Counting the Days

Time to write again already? Yeah, I trail off after a while and don’t post as often. It’s already starting to happen.

Housekeeping: My address will probably be changing soon, but I will be able to get anything that is sent to me at the address I gave before. Check back for the change of address sometime. Also, new photos are up on facebook. Only a few. Here is the address for the new album:

Foreigners, Halloween, and Seville with the kids

Not a whole lot new to report. The government still has not paid me for the first time, meaning that I’m not off on grand excursions. If I spend my American money now to visit great places, I get hit with the exchange fees. Then I won’t visit all those places later because I already have, which means I won’t spend the euros tin my Spanish bank account, which means that I might have some left over. And then I would have to change that over to USD at the end of my stay and get hit with exchange fees on that side too. So what I’m attempting to do is not spend any more American dough and try to wait to travel until I have been paid. But my region has to have the paperwork from ALL of the Auxiliares (my title here) from my region turned in (and the paperwork includes the NIE—Identity card for foreigners—and direct deposit bank account information for each and every Auxiliar), approved, and whatever-ed before they can start paying any of us. So I’ve had all my stuff turned in for over a month, but that doesn’t really matter because they still have not paid me. I’m really rooting for Spain to get their act together on it.

And it’s turning out to be harder than I thought to not spend money. It’s cool though, because I’ve been doing a lot of things for free and getting creative on how to do things, but it really limits what I can do. I wanted to go to Don Benito or Mérida this weekend to see if I could catch a showing of Harry Potter if it was there, but alas, that will not happen just yet.

Not only that, but I’ve been eating myself completely out of food more quickly than I thought. I’m down to a package of linguini with no sauce to put on it, half a package of rice, a tiny can of tuna, two slices of bread, liver spread, four or five carrots, and an onion. Plus, I’m a shitty cook, so all these things don’t mean much except that sometimes I eat tuna right out of the can or plain rice. And the place where I live does not have spices. Well, it has about three different jars of pepper, three jars of sweet pepper, a pizza spice mixture, and two jars of coloring for paella. My current self-imposed poverty is making me a little hungry. Sometimes I wish for the days from a month ago where my nerves had me eating like a bird. Suddenly when I need that out-of-whack metabolism, I start eating like a horse instead.

Oh well though. I was doing pretty well for a while on cooking. This is the girl who has to learn how to cook something as simple as rice from her little brother. But I was making a wicked spaghetti sauce when I had tomatoes. And yesterday I tried to make caramelized carrots, which didn’t work, but they tasted pretty good. I was satisfied anyway.

Mom comes in three weeks! Of course, I have to make it through Thanksgiving first, but that shouldn’t be too bad. At least I don’t have to watch football. Or clean up the dishes while the men watch football.
I’m struggling to keep warm. I keep a radiator heater that is supposed to go under the kitchen table on in my room at all times and occasionally have to bring in the space heater to get the temperature up again. I have enough blankets, so sleeping is not a big deal, but there is no central heating, so I try to just heat one room—my room. But that makes the rest of the house pretty miserable. Which means then that I hate getting up in the morning because my room gets a little colder at night, but then also I know I have to venture out into the kitchen for breakfast and to the bathroom, both of which just make me like ice! I need to figure out something to deal with the cold.

The stupid part is that I’m cold ALL THE TIME. I was cold this last summer a lot. I’m trying to figure out if there is something actually wrong with me, or if I just need to stop being a baby. It’s been this way since I came home from Ecuador and I felt like Ecuador was a different kind of cold. Sure, it was perpetual spring there, but there was no indoor heating and the cold just sank into your bone, where it was almost impossible to warm up. My family can attest to how cold it could get, even if the weather was fairly tepid. I was in a winter of 60 degrees that was way worse than the winters back in Idaho of cold snaps that get down to -30 degrees and lower.

And now I don’t know how to make myself be a warm-blooded Idahoan again. I crave the sunshine, the heaters, and hot footbaths. I’ve tried to just deal with it, but it doesn’t work. I went through a series of tests last January checking for nutrient deficiencies or low thyroid and other levels (I was being tested for other reasons but I can apply the results to this too) and everything turned out to be normal. Compared to a lot of Americans, I’m on the thinner end, but I’m not too skinny. Certainly not scarily skinny. And it’s not that I wear too few of clothes… I bundle up, let me tell you. I’ve even gotten to the point where I’m wearing two pairs of pants in the evenings, and the poor kids at the school probably think I don’t have another sweater because I have to wear all my layers every day. I have no other symptoms, like it’s not that I have some other disease that has a side-effect of constant temperature regulation issues, because I don’t have any other noticeable side-effects. What could it be? Actually, if anyone has ideas about why I’m cold all the time, please let me know. It’s a mystery to me and is proving to make my life a little more challenging than I’d like!

My dueña (owner of the house) comes home sometime around December 10th, which is the day that my mum comes into town. So that’s a bummer. I can just see my mum having to hide in her room because Manuela just wants to chat her ear off, even though my mom speaks little Spanish and Manuela is unintelligible most times even to me. I have to find a new place to live. Victor, the head of studies at my school, is undertaking a search for me, but I don’t know what it is going to produce. There aren’t a lot of places available and I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything available that I could share with anyone, meaning that my rent is bound to be pretty expensive. Hopefully it would have central heating though!

I think I’m going to start doing shout-outs in the middle of blog posts to see if that person is reading. This post’s shout-out is David Kuhl. Love ya, bro.

I spent 15% of my net worth today on stamps. €1.56. Yep. I’m a little stressed about only having €8.44 left. And the lunch I ate today consisted of chicken soup (boiled water with a bullion chicken cube mixed in) and linguini noodles with fried garlic and olive oil on top. Last night I was going to eat my last can of tuna with some bread for dinner, so I opened the can and put it in a bowl and then accidentally dropped it to the floor, where it splattered over everything—on the floor, the fan, the refrigerator. It was tuna in olive oil and I spilled it on my favorite pair of slacks, so I pulled them off quickly, got another pair of pants and went to my creepy internet-mooching corner to look up olive oil removal from fabric without much hope of fixing it. I was supposed to blot with paper towel, then spread baking soda or cornstarch on it, and if it still remained, dish soap. I had no paper towels, so I tried to use toilet paper as a substitute. That doesn’t hold up as well as paper towels. No baking soda or cornstarch in the house. Less than a teaspoon of dish soap. I did the best I could, but I don’t doubt that the slacks will always have a small oil mark on them.

And I just went shopping for what will probably be the last time until I get paid. It’s good for me to be counting up each cent that goes into my shopping cart, because I’m learning the true cost of things. I bought two large-ish cans of tomato chunks (I don’t know how to say it in English—cubed? But they’re kinda smashed and stuff) for spaghetti sauce, two packages of noodles that should feed me for a week I’m hoping, a loaf of bread, cereal, milk, and orange juice. Orange juice was not on the list, but they had it for really cheap and I figured it would help keep me a little less scurvy-ish. Now if I can just control my appetite a little better, I think I’ll do fine.

The only problem is that I eat when I am stressed. I crave the feeling of being stuffed with carbs and I eat until there is nothing left. And I think to myself, if I just eat myself out of bread, I’ll stop craving the carbs because I won’t have any left. But then I just start eating things like liver spread straight out of the jar.

After-school classes went well this week. We talked about lots of things without much awkwardness in my class with the two older kids and we made “Thanksgiving Books” with the younger kids. My markers are not going to make it through the time with the younger kids. They really do a number on them.
And normal classes are going pretty well, although I still feel a little silly and ineffective. I definitely don’t like being an ineffective person. But I got to go with the 5th and 6th graders this last Monday to Seville, which was cool. I got to get into all the museums for free. Of course, I had already seen all of the museums we went into, but there were other portions of them open this time that were not open the last time. For instance, in the cathedral, the tower was open, so I got to climb somewhere around 15 stories by way of a cool stone ramp up to the top of this tower that overlooked the city. It was great. Plus, 11 year olds move slower than my last traveling partner, so I didn’t feel bad about taking my time to look at something this time around.

Today is a lazy day. I’m hanging out in my living room typing out correspondences in Word and then going to the corner near the school to catch enough internet to send them off to their recipients. I’m doing my best to not want snacking to be a part of my lazy day. There’s not much else to report, so please have a good week and a good Thanksgiving. Please eat some extra yams for me and for my immediate Kuhl family: eat some extra of mom’s amazing cranberry relish for me. Love you all.

Emily