If rhyme were a drug I'd sell it by the gram

Tuesday night television sucks SO much that right now my husband is watching a Discovery Channel show on Star Trek, um, “fans.”

Please notice the quotation marks, which are a nice punctuation-riffic way of me saying scary obsessed uber-nerds without coming right out and saying just that. Except I just did. Oops.

Anyway…

This show is narrated by Canada’s finest, William Shatner-or as I like to think of him, The Shat. It’s super-neat. Darn, if only my space tunic and moon boots weren’t in the laundry, I’d so be into this!

I saw on the news today that Our Boy Dubya is going to be visiting India to discuss the country’s nuclear program future. Now, before I go on a trip I like to make a “to do” list so I don’t forget anything. If GWB does the same thing, I sincerely hope that somewhere between “pack power tie” and “don’t forget toothbrush!” this list includes “actually learn how to pronounce nuclear.”

In other (less important but more amusing, I think) news, I’m teaching my 8th grade English class about poetry. This week we’re focusing on tongue twisters and limericks. Until recently, I only knew one very bawdy, very inappropriate, limerick.

“There once was a man from Nantucket…”

Apparently not many people know this entire limerick, just the first few lines. I don’t remember how a nice Lutheran girl like me (hahaha!) learned the rhyme in its entirety, but I did. Needless to say, I quickly had to learn some more limericks in order to give my herd of semi-innocent adolescents a proper lesson.

Alas, I was also unable to teach them my favorite tongue twister, one which we frequently used for play rehearsal warm-ups in college. It goes as follows:

“Phil was a mother pheasant plucker. Phil was the most pleasant mother pheasant plucker who ever plucked a mother pheasant.”

Try it, it’s fun!

Luckily for me, there are hundreds of other appropriate tongue twisters out there and the lesson was a great success. We ended it with a tongue twister contest, which is fantastically fun, particularly if you teach a great, energetic bunch of kids like I do.

We’re continuing the countdown to quarter break. I’m looking forward to this one especially for two reasons: one, it means the hell that is moderation is over and two; it means I get to go to Turkey for a week. At this point, I’m mostly just looking forward to the end of moderation stuff and I really don’t think I’ll be able to get fully excited about our Istanbul trip until I’m sitting on the plane.

We did pick up some fun new stuff for our camera this weekend, though, which will be good for our trip. I also got a new cell phone on Saturday, which was very exciting. According to my homeroom students, my old phone was so not cool because it didn’t have a camera. Well, now I have a cool phone, which has enabled me to take low-quality, grainy digital photos of my cat. Whee! The camera will come in handy, though, for great photo opportunities we have previously missed such as elephants riding down the highway in the back of a truck or the big sign at Makro (a bulk Sam’s Club-type store) that advertised “PLASTIC ASS 2 pcs. Rp. 10,000.00!!!” Oh, those wacky foreigners! Wait...I'm the foreigner here...

With our cell phones (or handphones, as we’ve gotten accustomed to calling them) here we pay as we go. We buy pulses for our phones on these phone card things, dial the numbers in, then refill when we run out or the pulses expire. It’s very handy, and it’s nice because you can switch phones and just keep the same SIM card, which is the card that has your individual phone number and your phone book and contact list. I was able to switch phones and just put my old card in the new phone. Then we bought a new SIM card (they run about $2) for my old phone and gave the phone to our driver, Pak Supardi.

Earlier in the day, Travis told him we were buying a “new hp for Mrs. Erin.” Supardi then suggested that we could give him the old phone so then we could call or text-message him rather than having to wait in line at the car-call. “Mrs.” he told me in Indonesian, “you can go to Starbucks and call 15 minutes before you want to go home, then no waiting!” Sold!

In the end, we decided to give him the phone and a certain amount for pulses each month since he’d be using it mostly for work. It was fun, we programmed all the numbers he’d need into it, set it to say “Hello, Pak Supardi!” when the phone was turned on and switched the language to Bahasa Indonesia. I’d just decided I was going to have to show him how to play Space Invaders, my favorite game on the phone, when I remembered something-I needed to clear the game’s high score board.

I hold all the high scores for said game, and because I am a mature, outstanding young adult, when offered the chance to enter my three initials on the high score board, I did not go with the obvious choice-EMA. No, all the high scores on Space Invaders were held by ASS or POO.

I am an ocean of awesome.

P.S. If you can name the song that the title of this post came from, you too can be an ocean of awesome. I'll give you a hint: not only can this musician rock a mic like a vandal, he can also wax a chump like a candle.

P.P.S. I’d like to send a special un-birthday shout out to my homeslice, Matthew Jonathan Clark. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t get a birthday this year as he was a leap year baby. Fortunately for him, he does get this handsome blog mention! Ooh! Fancy! Cheers to Matt, who does the best impression ever of Aaron Neville (via hand puppet, Mr. Hand) singing that green Lutheran hymnal supplement favorite, “Eat This Bread.”