No Picture Necessary

Can I just say time flies when you’re having fun. I can honestly say this week like every one before it, has flown by. I woke up on Monday the next thing I knew it was going to be Friday. Crazy how that works. Crazy how different events mark time.

This past week I have been working in the classroom of the youngest munchkins at church. I am done with all the projects for their playtime. Now I am helping with homework, counting and mostly coloring since I can do that much with the Spanish I know! I also just spend time being with them and playing. This is a fun switch and it definitely passes the time. It is nice being able to get to know the children a little more each time I am there. Fewer unknowns and more hugs.

English class is going great.  This week we had our first student take her test. One of the things we do in English class is to prepare a few of our students who are taking an English comprehension test in their schools. We practice with them twice a week to get them ready. By the end of this week we will have two students that will have taken not only an oral test but a written one as well. They don't get the results until next year but we celebrate with the fact that they did the best they can and pray for passing exams. It is a big accomplishment to pass this type of test and the other teacher and I are very proud of our students.

Halfway through the week my family hosted a little dinner party. I put up Christmas decorations, which I hot glued to the walls! I love doing things I have never done before. The wreathes were hung and the party was in full swing. We had so much food and so many people. It was truly a nice evening reminding me of my family gatherings. It kind of felt like Thanksgiving with lots of people talking and eating. Although my family’s language of choice is English we might hear a little French due to my Aunt. We can even hear a New York accent every once and awhile. Here, there was mostly Spanish with English thrown in the mix. The volume was no different than back home and we even had a few kids running around. What is a gathering when you don't have a child under the table hiding from an adult impersonating an animal and too much food in your tummy?

A picture is worth a thousand words they say. Against my better judgment I left my camera at home so a thousand words it is. Get ready for either an amazing story that will make you laugh like you experienced it with me or a five minute break as you let your mind wonder. We begin with potatoes, move on to an OCD gardener, and then to an epiphany about dragons, followed by a base jumping spider, and then back to potatoes. Twenty words with 980 words to go. I hope that while you're reading what was humorous for those people involved you will not be bored due to my lack of creative writing or my inability to manipulate the facts to sound better. Even if you find the story uninteresting you should still read it all because you have to find out the ending.  So, tally hoe and get ready to be enthralled…I hope!

Walking into the church I saw familiar faces. It was Saturday morning and we were getting ready to celebrate the church's anniversary. I was asked to wash the potatoes ~ that didn't sound too hard. Although I walked right past them the first time, not knowing what is in the sack. By sack, I mean a bag a foot shorter than me and I’m 5'2. Remember the potatoes and I will get back to them later because before I filled a basin of water to start boiling the water I stepped outside to talk with the pastor who was in the garden. When I questioned him, he mumbled to himself and proceeded to talk about a nice plant that he had only one of. To me only having one of that particular plant did not seem like a problem but for him it threw off his whole garden. He was a little OCD about the level and arrangement of the plants and he did not like the thought that right in the middle was a single green plant.  He wanted it to either multiply or die. Ranting to himself in not quite a whisper, he drew in another church member.

Then, as the pastor was directing his tangled words in our direction he had an epiphany.  Of course we jumped on that by asking the, oh so daunting question, “What is it?” He proceeded to tell us of how dragons can see really well in the dark ~ there sight is amazing according to the pastor.  Even in the daytime dragons wouldn't need glasses. The only time the dragon is at a disadvantage is at dusk when the sun is about to kiss the ground and the first star is ready to be seen.   The dragon’s eyes cannot adjust very quickly and so that is when you must STRIKE if you want to kill them. (Of course, if you see a dragon any time soon ~ killing it would be the best option.) Happy to have shared that fun epiphany with us the pastor picked up a plant and began to decide the best place to put it in his garden.

As I headed back into the kitchen I wasn’t sure if he found the perfect place or if he gave up on gardening all together because he remained holding the plant. While looking at us he took notice of a spider on the wall. Pastor informed us that he has the same spider in his house and that they named him Fred. These are base jumping spiders, or so I found out. To show us what he meant pastor took the innocent plant and began swatting at the spider in hopes of making it jump. Well, I don't have to tell you it ran and hid from the giant green thing trying to attack it.

Okay back to the big bag of potatoes.  I finally got water to start washing potatoes. They opened that bag and potatoes tumbled out.  I sat down with two children not yet in the age of double digits and we got to scrubbing. I checked the clock and noticed that it was 10:46 a.m. I also asked how many potatoes were in the bag ~ 700 potatoes. We all three hunkered down and started with our bare hands in a wash basin filled with water and begin to scrub the potatoes. For those of you who have never seen a potato outside of a grocery store they require more than a rinse off. These potatoes just came from a field and that means from underground!  We had to really scrub the dirt off of them and then fill up pots with potatoes. Halfway through we dumped the water and started fresh. In the end we had three pots ranging in sizes with heaping piles of potatoes. The small pot could cook two whole chickens in it and the large pot was large enough to be a great place I could hide if I was playing tag!  It was 12:49 when I have finished scrubbing my last potato. I didn't reach my 1,000 words but hopefully the picture I painted for you isn't too blurry.

If you liked this last story you will have to come back next week and find out if I ate those potatoes on Sunday for lunch or if I was all "potatoed" out. Until then, remember that time goes by quicker than you realize ~ so make the best of it.