Mondays with a Grain of Salt (or, I Am Not a Snack)

A real update is coming soon. For now, I will say life is going OK. The move should be taking place this weekend, with a housewarming party from HOPAC's Staff-Parent Association taking place Saturday evening. More info on life here soon. :)

But, to ensure my new posts aren't few and far between, here is a fresh one just for you. Behold two mantras I have adopted here in Dar:

Take Mondays with a grain of salt
I've noticed on the past two Mondays I've been a little frustrated at school because of little things. My email's not working again. The last class (not mine) left my classroom a mess. I have to walk to the admin building a few too many times for various tasks. My whiteboard markers are ridiculously faint. My laptop's Microsoft Office program hates me. I have to play musical computers to order a print job, which in itself requires I move files onto my USB flashdrive. Oh, et cetera, et cetera. Even a British/Western-influenced school in Tanzania functions differently than an average school in the U.S., and it's on Mondays it seems I have to readjust myself all over again to this fact. By Tuesday, I'm OK; it's just Mondays.

After talking to another new teacher, who agreed she experiences the same "Monday frustrations," I realized that (A) hooray I'm not alone, but (B) more than that I have to take Mondays with a grain of salt. And not just on campus, but even when I come home after being slightly irritated at school. I have to remember once I leave HOPAC on Mondays that I shouldn't get upset about anything that might happen later that day (i.e., homesickness/entrapment freakout LOL). Of all days, Monday is the day I have to plan for indulging myself. Watching four back-to-back episodes of "The Office" on dvd? Sure. If that's what it takes to unwind and bring the day to a sufficient end. A new day will dawn (praise God for Tuesdays), so I just gotta take Mondays with a grain of salt.

I am not a snack
Oh, bug bites. You sure are fun. I was so proud of myself the other day because my bite total was... zero! Yet the next day I got a few and the day after that four more in one afternoon. (A mosquito HAD to be hiding under my desk. I didn't have those four bites on my lower leg when I got to school that morning!) The worst of it, really, is that they seem to LOVE my joints. With my current tally, all but four are on joints. Oh, and the ones on my feet are seriously the worst. I wake myself up in the night itching my feet in my sleep.

But back to the joints. In the last week, I have had bites on each big toe's knuckle, one on the knuckle of my toe next to my big toe, one on my knee, one on my elbow, and one the knuckles of both my pointer fingers. What is the deal with these jointy areas?! Anyway, I've been perplexed by the mosquitoes' desired sweet spots, so I had to share. When scratching the four bites that align down my leg (a four-inch linear display of pink spots between my knee and my ankle), I decided I should have a shirt that has a mosquito in a red circle with diagonal line through it that reads "I am not a snack." Indeed.

LG