Weather and Other Mundanities

Warning: stream of consciousness ahead. Strap on your life jackets and keep your hands and feet inside the raft.

It seems that, despite my frequent protestations to the contrary, folks seem to think that, merely because of my current location, my life couldn't possibly become routine, boring, or anything other than exciting and exotic. I repeat: this is not the case. My phone is now relentlessly and absurdly throughly programmed to beep when I reach significant percentages through the year, in addition to the weekly update and the monthly update. For those of you keeping score at home, I arrived on August 15, almost three months ago, and my calculations are based on spending 300 days here, which puts my departure somewhere in June. Makes the math easier, anyways. It's started to snow in earnest, I think. On Monday, it snowed more than we ever get in a year back home in Eugene, then it all melted and rained on Tuesday. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday... more rain. Rain depresses me here. It's too much like home. Today, though, the snow started again. Every time I look out the window at the couple of inches of snow covering everything, I get all giddy and gleeful and start to dance around like a crazier person than I am. We're going skiing next weekend. That is to say, my host family will ski and I'll probably fall on my face a lot. I'm friggin' excited. The Christmas-themed commercials have started... but despite the snow, it simply doesn't feel like the "holiday season". They don't celebrate Halloween here... or Thanksgiving... so that might have something to do with it. My host mom's constant, slightly passive-aggressive worrying about me being cold are beginning to look more legitimate, what with the snowing and freezing of mudpuddles and all. Therefore, I succumbed and meekly accepted her offer of a proper winter coat today, for which I need to pay her back. Note to self. Anyways, my current to-do list has, maybe, two things on the horizon: the Rotary slovak test in December and a presentation for Fyzika (physics) on the sources of energy in my area shortly thereafter. Mostly hydroelectric, as far as I know. I'll have to do some googling for that. I went to an Irish pub with Haley on Friday. Tried my first sip of beer ever, and didn't like it. Also tried a sip of some bright blue drink that, I swear, tasted exactly like mouthwash, and a sip of some mysterious clear substance that tasted exactly like rubbing alchohol. Not that I've ever drank rubbing alchohol. Some girls in school asked me what an adverb was, and I sat there for five minutes humming through all the school house rock songs I could think of before I could answer them. It was pathetic. All these questions about tenses and parts of speech leave me wondering what 12 years of education taught me after all. The other day, some emo kid asked me to look over some crappy song lyrics he'd written in English and make corrections, which I did. They were mostly nonsensical, with a bunch of disjointed, rhyming lines that made just enough sense that I couldn't really correct them for anything in particular, but just little enough that it was obvious that the kid didn't really speak English. I suppose, since I have nothing more to say, I should stop typing now. 3/10 of the way done with the year! See you all in 7 months!