Odds and Ends Thursday 59

True. It’s not Thursday. But next week I’ll be doing Odds and Ends on Friday, so I think it all evens out, right? In any case, coming off of 4th of July weekend has been a downer. There’s not another holiday until Father’s Day sometime next month, and my ability to stomach these long periods of solitude seems to be dwindling. This next stretch of school is something akin to the President’s Day to Memorial Day stretch in corporate America, where it’s just a filthy long time to go without a 3-day weekend. Here are some other odds and ends from the week:

• Last year was pretty great because this stretch got broken up by a surprise 2-week break because of Swine Flu. Okay, so it wasn’t so great for the kids who got Swine Flu. But the rest of us got a needed break.
  
• Something is wrong with my optical mouse. I have to turn it 90° to the right in order to properly orient it with the cursor’s movements on the screen. That is, when I hold it normally, with the buttons at the top, the cursor moves to the right when I move the mouse up. When I move the mouse to the left, the cursor goes up. I uninstalled the device driver, and I can’t find anything in the control panel. Anybody got any other ideas?
  
• There are so many mosquitoes in my house! I don’t know how they got in and why they can’t find it in themselves to fly into the bug zapper. I swear, every time I finish an episode of The Wire I’ve got 4 new bites to show off. Obnoxious.
  
• Did everyone catch the Finder-Spyder reference in Monday’s post?
  
• At interchurch athletics last Friday, second place in the senior boys competition—the group I was scoring—came down to the very last event, the high jump. For whatever reason the high jump took forever to finish, and so I walked out there to watch firsthand. I think I was the only one in the crowd that knew how crucial this event was to the outcome of the day.
  
• The man next to me in Saturday’s post is John from Peace Corps Samoa Group 6. He’s now Associate Professor of Samoa at University of Hawai’i Mānoa. He’s in Samoa for the American summer with a bunch of Fulbright scholars.
  
• I watched Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” again last night. I watch that movie a lot.
  
• I finally got the Guinness out of my refrigerator this weekend. I’ve had 7 in there since I got back from Hawai’i, and in my tiny little fridge, 7 tall Guinnesses take up a lot of space.
  
• The first guys from group 80 to leave at the end of their service take off in less than 3 weeks. It feels a little weird because once group 80’s gone, we’ll be next in line. Home stretch.

That’s all I got for this week. I hope you’re well. Pictures below.

The chalkboard from this morning's English class in which I made the kids write journal entries explaining the steps in "Making the Saka". Literally, saka means to boil, but it also tends to be an umbrella term for making a fire; boiling water; readying the taro, bananas or breadfruit to be boiled; boiling them; preparing the salted pe'epe'e sauce; dumping the water; and cooking the starchy vegetables in the sauce.
The kids had a host of questions about vocabulary words. So I drew little pictograms along with the English. As seen above.

Scout wrestling my laptop's power cord.