Inner Pattern

Another week in swing. Yesterday was somewhat horrific, copiers didn't work right all day today. The copier guy came today to fix them. I had asked him to run a thorough test after he fixed it. He ran 1500 copies of the tardy slip page. 1500. There are at least 60 tardy slips to a page.

...

The copier definitely works. The administrative assistant said she didn't think we would use that many tardy slips in the next decade.

We had the most interesting main course I've had here yet tonight. It was roast chicken. But they were whole chickens. Stuffed with apples, cinnamon, butter and.... onions. ONIONS??? Yes, onions. And we had sugar and vinegar green beans and baked potatoes. It was an interesting dinner. The chicken would have been better without the mixed cinnamon and onion taste, but was pretty decent anyway.

I played spades with a couple folks the other day. It had been long enough since the last time I played that I forgot it was a partners game, and didn't realize it until midway through the second hand (after a practice hand) when my partner (who had bid nil) said, "Um, if you had the king of diamonds, why didn't you cover me earlier when
I put down the ten?" .... The best part of the story is that we still won, after I had a killer hand, bid 9, and he bid nil, so we stormed back from the jaws of defeat to snatch victory from the abyss.

Additionally, I've been working out. I was getting all mad at myself at the small amounts that were all I was able to lift, like I could only do 48 pounds on leg lifts, 70 pounds on the leg press. Yeah... Can you guess where this is going? In Afghanistan, they use the metric system. So... that's like 105 pounds on the leg lift, 150 some odd pounds on the leg press. And I did like 80 pounds of arm weights, press, lift, pull. Suddenly, I felt much better about myself. I worked out for around a half hour, nothing overly intense, just enough to start to knock the edges off.

As far as other news goes, work goes OK, still got lots to do, and life goes on. As I was helping one of the new female teachers with her computer today, she asked me how the adjustment process was going. I told her it was going fine, and I didn't think it has been that much of an adjustment. And really, it has and it hasn't been. I mean, I have little things to adjust to, like not wearing shorts, not flushing toilet paper, not having hand towels or paper towels in bathrooms. There are also big things to adjust to, like different job responsibilities, (Boy, that really is a long word) not always being able to communicate with people because of the language barrier. However, these don't really feel that difficult to me. And there are lots of things that I don't feel like have been an adjustment. Part of it is the fact that I see plenty of Americans, most people I deal with speak English pretty well, and we eat Westernized food and live in a semi-westernized compound. Part of it is the fact that I adjust to things pretty quickly. But most of it is that there isn't a lot to make me feel unadjusted.

Kind of hard to explain, but this simple question really helped me process a couple other things that I have been thinking on. Well, now, I can't talk about those things here yet. But really, things here are going pretty fine. Friday and Saturday were pretty rough, but today is better. Every day, in every way, better and better.