the offWhites

Come visit.

*new to us, of course.

Actually, fairly newer than we expected to get anytime soon.  It’s an ‘02 Intrepid, and it looks pretty nice.  We’ll be getting it in the morning.

*not actually new, it’s a job I had for six or seven years, until two years ago, but I had new employee orientation today.

Make sure to watch Lisbeth’s posted video first.

This makes no sense without hers.

Do you remember this?

I do. Heh. I can remember doing it in the gym at my preschool (it was one of those preschools that was in some big church not too far from our house). I think I liked it.

At any rate, I know the leotards (puffed sleeves!) are amusing me now.

It rains a lot here (you may have picked up on that from other posts). It’s almost ridiculous in its regularity. I’m not getting used to it, though, despite its constant presence.

I remember an ad for 7Up that ran when I was little. There was this couple dancing and kissing and (dur) drinking 7Up. The rain looked fun and romantic and not at all annoying. I think rain like that could be awesome.

This rain is not that rain.

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this 7Up ad, but it probably aired around the same time.  I’m positive (well, as positive as I can be about a memory that dates to my single-digit years) that the setting was more urban - I remember streets and fire escapes - and that the dancing couple was younger, early-to-mid twenties probably. Does anyone else remember this, or am I nuts?

So we’re reaching the end of our first two-day weekend since we got to Taiwan. I’m already a little bummed thinking about the fact that I only get one of these weekends. For some reason they only cancelled my Saturday classes for three weeks, and this is the only one that doesn’t have an unusual Hess event happening. Next week we have some kind of banquet on Sunday, and the following Saturday I have to participate in some kind of Chinese New Year festival, despite the fact that Chinese New Year isn’t until February. I can’t wait to have normal hours again.

Regarding the Chinese New Year festival, I asked my manager what I’m supposed to do. She told me, “Sun and moon and…” Then she thought for a minute, then drew a cloud with her finger.

“Cloud?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Sun and moon and clouds.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding slowly, fighting the urge to tell her that even if that had been a complete sentence rahter than a thought fragment, there was still no verb in it. “What do I do?”

“The sun and the moon, and the… the clouds.”

“Uh-huh. What do I do with the sun and moon and clouds?”

She thought for a few more seconds, then let me know she’d tell me later. If past experience factors into it, and I’m fairly certain it will, I’ll find out right before I actually do whatever I’m doing, even if I ask her every day between now and then.

Stupid Hess Language Schools.  Don’t work here, please, and if you’re in Taiwan, definitely don’t send your kids here.

I forgot to show you this in the previous post.

Why am I posting a photo of an orange? Let me tell you a little story:

In front of our kindergarten, there are a handful of potted trees. Recently, some of the kids one morning began pointing at one of the trees and shouting “aw-run-jooh!” This is six-year-old-Taiwanese-English-student for ‘orange’.

I looked at the tree and saw nothing orange. “Where?” I asked them. One of my boys came up and pointed to a small, green something, about the size of a shooter marble, dangling from the tree. I then noticed several of them. They were all miniscule and a darker green than a perfect lime. I wondered why immature fruit would be just now growing, since, warm or not, it is winter here. I also wondered what the kids might know about the life cycle of plants, so with great difficulty, after several attempts at restating my question until one of them understood what I was asking (they are mostly six, after all,) I queried “When will the fruit be big and orange and ready to eat?” Eva, a very bright, very sweet, and ridiculously cute little girl,

(only complete face in the picture,) lit up as she realized what I was asking. She excitedly smiled up at me, raised her hand, index finger extended upward in the universal gesture of one about to bestow knowledge upon another (otherwise known as “droppin’ science,”) and answered, “Wait.”What does that have to do with this particular orange? Well, naturally, it’s one of the very same oranges from that tree, now ripe! It fell off the other day. And for an idea of why I picked it up and brought it home, here it is again, in my hand for a size reference:

…then you’ll be enthusiastic!  In a few scant minutes, I’ll be heading back to work for the first time in a week.  I’m just so excited I could throw up!  Seriously though, I guess I’m glad to be going back, if only to get out of the house.  It’s a phased return, with partial work days today and tomorrow, and a full day on Friday.  I have to admit, when I mentioned doubts about our HNST before, he proved me wrong this time.  He seems to have really gone to bat for me, and it kept most of the pressure off while I recovered, which was good.

Now I need to clean up the mess that’s inevitable when you leave things kind of a mess to begin with, and then ask two or three different people per mess to sustain what you’ve done.  Everything was sort of chaotic and disorganized when I left, due in large part to the fact that I’d actually already been sick for a while, and just wasn’t keeping up with things because I wanted/needed to go home and sleep.

It’s time to go now, so I’ll tell you more later.

I’m finally starting to get better, yay!  I’m pretty tired still, and I wear out in no time flat, but I’m feeling less actually *sick*, and that’s nice.  So for those of you who were thinking it, you weren’t alone, and the thought crossed my mind once as well, but no, I don’t have ebola.

Laters!