Merry Christmas!

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Hey guys,

In a few minutes I'll be catching a cab to the airport for my flight to Peru, where I'll be spending most of the 3 weeks of Christmas vacation. There won't be any blogging, but I bought a journal with like a werewolf or something on the cover, and January will be Journal Transcription Month.

Also, today's post is the 100th published post of Xave's Xlog, but I don't want to make a big deal of it, because there's a more important birthday coming up. Anyway, hope everyone has a great Christmas and New Year, and I'll see you later!

Xave

Sunday Smorgasbord

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It's 8:55 PM on Sunday night. I haven't thought out a blog post, but I didn't want to leave you guys in the dark, so I'm just going to write whatever comes to mind until 9:10, at which I'm going to drop everything and hit the publish button. Expect discontinuity and choppy grammar.

• this is the last week of school before Christmas. The schedule is kind of weird: on Tuesday we have an early dismissal and then, I think, staff meetings all day.
• On Wednesday we have another early dismissal, this time for a special event called Christmas Blaze. Last week, my boss, the secondary school principal Omar, asked me if I wanted to "participate" in Christmas Blaze. I enthusiastically replied that of course I would. Later, I found out "participate" actually meant "be one of the teachers kids pay money to throw pies at". Talk about lost in translation.
• After Christmas Blaze, there is a secondary staff party or something.
• I wanted to have parties in all my classes on Friday, but someone told me not to plan anything for Friday, cause there will probably be a whole school something. Or something. I dunno, nobody has mentioned even the first thing about it. Typical.
• In addition to all these events, I scheduled tests for all my classes this week. I still haven't made the tests.
• Also, I'm leaving for Peru on Saturday.
• So this means, these are the things I have to do this week. 1) make 2 tests, actually probably more than that because I want the tests to be slightly different for each section. 2) make study guides for both grades. 3) mark the tests before the end of the week (2 of them are on Thursday). 4) mark all the other stuff I have to catch up on. 5) enter all my grades from the beginning of the trimester into Excel. 6) export all those marks on to Engrade, a website I use to show my students their grades online. 7) I'm sure I'm forgetting like 8 hundred million things.
• And that's just the school stuff. Also: 8) plan/pack for Peru. I'll probably end up buying anything I need in Peru. 9) a secret project that I can't talk about but despite my inability to talk about it will nevertheless take up at least a couple hours. 10) once again, robably forgetting a lot and I just spelled probably robably but I don't have time to go back and change it even though it probably took more time to write this explanation and also look it's not that i'm complaining that i don't have any time, it's just that i imposed this deadline of 9:10 to write this blog post! what am i talkinga bout?
• ok, 5 minutes left. Here's what I did this weekend:
• Yesterday, I went with a co-worker, Karen (not the Karen I usually mention, Karen #2), to a music studio where her boyfriend's band was rehearsing. Their drummer was late so I got to sit in for a while, and it was a lot of fun. They play classic rock, a lot of Eric Clapton, and originals as well. I was very impressed - they're an excellent band. Apparently they won the Miche Rock Festival in 2008, and as a result went to a huge rock festival in Bogota. I went to the Miche Festival this year, which you can find in the blog archives, but the 15 minute nature of this post prevents me from linking to it cause it takes too long!
• After that we went to a bar to see a friend-band of theirs, which was pretty good.
• Oh man, 2 minutes left.
• Today I went tot he beach with Karen and Elizabeth. We enjoyed a leisurely lunch, which wasn't actually all that leisurely, because the wind was seriously some of the most intense wind I've ever seen, and the entire second floor restaurant we were in was literally swaying. Karen's half full beer bottle fell over, knocking over her other bottle, which rolled to the edge and fell to the first floor (okay, I'm breaking my time limit for this one correction: by Karen's "other" beer bottle I mean her already empty one. We had a very long wait for our food. Karen is not an alcoholic.) . Also, later on I was sitting in our cabana while the ladies swam when I was surprised by a wave that not only made its way all the way up to the cabanas, but was KNEE DEEP, and swept all our shoes away. OH MAN 10 SECONDS LEFT OKAY PUBLISH POST NOW BLOG! SEEYA GUYS LA

Candle Day

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Today is a holiday here in Colombia, the purpose of which is to celebrate the Immaculate Conception. The actual name of the holiday is something that I probably can't spell in Spanish, but it translates to Candle Day (it sounds better in Spanish).

Yesterday, in expectation of the upcoming day off, I asked people about the traditions of Candle Day, and heard varying things. Among the alleged traditions:

• lighting candles
• fireworks
• getting up at 3 or 4AM for candles and fireworks
• getting up at dawn for candles and fireworks
• partying
• drinking, specifically rum

Karen and I decided to wander around the neighborhood last night to check out the festivities, but I don't think anything had really started, aside from a couple of small apartment-building-front-yard parties. We saw a lot of lights, but most of those were probably just Christmas lights. And we went to dinner and then headed across the street for a beer, but neither location seemed unusually busy or celebratory.

At 3AM I was awakened by noise. I looked out my window and sure enough, there were some fireworks. I don't know why it's a middle of the night thing, but yep, people really do get up in the middle of the night to celebrate.

Now, in order for you to fully realize my observation of the celebrations, I need to describe my state a little more. Obviously I was drowsy, having just been woken up. And I only watched the fireworks for about 20 seconds, because that's when they ended. So I didn't have enough time to shake myself into full consciousness, and coupled with the fact that I was watching something fairly out of the ordinary, this brief fireworks viewing was perhaps the most dreamlike thing I've ever witnessed that actually happened. And this next part is the sort of thing that makes me believe it really was just a dream, but I'm pretty sure they were shooting the fireworks, inadvertently or not, at the walls of the apartment building, where they bounced off before eventually finding a patch of air to explode in.

There you have it: a foreigner's semi-conscious account of the festivities of a holiday he doesn't fully understand. If that's not classic travel blog material, I don't know what is.

Nitrogen is a Common Xave Element

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Let me be upfront. This post is about farting. (I'm not sure if farts actually contain nitrogen, but whatever.) Specifically, my farting habits. So if you don't want to hear about that, just close the tab now. (And if you don't use tabs, get off the internet, cause you internetsuck.)

Ha ha, I knew you wouldn't leave. Who doesn't want to hear about farts?

Anyway, I wasn't always a farter. Actually, that's not true: I've always engaged in my share of flatulation, but it (my flatulation) used to be mostly odorless. I don't know what changed, but in the last couple years, all my farts, without fail, smell awful.

I've noticed it particularly in school. It's a constant struggle to keep it in. It started last year when I did my two practica at Ottawa schools, and as far as I can remember I was 100% successful at holding it in, or at least confining it to my teacher area where it couldn't spread. But this year the teacher area is much less well-defined; just a small desk instead of a big lab bench. The lab bench, completely befitting of a physics classroom, was very effective at Fart Diffraction Prevention. Also, I have students coming up to me all the time, a big difference from last year when I would mostly visit them at their desk, when if there was an incident, I could pretend to be busy with something for a minute until the air cleared.

Consequently, my stifling success rate has dipped below 100%. There have been several times when I've dropped a serious bomb right in the student area, and in most cases they definitely knew where it came from. A couple were so bad they I totally cleared out the area, with the students dashing for cover on the other side of the classroom. Unfortunately, I didn't make any jokes about it the first couple times, and now I can't bring it up because it's awkward. But they definitely know me as the farter.

Fortunately, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. For one thing, as far as I can remember, all the really bad incidents luckily happened with the same class (I have 4 different classes). Secondly, my fart prevention has improved quite a bit. I can smell it coming a mile away now (not literally, thank god), giving me enough warning to prepare my butt muscles accordingly, and it hasn't happened for quite a while.

Hopefully my reputation as the farty teacher will start to diminish as the time since the last incident grows. But I must always be on the lookout, for a single infraction could ruin all my hard work, and I will once again be known as Dave Butt.

Joke's on Me

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Yesterday, I wrote about a colleague's newly-formed blog that I helped name. The name is kind of ridiculous, but she went with it anyway, so in yesterday's entry I wrote (only half-jokingly) "joke's on her".

Well, even though I was kidding (kind of), what went around came around, and I was the butt of not one but two running jokes yesterday, which I will now elaborate on.

After school yesterday, the regular crew of Friday soccer players, which includes a mix of teachers and maintenance workers, headed off to another school to play our first match against a different team. Upon arrival, I discovered that I didn't have my shorts. I could've sworn I had packed them in the morning, so I was somewhat baffled. Just when I was about to go ask a colleague if he had an extra pair, the affable (and non-English speaking) phys. ed teacher Jairo held up a pair of shorts that looked suspiciously like mine.

Before I go on, allow me to describe these shorts. I've had them for a very long time, more than 5 years for sure. They're just a regular pair of athletic shorts, and really the only ones I've had for, probably, the entire time I've had them. I've just never needed another pair, because they're good enough. A year or two ago, the drawstring broke, and now they look kind of ridiculous, because the waistband is kind of frayed upwards, but as long as I cover it with a shirt it's okay, and despite the lack of drawstring they still stay up.

That is, they did until yesterday. When Jairo found them, the lack of drawstring led him to believe they were the property of a very large person, and so he held them up and stretched them out for all to see, while joking that they must belong to Ivan, the large English teacher. Soon I recognized them as mine and was relieved that I wouldn't have to scrounge for an extra pair of shorts.

But when I got out on to the field to warm up, I realized that Jairo's stretching had made them a little too big, and I could only run for a few seconds before they started to fall down. By the time the game started, I hadn't yet devised a system for keeping them up, because I wasn't sure how big a deal it would be. But I quickly discovered it was, in fact, a big deal, when on my first ball possession I had to basically run while holding my shorts. Soon after I figured out that I could tuck my shorts into my boxers to hold them up, but not before my teammates had a good laugh.

The game was pretty good; the other team was better than us, but we kept it close, and trailed 3-1 at half-time. The second half was a more lackadaisical affair, especially on our part, since it was pretty hot (like usual) and we were playing on an actual-size soccer field, much bigger than what we're used to. Despite our lack of effort, though, we kept the score at 3-1 and it looked like it would stay there.

But then, somehow, we ended up on a 3 on 1 attack, with me being one of the three. Aldrin, one of the janitors, passed across to me, and I shot... right into the goalkeeper's stomach. But he couldn't hold on, the rebound came right back to me, and I tapped it into the open net.

This led to what could have been a great moment. Upon scoring a goal, a common celebration for soccer players is to take off their shirt and run around. It occurred to me that I could perform the same type of celebration, except instead of taking off my shirt I could pull my shorts down and run around with them around my ankles. It would have been hilarious. But I chickened out. Such a missed opportunity.

Anyway, the game ended 3-2, but we were all in good spirits afterward. The conversation inevitably turned to my shorts, and the joke became that I should be on the receiving end of the charity clothing drive that is currently happening at school for the holidays. Actually, that might be a good thing to do with my newly-gigantic shorts...

Linky Friday

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My Seattleite (is that the right word for someone from Seattle? I hope it is, because it's great, and if it is and I've heard it before I never realized it until now. It should be spelled Seatellite) colleague Karen blogged about a concert-show thing we went to. In the interest of efficiency, I won't be blogging about it, so just check hers out. Also, I already told you about our Thanksgiving dinner, but Karen's entry adds a couple of details and a couple more pictures.

Another colleague, Fathima the art teacher, started her own blog, and she's going to blog about art stuff she does in school, which sounds super-great! If that weren't incentive enough to check it out, I came up with the name for her blog, and even though she didn't get it at first (not being a native English speaker), and also even though it's ridiculous, she went with it! Joke's on her.

A few quick notes:

Last night I attended a choral competition that my co-worker Mario is participating in. It's a week-long contest - there was an opening show on Monday, I forget on Tuesday, then semi-finals on Wednesday and last night. There are 2 categories: little choir and big choir. Mario's group is in the little category, and it's a group of 8 guys who do all kinds of stuff - from baroque to barbershop. And they're really, really good. Like, this is purportedly a contest for best choir in Colombia, and I can believe it based on the level of the groups. Tonight is the final, which Mario's group is in, and I'll surely be in the audience.

Before that, though, there's a much-hyped soccer match between our school's staff and some sort of police school? Or... Police Academy? I'm not really sure. But hilarity could ensue. Also, apparently students are coming to watch it. I'm not sure how they found out about it, I thought it was just a low-key match between 2 schools. I better be on my A-game though.

Finally... I booked my Christmas ticket to Peru! I'll be there for 3 weeks, including a 5 day hike on the Inca Trail which ends in Macchu Pichu. Needless to say, There Will Be Blog.