Tuesday, March 24, 2009

O wow....

So, I really only have about 4 cycles left of teaching for my first year. Because of IB exams, music basically stops after our concerts in the beginning of May. I can't believe it's almost over!

I was getting on here to write a health update instead of sending an e-mail to home. I was feeling excited because other than a stomach ache after eating, I'm feeling better in that regard. At least it's staying down!!! I've been feeling nauseated almost 24/7 for the last month, and it hasn't been fun. However, today, until a few moments ago, I haven't really been nauseated. I'm still feeling a bit weak from 4 weeks of vomiting, but not to the same extent that I was.

AND, I actually got sleep last night. My headache is still here, but I was so exhausted after a long day, that I completely passed out around 11 last night. I woke this morning still feeling tired, but that's okay.

Next week, I'm going to Coimbatore for 2 days for a conference, and I'm really hoping to learn a lot. I love learning, and I hate that there aren't many opportunities for me to learn more of what I want to here. I'm making some decisions regarding my future recently, and it's got me excited. They're still really vague, but just knowing that I have options makes me excited. And with part of them including going back to school, I'm STOKED! (Did I mention that I love learning?)

So, I'm going to go now before I teach again.
<3

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Hills and Valleys

I'm in a valley and I can't seem to find a way out.

But I'm searching none-the-less.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Books...

The BBC estimates most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible x
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy x
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy x
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan x
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold x
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie x
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce x
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert x
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas x
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x

I've read= 63
I loved= I don't know.... maybe 10 of them
I plan to read= the rest of them...

It takes too much time to mark the rest. I've basically decided that I've had way too much time on my hands in the past to read books. Problem is, most of these were read before I finished high school and I haven't read too much serious lit since. That might be a problem.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Hills and mountains...

So, as we were coming back towards the mountains where I live, I was in awe of them. I had thought on the way down about how it's wierd that our mountains just show up out of no-where. You have no warning they are coming except that you can see them. You don't have any hills leading to them. It's just an all of a sudden change to a steep mountain climb.

It just makes me think. In light of recent events and because of them. That sometimes, problems come to us with a preparation. Much like NC, where you have the foothills and then the mountains. You have a warm-up. Something has prepared you (at least a little bit) for what is coming. But here, much like India, where the culture is all or nothing most of the time, you have flats and then BAM! it's a mountain. It's a little bit nuts. Just sayin'.

I don't really know what I'm saying with this. I guess that it doesn't really matter how these problems come to us, they're never more than we can take. We will always be able to get through them. Whether we have warning or not.

Maybe I'll try to elaborate on this one day when I feel better. We'll see.

<3