Busy Busy Busy

So, my life got busy pretty quickly here. I just had my first day of teaching English classes and I think I was maybe a little too hard for the lower intermediate class, but just right for the higher intermediate class (which came second of course...I always do things better the second time around). But I'm pretty excited about teaching, which makes me feel good. I had a bit of a crash for a few weeks where I felt like there was nothing valuable I could offer in Monteverde. I've also got a million people begging me to give their children music lessons, even though I keep telling them I don't know what I'm doing. I mean, I can teach guitar fine, as long as no one wants to learn fancy fingerpicking or theory. But Suzuki violin? I've never done it. I did Suzuki cello from age 5 to 18, but only one person wants cello here and she'll only be here for a few months. And I don't have a cello. Or music. Nor do I want to lug a cello around on these horrible rocky roads. But violin, maybe. I found a person today who is willing to lend me a bunch of violin teaching resources, so maybe I'll do it. But not the three year old. Just the six and olders. I'm also starting a contradance band, which I think I mentioned before. Pictured are some of the key players, though I'll be calling, not playing. I'm not good enough to do them simultaneously. I'm no Bill Olsen. We played for an open mic coffeehouse pizza night fundraiser for the school. It was super fun. Annie's 7-8 science class played this whole routine on the instruments they made, some of which were amazing.

The other reason I've gotten so busy, or at least preoccupied, is that we've taken in a street dog, photo included. Please notice how thin she is. The vet in town only spays/neuters animals every so often, doing them all on one day, so a local group of residents (including myself) organized to collect all the street dogs they could to get them fixed. But then we needed people to care for the animals post-surgery. We volunteered to take one they've been calling Flor. She's very malnourished (see photos of how skinny she is) and wouldn't eat for three days after the surgery. We tried everything we could think of in the house. Finally, I gave her a frozen marrow bone, which I get from the butcher who recognizes me and remembers that I want huesos (bones) for my dog. He's cute. She devoured it so the next day I got some pork sausage from the fábrica (cheese factory that also makes pork products with all the pigs that eat the whey) and then all of a sudden she's eating 4 times a day. We had been force feeding her up to this point, and not very successfully I might add. Pureéd chicken soup, soaked dry dogfood, pancakes (she did briefly show an interest in these). But now relief. She's eating. She won't die in my care. I was really worried about her on top of starting a new job, being pressured to teach music lessons, and trying to fix the school's technology problems (I don't know as much as people think I know. I just like to teach web 2.0 stuff). But now I can breathe a little easier. We even went on a short walk this evening and she was almost sprightly. She and Toast have played "bite my face" a few times today, which I love. Puppy TV is one of the things that can pull me out of any funk. Kind of like a really good LOLcat photo. Please see http://icanhascheezburger.com if you don't know what I'm talking about. We call our new dog Flora Segunda Pancakes (last word pronounced in Spanish pahn-CAY-kees). Flora Segunda is the name of a book we liked, and since they were already calling her Flor, it fit. She is the color of pancakes, ate pancakes as her first solid food, and I had decided weeks before getting her that I wanted to name a dog pancakes (to go with Toast and the non-existent Burger). So far we like her pretty well, though she did eat a book today. Hmmm. What does that say? Good taste? Or she knows what we value and wants to destroy it? Hmmm. She sticks very close to us and seems to be adapting to having people quite well, though we know she was decently cared for at the hostel where she was kind of living before. So. There's my life this week.