beat it" and take care of the problem but that it was just too fast for her so we needed to go and buy poision.
Now this just seemed too cruel so instead we set up one rocking watery death trap, using the laundry bucket, our infamous ax, a few sheets of paper and bits of quiche, positive that no one in their right mind, mice included, would be able to resist the temptation of quality quiche.

night one: no luck
night two: again, no luck..we begin to forget about the trap even though in order to leave the house we have to step over it
night three: don't bother to check
night four: have an extreme night out, continue the party back at our house, moving the trap to the corner to avoid knocking over.
morning five: hungover and cleaning up the living room I discover not one but two VERY dead mice in the bucket. meaning they had definitely been in the bucket the night before and who knows how long before that.
(note: this is the bucket that nan is using to do her laundry in this very moment...)
Our house is not only host to mice, we also have a large collection of dust everywhere. After bribing a fellow English teacher to let us use his vacuum cleaner, with the agreement that I pick it up and return it, I went on a full out cleaning RAMPAGE. Nothing got in my way and aside from the frequent power outages and uncooperative short cord, I was able to feel pretty satisfied with my work.
Then it came time to return it.
Adam lives UP the mountain from me and the path there is not a nice paved walkway; it is makeshift stairs carved into dirt. This was a bit of a problem. Think of the movie 'Once' and the scene when Marketa rolls her vacuum down the street to be fixed, looking charming and collected all the while.. in fact it is almost quixotic.
This was not the case here.
With the help of my neighbors we laboriously lugged the awkwardly shaped beast of a machine up the hundreds of steps, traversed through a recent land slide, narrowly steered our way through Indian traffic, fended off the wildlife and reached the destination completely dripping in sweat. But oh was it worth it.
I recently had my first opportunity to experience professional development Indian style. Four other members of the English department and I headed down to Dehradun for a "grammar without tears" 6 hour session. This was quite an interesting experience to say the least...being the only white people in the place we definitely got our fair share of attention and a lot of candy. One of the activities was to write a poem structured in about the level of a fourth grader. While everyone else wrote about how wonderful and academically stimulating their schools are, I wrote about Harry Potter and was asked to share. While my poem was a complete piece of crap and ridiculously pathetic, it received enthused applause and a Kitkat.. I don't think I need to say anymore..

(just to clarify: the white girl is with me)

Last week Woodstock had its annual Cross Country day which translates to every single student is required to run and if they do it in an almost impossible time, they receive points for their house. Yes, houses, like in Harry Potter (sorry for the double reference) except rather than being named after heroic figures, our houses are named after birds: Merlins, Eagles, and Condors. While it was not the ideal way for me to spend an afternoon, it was quite amusing to watch majority of the students struggle their way through the race, motivated by the dinner of junk food (tuck) they would be able to indulge in upon completion.

Sometimes the race doubled as an obstacle course..

Students re-consuming all the calories just burned

Brown ferns are the sign that monsoon is close to an end. Every morning Nan and I fool ourselves into thinking we see these and that surely, tomorrow will be the last day of monsoon. We have been fooled over and over again, but today the sun came out for four straight hours. I took full advantage of the opportunity and brought out all of my nastiest mold ridden items to try and dry them even the tiniest bit. Hopefully this soon becomes a daily occurrence.

Note: I apologize for the lack of consistency or any underlying theme in this blog, this is what happens when I try to write after drinking.