Kaitlin´s Bored to Tears Mad-Libs

OK, pull out your paper and pencil and write down the following parts of speech:

1. weather adjective
2. time of day
3. place
4. modern convenience
5. aggressive verb
6. noun
7. noun
8. musical group
9. verb ending in ¨-ing¨
10. previously used weather adjective minus ¨-y¨
11. verb ending in ¨-ing¨
12. number
13. time unit
14. longer time unit
15. verb
16. emotion-related noun
17. conjunction
18. verb
19. foreign language
20. foreign language
21. foreign language
22. adverb
23. animal
24. past tense verb

Mad-libs

It´s a (1.) (2.) in (3.) which means the (4.) doesn´t work. In order to (5.) the (6.) and (7.) I´m listening to (8.) and (9.). The (10.) has prevented me from (11.) (12.) (13.) in the last (14.). It makes we want to (15.) with (16.) (17.) I´ll (18.) (19.) and (20.) (and not (21.)) (22.).

PS. A(n) (23.) just (24.) into my room.

My Mad-libs answers

1. rainy
2. evening
3. Paraguay
4. electricity (the only one I ever have)
5. combat
6. boredom
7. silence
8. The Velvet Underground
9. cooking
10. rain
11. working
12. 3
13. days
14. week
15. scream
16. frustration
17. but
18. study
19. Japanese
20. Spanish
21. Guaraní
22. instead
23. frog
24. jumped
    

The Wall of Fame

This is a shameless ploy to get the people who know they should mail me things (you know who you are) to actually send me letters!!! Letters are more desirable than packages because getting packages is a pain and people steal stuff out of them all the time. Letters, on the other hand, make my room beautiful (see above), give me something to read on long, lonely campo nights and tell me about your life. I want to congratulate the following members of the Wall of Fame have my undying gratitute (look how easy I am to please, you too could join the elite ranks by weilding a pen and buying a 94 cent stamp):
MOM (the greatest pen-pal in the world)
Dad
Will
Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Ed
Grandma Alyce
Great Grandma Sheldon
Amy Sheldon
Libbey Sheldon
Kay Kromm
Caroline Hammargren
Kjerstin Moody

Letters can be sent to either of the following addresses (also found on the side bar of my blog) but packages only to the Peace Corps Office (though they don´t actually end up there, urgh):

Kaitlin Schott
San José de los Arroyos
Departamento Caaguasu
Paraguay
South America

Kaitlin Schott, PCV
Cuerpo de Paz 116
162 Chaco Boreal c/Mcal. López
Asunción 1580, Paraguay
South America

You guys all rock and support me a ton already, but I´ve never been too shameless about asking for what I want!

Add aspiring vet and electrician to my resume

I would like to add another bullet to the list of reasons I do not want children:

• the potential of a prolapsed uterus

This week I was visiting a friend in a neighboring community when her uncle came running in talking about a cow being sick. She had just given birth about an hour and a half earlier and the birth seemed to proceed normally but it was the cow´s fourth calf. I went with all of the people going to see the cow and found it in immense pain with what appeared to me to be a prolapsed uterus. I called Mom to get a quick step by step about what to do (really quick, we were only on the phone for about 2 min) and did my best to help out. The local vet was out of town so I knew that the information I had gathered from my mom plus the experience of the farmers was what we would have to go on.

I hadn´t realized it before, but a cow´s uterus is really big and heavy so we got the cow down on the ground so she wouldn´t move as much and so we could work with the uterus better. At Mom´s direction, we spread two kilos of sugar over the uterus to shrink it by osmosis, making it easier to work back in. After the sugar had absorbed as much water as it could we washed off the uterus with water, ¨scrubbed in¨as much as we could, and started forcing the uterus back in. I had the longest arms of anyone there so I was the one actually pushing in the last parts until it was in place. We took shifts that night watching the cow to make sure she didn´t prolapse again and everything went fine. It has been several days now and both the cow and the mother appear to be healthy. As a result of the incident I was able to talk the family into buying balanced cow feed and will be getting some free milk!!! Cows here serve more or less as campesino´s banks and I was very pleased that I could do anything to help them with this unfortunate event.

On a less dramatic note, another accomplishment of mine this week was replacing an electrical outlet by myself. When my family was visiting one of my (two) outlets got fried from plugging too many things into it. I had asked several electricians to come to my house and replace it for me when I finally gave up and bought the outlet myself. Looking at the back of the outlet I figure I would be able to figure out how to wire it if I saw how the old one was wired. I bought a multimeter so I could make sure my electricity actually switched off when I flipped the switch on my box and called my neighbor over so that he could call the ambulance if I messed up. The hardest part of the whole process was that two of the screws on the old outlet were threaded backwards and it took me a couple of minutes to figure that out!

I had an actual agroforestry related meeting scheduled this week (to talk about starting tree nurseries) but that got put off due to rain! Regardless it was still a productive week!