Day 13: The Longest Hour

I'm happy to report I got up at a reasonable hour this morning, inching me along towards my goal of going to bed by 11 pm and up by 6 am. My plan is to even start jogging again in the mornings. Today, to help with that, I put on my black long underwear with my terrycloth kelly green running shorts over, as well as my long-sleeved black shirt I stole from Tom when he left and my tomato red sweatshirt, also Tom's, with inherited cigarette burn in the shoulder. I also wore my pink running hat and my orange Asics, just to complete the look. I told myself I'd go for a jog all afternoon. Instead, I tried to go find another charger for my phone to replace the one I lost on the old dusty traveling trail.

No luck, though. The specialized cell phone store was mysteriously closed. But the nice lady in the furniture store under "Everything for the Home" assured me they'd be open tomorrow morning. I swung by the corner store to get water, cheese, juice and bananas and my friend Inna (?) was there. She's my favorite. She's 25, got this great bouncy red hair, sparkling eyes and gorgeous little freckles, and this kick-ass attitude. "Why get married so I can wash some guy's laundry and cook him food all the time? I can do that for myself. I don't need no man," she says when we have a beer after work sometimes. I'm thinking about inviting her over sometime. Anyway, she got all happy and said "Priviet!" to me, which is like saying "What's up, girlfriend!" and looked me up and down. She giggled and asked me why I was dressed like I was. I made some lame excuse about going in for sport, which was good enough for her. As least she's kind about it, unlike some other characters in my life. Sometimes you just have to wear a pink hat, red sweatshirt, and green shorts over black leggings with orange shoes.

But at least I dragged out all the sporty clothes, one step closer to actually doing it. I did even go out and jogged for like 3 minutes at about 5 o'clock, but it was so cold and dark that I just decided I'd wait until tomorrow morning. I didn't want to start my jogging regimen with a twisted ankle from a loose paving stone or a fracture from falling into a sewer pipe, the risk of which is quite great in my town, despite the leafy branches kind-hearted people stick into the gaping holes to warn the nearsighted, drunken, or crazy Americans who stumble upon them.

I worked all morning cleaning out my email and researching options for my culture club. I want to find a place on the web our kids can use to post discussions or develop a newspaper in English. Our school already has an online newspaper in Russian (I'm featured, too! Check it out: Interview with Sarah! Below my picture, click on "Читати далі" to see the rest of the article), so it seems a small leap to develop one in English. I have to find out if we already have hosting anywhere (what is the Russian for "web hosting" anyway?), but in the meantime I found some cool websites. One is a great place for school newspapers in the U.S., but it costs $50 to register, although after that it's free. I'm thinking Rockford can register and then my school can contribute. I also started a group page on yahoo just to see what's up, and that has potential too. I envision our kids starting discussion threads to throw questions and answers back and forth. I'm not sure how many pictures we can put up, but we might be able to post pictures, too. It seems pretty cool. I just have to wait to see what my adopted counterpart in Rockford thinks about these plans.

I also got on the internet to look at ideas for a fall festival party at school. I'd like to raise some money to buy a bulletin board and some shelving for our English room. It would be great to have some extra funds for printing and photocopies, too. Right now everyone sort of scrambles for that out of our own pockets. I will propose this idea to Elena on Monday morning to see what she thinks. Ludmila has already told me to go ahead and do anything I want like this, but I need some kind of support to bring it all together. Things we could do at the party:

• Carve jack-o-lanterns
  
• Apple bobbing
  
• Act out scary stories
  
• Make masks
  
• Dance party
  
• Costume contest?
  

We could even make it a community party, too, and maybe I can get the lunch ladies on my side and use the kitchen. Then we could have:

• Apple cider
  
• Roasted pumpkin seeds
  
• Pumpkin pastries
  
• Honey roasted nuts
  
• Pot luck dinner
  

We'll see. At least I have the preliminary plans ready. These are all pretty low-budget things. Even if we could charge enough to break even, just to have a fun party would be a blast.

I've also got to discuss with Elena the potential to have a community adult English club at school in the computer room. There are some tables and chairs there, it's light, and the computers mean I could teach people about the internet and teaching resources the teachers can find there. I wish we had a printer in the computer room so we could print interesting things we find. Maybe I can get the administration to help us buy a printer. After all, I am quite good friends with the leader of the rayon. Hmmm...

I made pizza for one tonight (it will feed me for 4 days). It got me to thinking about the story "Like Water For Chocolate" though, because the last two times I made pizza with Kathryn and Joaquin it rocked, but this time, by myself, it didn't quite work. It's edible, but the dough didn't rise for some reason. Either the yeast was too old, or the water was too hot, or the room was too cold, or I used too much yeast, or my heart too heavy with a saddish sort of loneliness. The dough turned out sodden and chewy to match. It didn't help that I started reading "Riding the Iron Rooster" by Paul Theroux, which seemed to incite my imaginary self to fly out to trains and traveling and people I wasn't traveling with. Sigh.

You know, you can actually make quite a killer peppers-onion-and-sausage pizza in Ukraine. I found this bolognaise sauce in a packet that's exactly the right size for one pizza. And the salami is super tasty. So that's good.