This Is School?

Yeah, I guess I need to update the blog more often.  My two beautiful ducks were killed by a raccoon, just a couple days after I made the last post.  But I bought them with the hopes that they would protect my chickens and they did.  The cinder block has since been replaced with a more secure locking, hinged door and we've had no more deaths.  I plan to get more ducks in the spring.

We're well into winter now and the holidays passed without incident.  The break between semesters seemed pretty short, but the time our friends and house-mates were away seemed to last forever.  I guess that's how those things go.  I can't believe I'm already in the second semester of my second year of college!  Turns out I'm a pretty good student when the situation is right.

At the moment, that situation is a small classroom in Kiev, Ukraine, with all my lessons held in Russian.  Looking back, I'm not really sure how I got here.  Of course I drove to the airport, got on a plane and flew, but how the heck did I end up in Ukraine, of all places?  I never in my life imagined wanting to travel here.  And here I am.  The truth of it is, I am going to school to learn.  There is no other reason.  I want to learn Russian?  I'd better do it right and go some place that speaks Russian.

Still... I'm baffled that I am actually here and am actually getting school credit for this.

So, what is Ukraine like?
In January, it is cold (9c/15f today).  It is icy.  It is grey.  The people are also cold.  If you want to fit in, don't smile in public. Don't smile at people you don't know.  And you should always try to get in front of them.  People seem to always be in a hurry here (maybe because it's so cold?), and will walk faster to pass you on the sidewalk, or try to squeeze in front of you to get what they want at the grocery store... Even if you're the only two people in the store!  It's a bit strange and it makes trying to speak the language in every day situations rather difficult.

On the flip side, my host is fabulous!  She is so sweet and I feel like I'm at my grandma's house.  Valentina is always concerned that my shoes won't be warm enough or that I haven't had enough to eat...  The food she cooks is wonderful, but it is hearty.  I have had to ask my instructor how to tell Vale that I would like to not eat so much.  I wrote it down, but I haven't tried to tell her yet.  She is so nice and so genuine that I don't want to be rude.  My current plan is to walk home from school everyday, instead of taking the metro, to burn off all the extra calories.
The apartment I live in is located in 'Old Kiev', now called Podil, on the banks of the Dnieper River.  It is a wonderful neighborhood, close to the metro station, and without too much traffic.  It is a great place to walk in the evenings and there's even an ice-skating rink set up in the square.

I have two more weeks of lessons before returning to the states, so hopefully my speaking skills will improve by then and I'll be able to hold an actual conversation with my original mentor at Prescott College.

Days Without (a Duck)

Meet Vladimir and Inga

These two ducks are the most recent addition to the Casa de Chaos flock.  They are Muscovy ducks, known to be quiet, clean, friendly, funny, and grounded.  As it turns out, Inga (on the right) can fly.


Here are the events of the past week:


Friday 9/16-  I bring home the ducks around noon.  They hang out in the chicken coop, swim around their tiny pond, nuzzle each other with their beaks, and make cute, quiet chirping sounds.


Saturday- I let all the birds out into the garden first thing in the morning.  The dogs don't pay any attention to the ducks at all.  The ducks do the same thing they did the day before along with waddling between the corn and squash looking for bugs.
Around 6, we leave for dinner, assuming all birds will make their way back to the coop before the sun sets as is standard.
9:00 pm we return from dinner to find only 1 duck in the coop.  The word is that sometime that evening a neighbor stopped by to see if we were missing a duck.  He had seen it walking down the road on the other side of the block.  The roommates couldn't find it.


Sunday- I get up early to start the search for the duck. A neighbor with ducks on the other side of the block says someone brought it to her house the night before.  They found it trying to cross a major road 6 blocks from our house.  By the time we got there, the duck, free-ranging with the other birds, had already disappeared.  


Monday- No word about the duck all day. By this time I'm sure she's been eaten by something.  Finally around 3, I think to call the Humane Society.  Good news!  Someone called about a duck in their yard earlier that day.  Bad news!  The Humane Society can't take in birds, so the caller was directed to the natural history park.  The park hadn't got any calls.  Being that the duck was sure to still be alive, I made posters.


Tuesday- I left bright and early Tuesday morning for a field trip and left the posters to be hung with the roommates.  Roommates did not hang any posters, but as luck would have it, Tuesday night they encountered a 'Found Duck' poster just a couple blocks from the house.


Wednesday- The roommates find the duck at a women's rehab center 3 blocks away.  Trying to catch her, she demonstrates her impressive flying skills and evades capture.  I get home from my field trip late in the afternoon and we go back to the center to find duck on the roof, beyond our reach.


Thursday-  We go to the rehab center at 7:30 to capture duck and she is nowhere to be found.  We search the entire block with no luck.  At 8:45, a classmate walking to school spots the duck three houses down from ours on their front fence.  We get a crew together and hurry over to attempt another capture.  The duck escapes and flies to the peak of a very high roof, very narrowly missing a high jump capture attempt.  Having class at 9, I have no choice but to leave her.  At 9:15, the rehab center calls the house saying she has returned.
At 11:30 another posse is called to arms and we all head to the center thinking a night time capture will be easier, only to find the duck again at the peak of a very high roof.  Being a roof very well lit, close to the street, and above many sleeping rehab patients, scaling the building was not an option.


Friday (today)-  As morning gets underway and I prepare for another duck hunt, a neighbor stops by to announce that the duck is back at the house just down the street.  We get together some sheets, in hopes of throwing them over the duck to keep her from flying.  We find the duck in the driveway, almost cornered, and seemingly very calm.  We get as close as we can then attempt to throw the sheet.  She escapes again, but luckily only flies over the fence to where a group of fellow Prescott College students is painting a mural on the house. I make another attempt with the sheet and as she slips out the side, one of the painting students tackles her with another sheet.


FINALLY! The duck is in my grasp!  We immediately proceed home, to the shop, to cut the ends off of her flight feathers.


So, one week later, Inga the adventuring duck is finally back in the coop and I got to see a very cute duck dance when Vladimir saw her. 


And they (hopefully) lived happily ever after.  The end.  

Spring!

I am happy to say it is spring, but I'm not really sure what the means here...  We've had this great weather pretty much since January, punctuated by brief snowstorms.  I guess the difference in March and April's spring weather is the abundance of greenery, flowers, and lizards!  Our small front 'lawn' area erupted in a sea of microscopic purple flowers.





All the fruit trees around our house are in bloom.








And lizards have started to appear, hopefully to eat the ants...

Work on the house is still progressing, although at a slower pace since we are all busy with school.
Shaun finally quit his job at El Gato Azul (yet another un-fulfilling restaurant job), and I finally got a job, which I'm happy to say is like a childhood fantasy come true for me.  I work at a little custom cake bakery called Sugared N Iced.  The walls are painted pink and covered with glitter. Although I could do without all the glitz and glam (like the crystal chandelier above our front counter)... I'm just not a girly-girl...  I get to bake cookies, add sprinkles to cupcakes, and eat frosting to my heart's content!  On top of all that, there's still occasionally time for me to do my homework, and if not, I get off work before 9 anyway.  It's really a fabulous job, made even better by my awesome boss.  She's the nicest person ever and when she's not baking wedding cakes and adding edible sparkle glitter to pink champagne cupcakes, she races motorcycles. Like knee-on-the-ground fast track racing. Yeah!  The only downside to this job is that it is located in food court in the mall (though it is a locally owned non-franchise establishment) so I get to watch real live Americans eat fast food all day long.

On the school side of things, things are going well.  We're all busy and struggling, constantly piled with homework...projects, reports and papers due around every corner, but we are learning.  I am in a class called Human Rights Seminar, where we have tons of discussions about things like 'cultural lens', 'Marxist dialectics', and 'human rights discourse'.  Half the time I feel way over my head reading so much political theorist philosophy, but I'm definitely understanding enough and working out enough concepts to leave the class inspired and enraged.  The really great thing is that I get to take all those human rights and cultural lens concepts straight in to my Kenya History and Culture class to examine the colonial and post-colonial atmosphere of Kenyan history and present day corruption.

And to prove that this school is working for me so far, I've been able to apply numerous concepts from last semester's classes.  Writing Workshop (which Shaun is taking this semester) prepared me for the constant research paper writing, but also gave me a good basis for critical thinking strategies and context evaluation.  Spiritual Landscapes of the Indigenous Southwest has served as a great background for applying my newly acquired human rights frameworks as well as being a parallel example to oppression in Kenya.

My other class is an independent study in Russian language.  As it turns out, the dean of the Resident Degree Program's wife, who is a math teacher at the school, lived in Russia for quite a few childhood and teenage years, so she speaks Russian fluently.  She is mentoring me and I am making progress quite well.  Although I'm getting into the grammar aspect of the language, which is fairly complicated compared to English, I feel confident that I could hold a simple conversation and that I will be adequately prepared to spend a month doing an independent study in Russia next fall.  It's such a fun language! Я говорю на русском плохо!

Needless to say, I think we're all ready for school to end soon so we can get on with other parts of life... like being outdoors instead of in front of the computer.  We would all like to spend more time in the garden, continuing our yard work, and watching my little chickens grow.  Also, my dad is making another visit, starting next Monday, and this time for a whole month!  He will definitely whip us into shape around here, so there will be tons of great new project pictures to post.

Check out photos from the last couple months HERE!

     

January in Prescott

The very first...

But getting better.

This month has been so busy, but so full of new adventures.  The weather has been so warm and beautiful, reminding me of summer in Montana, though it gets pretty darn cold at night and the mornings are frosty.

My younger brother Joe visited us for his Christmas break.  He had a fun time here, but we never got out of town.  We just spent all our time on the roof.  He left a few days after Christmas and as soon as he did, we got a good dump of snow.  So much snow, that we spent that day sledding around our neighborhood behind the car.  The sledding really made our day fun and cheered up a lot of people around town who seemed pretty sour about the snow.  It probably also helped that as we sledded, we would stop and help whoever was stuck.

New Years Eve was pretty mellow.  Shaun and the dogs went to bed early and Dylan and I stayed awake long enough to hear our neighbors banging some pots and pans.  I took some photos of the stars through the new skylight we had installed in the kitchen that day and we went to bed.

We've been working every day since then, finishing up the roof on the 9th.  Shaun started school that day, spending the first couple days on campus before he went to Chauncy Ranch on the 12th.  His group spent a couple days there getting ready for the expedition and they went into the wilderness on the 15th.  Three weeks to go before he gets back, but I've got plenty to keep me occupied while he's gone, including my block class and working on house projects.
My dad has been in town since the 7th, so we've really been putting a push on the house.  He has managed to completely remodel the kitchen, build a closet for the washer and dryer, and just today, he installed a french door.  Its so wonderful to see the house transforming!

It will really be wonderful when it's all finished and we no longer have to step over, around, and under power tools and wade through construction materials, but there's still a lot of work to do.

Check out my facebook links to see the progress we're making!

December Living
January Living

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December

A whole month has passes between posts again.  Part of that is due to our computer crashing.  Literally crashing to the ground and ceasing to function.  It's in the shop right now, but probably still not gonna make it. 
We spent the first couple weeks of December in the shell of our old house, the Bearclaw, living out of a couple boxes, sleeping on the floor.  Finally the new tenants wanted to move in, so we moved the rest of our shit into the shed and we set up the yurt that Dylan made in the backyard.  The canvas for the yurt still wasn't finished, so Dylan bought 26 red wool army surplus blankets which we covered the outside of the frame with.  It sounds strange, but it was really quite cozy in there!  We yurt camped for 3 nights.  On the evening of the second day, it started to drizzle.  By about 5 in the morning on that third night, our fire died down and the blankets started to give in.  The rain dripped down in a couple spots and started to seep through around the edges. 
That morning, I had to leave early for my last day of class, and spent all day in class, and as the morning progressed, everything in the yurt proceded to get wet and muddy.  Luckily, the house FINALLY closed that day, so Shaun, Dylan, and the dogs packed up and were at least able to get a roof over their heads while they attempted to dry out, even though there was no gas or water.  We had electricity, thankfully, so a couple space heaters made it feel like we weren't actually squating in an abandoned house that night.

Since then, we have moved everything out of the storage shed and the other house.  ALL of our belongings are in ONE spot.  The fish are out of their tupperware and back in the fishtank. The chickens are in the backyard and the house is actually starting to turn into a home, although there is lots and lots and lots of work to be done, including re-roofing it by the end of the month.    Luckily, my brother Joe flew in Sunday and a few friends left in town are helping us out with some of the projects.  

It is so great to actually have a house again and be doing things! 

I'll get some pictures up as soon as I can.  The big red yurt is definitely something to see!

Officially Winter

Well, We have all given thanks, stuffed our faces, and returned to normal daily life... 
Or not.

I made a quick trip to Montana for my Thanksgiving break, just to run the Huffing for Stuffing fun run.  It was wonderfully cold and snowy and the race went well.  I ran my fastest time yet and definitely earned my thanksgiving feast.  After that one day of fun, brother Dylan and I packed up all his belongings and a ton of tools into a giant moving truck and booked it back down here to the sunny south only to find that we dragged a little bit of winter along with us.  It's not as cold as Montana, but fall has officially ended here in Arizona.  It snowed for the very first time yesterday, however it all melted off within a couple hours of daylight.

Shaun spent Thanksgiving with one of our roommates at a co-worker's house.  They said it was a classic TV holiday complete with a senile old grandma.  How wonderful!

A holiday break from work and school is supposed to be just that... A break.  This break has been nothing but hectic and somewhat intense.  Upon arriving in Prescott, we had one and a half days to unload our truck into a storage shed and load up all the big things in our house before returning the truck.  It was a mad dash to box, move, organize, and un-organize, made even more complicated by the fact of not knowing where we were moving to and having multiple other people staying at our house while one of our housemates was still gone traveling for the holiday.  

Within a period of 24 hours we went from having a house to being homeless to finding a friend's house for all 7 of us to camp at to agreeing to set up a tent in a different yard to possibly moving into the house we're supposed to be moving in to, and back to staying temporarily in the house we're in. 
In the mean time, 4 of us are still trying to finish homework, write papers, and get to class on time.
And not to forget... there are three dogs, two chickens, and a fish tank in the mix of it all.
And a garage that we just tore down and are still disassembling.

Luckily, I think things are going to work out just fine.  It's winter, but we're still in Arizona.  It's not as cold as it could be and there are so many people here determined to not let us live homeless.
The deal on the new house will close soon enough and we'll be able to get a little situated before the new block and semester of school start.

Until then, we'll just all continue our little camp out/sleep over in our now unfurnished house and do the best we can with what we have... good food, friends, and positive attitudes!

Fall in Arizona

I should be working right now, but hanging laundry in the sun on such a beautiful fall day seems so much more rewarding.  11 am Shaun and one of our roommates came home with bloody mary and chocolate chip cookie fixings.  I've swept the leaves from the walk and the back landing and it's the perfect temperature to leave all the doors open.  Our place is so clean and organized since our landlord will be showing the house today, so it feels good to just sit outside and enjoy our alcoholic beverages waiting for the cookies to bake.  About once a week Suka manages to steal a fresh baked loaf of bread off the counter.  Today was one of those days, and a good one too!  A really nice loaf of Challah!

School has been going so well for me.  All my classes are interesting and I finish my school week with a field day every Thursday.  My Maps and Wilderness Navigation class drives out to some remote place outside of town where our instructors drop us off and tell us where to meet at 3:30.  We hike around in pairs with maps, compasses, and whatever knowledge we learned in class that week trying to find our way.  My group has only got lost once, but we were able to use triangulation techniques, taking bearings of a couple of known peaks to find our position along a road where the van was able to pick us up right on time.

My other classes are Writing Workshop and World Religions.  Evaluations for classes are based on a 'contract' you make with the instructor during the first few weeks of class.  If you fulfill your objectives in your contract, you pass the class. (You can also request grades, but I chose not to...just pass or fail.)  In my Writing Workshop, a class to help be become a better writer fully understand the concepts behind acceptable college level writing, my instructor actually suggested that I NOT be evaluated on spelling and grammar, since I seem to pay more attention to that than content.  It seemed funny to me at first, but it turns out that it is actually quite a task for me to intentionally not correct my spelling.  It's fun to twist the traditional view of education.

We're down to 2 chickens in the Bearclaw backyard, but they are very happy together.  The other two were eaten by something or other a few weeks ago, but  I'm designing and building a good chicken coop for the winter, and when that's complete we'll get a few more hens, hopefully to make a flock of 6 or 8.  In conjunction with a new flock and a new hen house, the Bearclaw family will also be moving to a new house.  There's a nice fixer-upper just around the block from our house, so my dad bought it to create an urban garden wonderland on the large property, and to give us poor starving college students a decently cheap place to live for the next 4 years (Shaun starts school this winter, but hopefully will take some summer classes to catch up with me!).  The moving party will be great, a full on barbeque and (around the...) Block Party, where all our friends can come over and walk around the block a few times with all our shit.

It's so strange to me that it's well into November and just now turning into fall.  All my friends (and me and Shaun, too!) can't believe that it's snowing in all our home towns and states, and still so warm and beautiful here!  It's going to be a great winter, if not quite a bit warmer than we're used to.

Harvey's ready for some cool weather, but Suka loves to lay in the sun when it's warm and in our bed when it's not.  The boys have been getting out a lot lately with Shaun and our roommates rock climbing any time they have available.  So much rock climbing around here, so close to town!  Shaun has been working at a little restaurant called El Gato Azul downtown.  He has a lot more free time than his last job, but it will be really nice when he starts school and can work through the Federal Work Study program.

It's really too nice to be staring at the computer screen and the computer's going to die anyway.

I'll go eat some cookies, listen to some drumming in the backyard, and lay in the leaves with the chickens on our giant trampoline.