Yak spravy?

The laptop has been ordered. I should be in good shape in regard to keeping myself occupied with it. I also bought a bunch of blank discs to hopefully rip key titles from my dvd collection and compress them down for carriage to Ukraine.

I learned my numbers yesterday. I am working on hellos and goodbyes now. Practice learning the alphabet continues as well. I hope I don’t go to all this effort with Ukrainian and end up in a Russian speaking village. I suppose the stuff is pretty similar, but it would still be a bit of a pain.

I got my press release mailed off. I need to get the last of my essays written and emailed, then I will be good to go other than the whole moving thing and waiting for my staging info packet.

Someone else is leaving at work. That will be three people in three weeks as of the 7th. The upside is they already found someone to replace me. She seems really cool. That means I have to worry less about Austin going crazy from everyone dumping things in his lap.

And how about that Idaho senator? I think we all know if you plead guilty, you are guilty, especially when the entire world’s default plea is not guilty. I think dude should have stood up and took his lumps. At least then he’d have principle to stand on. What the hell am I saying? He’s a politician. They don’t have principles!

Do pobachennya!

Ok, so it’s a phonetical spelling. I am not sure I want to try shifting my keyboard to a Cyrillic setting. In case you couldn’t tell, I have started working on my Ukrainian! I have 20 lessons to work on between now and the end of next month.

I bought a set of silk underwear today. I don’t know how much of it I will need, but I am trying to prepare for the worst. In good news, I ordered a laptop today, so hopefully it will arrive in full working order, so I will be computationally enabled while overseas.

I spoke with Dr. Walker, my British Lit professor from CoLin. He offered me whatever teaching materials he has that I can use. I highly recommend having a professor you stay in contact with through the years to any students reading this. I also have a teacher friend in NYC who is going to give me lesson plan pointers.

I am going to subscribe to Ed Helper. I think it will be really useful.

Oh and I wrote my Peace Corps press release last night with the help of writhaus.com‘s own Dave Yontz. It also helps to be friends with a professional copy editor.

Hurray for making quality friends over the years! BTW, dobre vecheer means good evening, if you were wondering.

For those not in the know, I’ve been in the process of joining the Peace Corps for a while now. Friday, I received my packet inviting me to join and identifying my country as Ukraine.

I’ll be teaching English from December 07 til December 09, home just in time for Christmas that year. I leave September 28th for three days of orientation, then October 1st, I start training in Ukrainian (and likely Russian as well) for my teaching assignment.

Some of you know my interest in doing something to make the world a little better than how I found it. This has been a concept I struggled with for a while, and this seems like the perfect way to affect positive change.

If you are wondering about the Ukraine, there are, thanks to our friend the internet, lots of resources online. The Dept. of State has a nice synopsis, the BBC has a nice overview of things and the Library of Congress has a nice page of links, too.