On the phone

When I first moved down here, cell phones were the newest thing.  It wasn't yet like it is now, where everyone has one, sometimes several, and may not be able to pay their electric bill but they do find a way to have this one essential extension.  Many I know have more than one, and each one is for calling very specific people, in certain circumstances, or to those with the same provider.  With this new found techno freedom, there is of course always the risk that someone will decide to point a knife or such at you and ask you to hand it over, as happened to me 6 months after I got my first one.  And when some unknown person ends up with your cellphone, they then can take it and use it to call your loved ones and try a "golpe" - try to convince the person they are calling that you have been kidnapped or otherwise compromised, asking for money or tricking you into giving valuable information for them to use at a later time.  My email box used to fill up with warnings about these golpes - how to not list phone numbers as "home" or "husband" or "mom" or what not, how to check if the person is okay in other manners, how never to take anyone's word for it that you can't see and don't know on the other end that what they say is true.  My second cell follows a lot of these indications (although as it is now so old and obsolete I doubt anyone would bother trying to steal it anyway) and I have learned to be extremely cautious on the phone when people call here.

All this caution has made it very difficult to communicate anything of use on the phone, however.  People call and want to know who called them from this number, but they don't want to give their name, and I don't want to give my name or the name of anyone else in the house, the conversation kind of going like this: "someone called me from this number, who am I talking to?" "It wasn't me that called, so I don't know." "Who are you?" "Who are you?" "I'm trying to find out who called me from this number."  "Well, it wasn't me, must have been someone else." "Who are you?"  "I prefer not to say, who are you?" "I just want to know who called me from this number."  "Sorry, it wasn't me." "Okay, thanks anyway. " "Yeah, sorry." And so what was the point of the phone call?  No one leaves voicemail because it counts against your very expensive credits to listen to it for many plans.  Many people figure if there is a number on their phone that called them, if it is that important, the person will call back, while at the same time you call and figure your number registered on the phone, so eventually someone will call to find out who that was that called and have a conversation much like that above.

I even had a golpe phone call once, after my maid's daughter's phone was stolen (for the second time).  About a month after or so I got a tearful phone call from a woman claiming to have been robbed.  Of course it caught me off guard and I accidentally gave the daughter's name before some guy got on the phone and wanted to know "what is the person at this number to her?", but luckily I figured out what was going on at that point and refused to answer.  I then called my maid and asked her to check on her daughter and make sure she was okay, which of course she was, but then I felt tremendously idiotic for having fallen for a golpe when I had always been so cautious before.  I hoped that by accidentally given the girl's name I had not done any damage that might enable the person with her phone to use this information to fool someone else in her phone list.  I never heard of anything happening after that, however.

At one point during college, some guy in Hawaii accidentally called my apartment in East Lansing looking for a girl who had previously been at that same number.  We got to chatting just for the heck of it and kept in contact for a few years after, occasionally writing letters and exchanging pictures, although we never did meet and lost track of each other once I moved off campus.  Still, for the bit it lasted, it was fun to think how I found a friend by accident just because he called what was my phone number.  (yes, I recognize that now with social media and whatever you wanna reference online, this kind of thing is quite common and not at all unusual)  I will never have that experience here.  You can't trust that unknown person on the other end of the phone.  Actually, you can't in East Lansing either, but it seemed much more productive to talk to people on the phone at that time than it does to me now here.  Or am I too paranoid?


**** Edit update ****

Apparently something similar is now happening on facebook.  Who knew?

If you were in my movie...

March has become an immensely horribly busy month for me.  I can't remember March ever being so distinctive before.  I have managed to pack (not by my own planning) two major school events and the MA course into a 3 week period, along with agreeing to sew 45 kimonos for my current students, 25 berets for my son and his classmates and teachers, traveling to São Paulo for a weekend training, not to mention taking a group of 23 students and almost as many parents to São Paulo at the end of the month for the DI Celebration which involves countless meetings with parents and students involved, and don't even get me started on the last minute additions to this trip.  Actually, I didn't pack any of this, it all seems to have packed itself.  I have been running on 4 hour sleep nights for the last three weeks, been sick twice (still recovering), and one of my bottom wisdom teeth has decided to break surface which has resulted in some of the worst tooth pain I have felt since I cracked my tooth two years ago and an extremely swollen face.  I'm hungry and I don't want to eat because even opening my mouth hurts, let alone chewing.  I have read almost all of our course text book in a matter of two weeks and only stopped reading because I found the first 60 pages of the last chapter are missing.  I'll have to chase those down tomorrow.  Today I took 5 quizzes online, wrote two papers, did 3 discussion questions and read two articles.  And I still have more to do.  Oh, and I cooked some soy chicken with carrots for our snack during the course tomorrow.  I'm not even going to go into what I have to do for the course this week, it's really not what I want to think about right now.  When I got home yesterday, I took a five hour nap and hid from all social contact for the entire day.  Then we watched a movie that was absolutely one of the worst movies I have watched in a long time.  It felt really good to not work for a bit.  Today was homework day as I neglected to do anything productive yesterday save dream of getting my PhD.



In the morning, I usually listen to my ipod in the van, rather than chat with my colleagues.  It's a good way to start the day, just watching the sun on the water on the way to school, and I can almost just feel optimistic about the possibilities for the day.  Sometimes I imagine I am in a movie and the music is the sound track, and what might be the next obstacle in the plot line.  Everyone's life seems a bit movie like I suppose.  Some more than others (my dear friend of the dourado mamão could sell her story for a novela, although unfortunately her experience is not far off the norm for new arrivals- come to think of it, I'm not sure when I got so passive about the things that really used to get to me).  I also think of very interesting things to write on this blog, although they seldom get written because I am in a van and no where near a computer with the necessary speed or time to write.  But I did remember the movie thing and I did take time out of my reading and writing to write about it, just so you all know I'm not dead. 

Ju speak, February 16, 2010

If I fosse a bombeiro I could apagar that fogo.

How to do laundry with a four year old (when the maid is on vacation)

To do laundry with four year old, follow these instructions:

1: get all laundry consolidated at the top of the stairs.

2: throw, toss or otherwise utilized gravity to ensure the laundry begins it's decent to the floor below.




















3: alternately, you can ride the laundry down on your butt (just make sure there is enough to cushion your bottom if it's like mine). Wooden stairs make a great laundry sledding hill.
















4: if you are four, bury yourself in the laundry, it's fun.

















4.5: break for lunch.

5: sort into piles of whites versus things that will bleed with darks, and light colors, also towels and sheets.

6: spend all day loading into machine, and then slowly painstakingly hanging them all on ceiling racks which are really hard to pull up.

7: wait 3 days for it all to dry, by which time there will be more laundry to throw.




I remember my mom yelling at me for doing this on her carpeted stairs, telling me that it would ruin them. I will never have to fight this fight.

In the spirit of writing my blog in the style of other blogs I am currently reading because that always seems to be what I do, here is a small tutorial.



Upcycle that skirt into a dress (but you can still wear it as a skirt too, woopee!)


Do you have a lot of India style long skirts stashed away? I remember giving many away to friends when I moved down here, only to need them when I was pregnant because nothing else would fit! I have quite a collection of them down here now, several that I have acquired since moving. I used to wear them quite a bit too, but I find that now 1) it's just too hot to wear something down to my ankles for the better part of the year; 2) when I walk on the street, I have a tendency to carry the skirt up off the ground due to the vast amount of grossities left on the sidewalks here that I just don't want on my clothes and; 3) climbing up and down stairs with or carrying kids and wearing long skirts is a bad combination resulting in tripping and falling, stepping on the skirt and either ripping it or pulling it off my butt.

I have gotten tired of me as the hippi-girl with long skirt and tank top look. I have been that girl for more than half my life. Most of the time I wear knee length dresses here, because of the heat. STill, I love these skirts, they are SO comfortable, so while staring at my collection one night, I decided to see if I couldn't turn one of them into a dress using shirring, as I have been experimenting with it lately. As this was a first attempt, it didn't come out as perfect as I'd like and I was unable to add the ruffle I wanted to the bottom because I stupidly did not measure anything before making it (live and learn), but it came out okay. I hope it can give new life to the skirts you have stashed away and don't want to part with.


You will need -
Scissors
Sewing machine with zigzag stitch
A long skirt
Thread that matches said skirt
Elastic thread
Seam ripper
A ruler, if you are so inclined to measure things
Pins

Select your skirt. If it's ankle length and you're not exceedingly tall, there is no reason it can't become a dress that will fit you without showing off all you have to offer.


As I am on the small side and there is a LOT of fabric in many India style skirts, I ran a simple stitch all around the skirt to maintain the broomstick pleats and make the circumference smaller on the top. If you are more well endowed than I, or feel like you need more space on the top, feel free to skip this step. With my machine, it takes about 5 inches in on a 37 inch circumference while shirring. Everyone's body shape is different and you may need more space than I, so I'd recommend doing one line and double checking that you can still fit it over your hips to pull it on. All this sewing I did with the garment right side out so I could see how neatly the stitches lay where they would be seen.


I sewed 14 lines like this, and I would recommend NOT just going down in a spiral like I did because it became really confusing when I was shirring with the elastic thread later on. These lines are about 1/2 inch apart. Yes, this part kind of takes a while, but I felt much more secure doing it this way.


Now that you have your basic shape (and have double checked that you can pull it on over your hips - it should fit loosely around you), you can chop off the waist band and hem the top (I liked the frayed edge and left it unhemmed). Often times these things are old and nasty, but if you want you can try to salvage the elastic using your seam ripper.


Hand wind your elastic thread onto your bobbin. This seems like it will take a long time, but it really doesn't. Don't wind it tightly, just try to keep it wound as it is on the spool, if that makes any sense. When you pop the bobbin into it's casing, be sure to pull out a decent amount and hold onto it when you begin sewing. You won't have to pull it out and stretch like you do for waistbands though.


Your top thread is the same, but now your bottom thread is elastic, do you see? You will use a wide zigzag stitch now - on my machine it's the widest of the three options for simple zigzag.




Now you get to follow those lines you made earlier, but this time zigzagging over your running stitch with your elastic thread underneath and the cotton thread on top, again with the garment RIGHT SIDE out (so you're elastic stays on the inside, where you can't see it). Obviously, one should generally experiment with any stitch or technique on your fabric before starting your project to make sure your tension is okay and such and to see how the fabric will lay with different stitches. I didn't so this at all because I generally just wing it and live and learn. When you complete a line, just stitch over a couple inches, put up your pressure foot, move it over and continue on the next line. I didn't once cut my threads (except when I ran out of elastic thread and had to rewind the bobbin), but rather trimmed at the end. It worked pretty well.



Be sure to get your cat to help you hold the dress down.


Once you finish all the lines, you are pretty much done. Big busted women may want to add ribbon ties to keep everything where it's supposed to be. I am not one of these.



If you want to go all out and have no waste at all from this project, you can chop up your waist band into a ruffle (be sure to measure first or you will end up ruffleless as I did - to compensate, I took the seam ripper to the bottom seam and made it frayed as the top - not my best idea ever...). First use your seam ripper to remove your waist band elastic. You could also use scissors to do this, but as someone who has in the past fought to carefully removed an old nasty waistband without ripping the thin cotton fabric, it was very satisfying to just really rip into it. To each his/her own.


Ew, nasty old waistband.




Now cut this circle somewhere so it becomes a strip, and lay it out strait so you can further divide it into multiple strips. I made three here, but that was not enough. I would recommend at least 4 for the average width skirt. If they are different widths and thicknesses, no worries - just cut them in half or thirds and you will distribute this unevenness evenly.


You can make your ruffles as gathered as you like. Some people have a gathering foot for their machine, which I am sure would be useful for this. I just push up small pinches of fabric as it passes under the presser foot, which works okay. When you come to the end of a section of fabric, just stick another one on to the end and continue gathering. I love this style ruffle - it ended up all over my white dress for new years as well. Once you're done with this ruffle, pin it on the bottom of the skirt and stitch that puppy on.




And there you have it - a dress from a skirt. Just tug it down to your waist to wear as as skirt again.

I keep having to write this, but yes, yet again, I am not dead. A bit tired, yes, but not dead. The problem is I feel most inspired to write things in the afternoon, when, generally, I am not usually anywhere near a computer. This may come from my deep found need to avoid actual responsibilities I have to accomplish, like cleaning, planning and laundry. Also, it's vacation and rather than sit and type things I have been sitting and making things (sewing, cooking and otherwise, and admittedly also spending time in FARMVILLE on facebook which is admittedly a stupid way to spend my time, but I like it).

Recent discoveries that have taken my life into a more sewing machine based direction are oneprettything and threadbanger. If you aren't familiar with them, you should check them out. I made several xmas gifts based on ideas from these sites. Ju is the proud caretaker of Boogie the monster (also known as stupid creatures) and his small cat friend Cookie. I made them from his rainbow boutique crib sheet and the legs of a pair of pants that turned into capris and then turned into shorts. I made my dress for NYE out of some lovely fabric my mom gave me for my birthday. It took me three days of thinking and staring before I began to cut and sew and I changed my design 4 times while working on it and in the end used nearly EVERY SINGLE SCRAP of fabric I had cut - even the very small pieces were cut into strips and sewn into the ruffle style I have recently become obsessed with. I used this same ruffle technique to make a garland for our Xmas tree (still have to take that down) and to make gift bags. It's not very interesting but it looks really nice when it's done. I also learned shirring which as opened up new design possibilities.

I promise something more insightful later. Maybe.

Yesterday was Halloween. We went to the mall. We bought a Christmas tree. Since the Halloween party at school was moved to the 6th, I am still finishing Ju's snail costume. Halloween here is only about scary characters and none of his friends can understand how a snail is scary and tell him so. I am feeling distinctly unHalloweeny, which is very unlike me as it was always my most favorite holiday ever. I hope it kicks in for Friday. I am working on a sort of costume for the night party - something involving this top hat and vampire teeth. For the day I think I will be an owl at school. That is, if I can finish the costume on time. At least I have the hat as back up.

Conversations with Ju -

Ju enters the bedroom, completely soaked in his clothes.
"Ju, why are you all wet?"
"I have to fix my hair. We are going to two festas!"


Reading a Halloween book, and seeing that the main character just went into the "witch's house" in the story and decide to predict what will happen next in the story.
"What do you think will happen?"
"I think she's gonna get him and put him in her panela" (pot)
"Oh, you mean her cauldron? Yeah, maybe. And then what will happen?"
"She's gonna make him be a.. a.. a sandwich!"


In other news, our Halloween comes late this year - due to the long holiday weekend coming up, the school decided to move our party to the 6th of November. This is good because I have more time to finish Ju's snail costume. But it's pretty funky already with all the Xmas decorations up, only to get worse the farther into November we go.

Haha, I always wondered what the words to that song were...

Over the summer, Ju learned a song at Quaker meeting. It is a song I sang as a kid, written by a local folk singer called Carol Johnson. What they did in first day school that got him to learn it when I had sang it to him for years before hand, I will never know. This song is called "Love Grows." His first version went like this -

"Love grows, one by one, two by two, three by three and four by four...."

After a month of this, he had corrected it and would sing it at random in the car whenever he felt things were getting too quiet.

Then the other night, as I was putting him to bed and staying with him "just for five minutes, please please because I love you" (and then he bats those long eyelashes at you and gives you a silly smile), he began to sing it, whispering, in Portuguese. He sang the entire chorus, it seems, completely translated by himself.

"Amor crecer, um by um, dois by dois e quatro by quatro"
"Amor crecer, faz um ciculo e vai bater na sua porta na frente"

When I asked him later in the week if he had sang this song at school, thinking maybe his Portuguese teacher translated it (I shared the song with the whole school a couple of years ago and now everyone from grade 2 - 7 knows the lyrics and sang it for a school wide presentation), but he insists he figured it out himself. I will have to verify this, of course, before I get too excited about how cool this is.

Queimadas, for those wondering where it was. I loved it.


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Hi all, I swear I'm not dead or lost or anything. I spent my usual month in the USA in June/July and just have not gotten back into the swing of blogging quite yet. I promise more stories soon though. Lots more. Just let me get through my current MA course and the start up of DI and I swear I'll get back into it.

Sometimes in the afternoons, Ju and I will do sort of research projects to figure out how things work, mostly focusing on science. We spent some days looking at videos of tornadoes and hurricanes and discussing them because of the recent weather patterns.


He has always be very fascinated by the elevators in the mall, watching them go up and down, so we made our own elevator on the stairs one day to learn about pulleys. It was a good time for Ju and for Duse who thought that we had hung string that moved just for him to play with.

Ju got annoyed several times as Duse would quickly knock our string off the pulley with his constant pawing, but I think all in all the activity was a success.

Ju generally wakes me up early on any given day when I'd rather not be up early. It begins with him running into our room, getting on me in bed, usually asking for me to look at this thing he made with leggos or playdough or grabbing a cat who was pleasantly sleeping on my legs or my hair. He will run in and out of the room for about 20 minutes, and then begin telling me to get up because he wants breakfast. Usually I can waylay him a bit if I don't want to get up quite yet and he finds something else to do until I go downstairs. This morning was much the same story, except when I rolled over and told him to give me a few more minutes, he took it upon himself to get what he wanted. I could hear him moving things around downstairs, and eventually I heard the sound of granola being poured in a bowl. As the granola is kept on a shelf above the sink, I decided I had better get up in case he was doing something even more dangerous than climbing up on the kitchen counter. He must have been really hungry and unwilling to wait for me, got his stool from the bathroom, used it to climb up on the counter, got down the granola and the cashew nuts, climbed back down, got his own bowl out, served himself half the container of granola (about 2 cups) into the bowl, and was just about to put milk on it which he had gotten out of the fridge on his own as well. Although it's nice to see him so independent and it may mean I get to sleep in in the future, it may end up being an awful waste of food. Maybe it's time to put a scoop in the granola, and perhaps take it out of the glass container and put it in plastic instead.

______________________________________________________________

As I was typing this, we had this conversation.


"mommy, look, the car is on the pedga."

"it's on a what?"

"it's a pegda."

"a playdough?"

"no, a pegda!"

"a peda?"

"no, a pega!"

"a what? a prega" (nail)

"no! a peda!"

"a playdough?"

"no! something else, hard!" (hits his fist on the floor beside the car)

"oh! you mean a pebble?"

"yeah, a peddle."

We went to the supermarket today to do our big bimonthly shopping trip. To pass the time, Ju and I wandered over to look at the fish on ice. There were some whole salmon and some red fish. One of the red fish was chopped up into fillets, yet still connected by the skin and with the head attached. Ju and examined it and had the following conversation.

"Mommy, why's it like that?"

"All chopped up? Why do you think it's like that?"

"Because the tubarão came and shwish shwish swish." (motions what I think is swimming)

"The shark came and cut it up?"

"Yeah, he cut it."

"How did he cut it, do you think? With a knife?"

"No, he did it with his sail." (he has been studying dinosaurs at school and is probably thinking of Spinosaurus)

"Oh, you mean his fin? On his back, right?"

"Yeah, he cut it with his fin. He came and went swish swish swish."

Ju has figured out ANY is part of the negation of English, so he says things like "Mommy, there is any cars coming. We can cross."

More rain.

A friend had told me yesterday her house was filling up with water - today I heard she lost everything. There was over a meter of water in her house. I can't get in contact with her and I want to know how she is and what she needs. She has two boys.

Are you paranoid about swine flu? We sure are. There are stories passing left and right about confirmed cases (there have been no confirmed cases in Brazil, as of yet), paranoid parents wanting me to tell them about every sniffle or cough that I witness in the class, people canceling their trips to Disney, you name it. At the moment I can feel myself getting a cold of some kind, nose feels like it's filling up with something, feeling a bit tired. Just watch, I'll go to school sick tomorrow and the parents will assume I caught swine flu just because I am American (yes, seriously, some of these parents think that way and I wouldn't put it past them to tell people they meet as much as well).

And lets not even worry about the rain (more on This Week in Bahia). It has been raining a lot lately, as it usually does at this time of year. The last week of April had more rain here than was predicted for the entire month. It's still the first week of May and we have already surpassed our expected rainfall for May as well. It has been raining pretty much nonstop since Saturday. Today the whole city was a giant traffic jam. I had kids who were supposed to go home at 12 still in my classroom at 2:40. Parents couldn't get to the school to get them, and the ones that were able to arrive where then stuck there with no way out with all the flooding. By 12 several people were out digging canals in the playground to try to direct the water around the building instead of into the preschool classrooms. I tried to make it an educational experience anyway and took the kids in small groups to look around at what was happening to the grounds. On the news they recommended that one not drive on the roads that usually flood during heavy rains - they listed every road that is a "main vein" to get to anywhere else in the city, except the Orla, which is two lanes in each direction. The mayor, or someone, advised everyone to just stay put at home for their personal saftey, lest they end up floating away in their cars. Mostly people were just stuck wherever they were at 10:30 when the major rain really began taking hold. Ceilings caved in, houses collapsed, lakes and rivers filled up, taking over roads flooding houses. And this isn't an unknown phenomenon - it happens nearly every year. Why nothing is done to improve drainage is beyond me. I don't want to think about it too much because there is nothing I can do to change it.

Ju's 4th birthday, by some miracle, was clear, cool and miraculously rainless. We got a bit more involved with games this year and sent the kids running all over to find the hidden 4s we had concealed all over the garden after a rousing game of pin the baby stegosaurus on the mommy stegosaurus. One of my favorite parts of Ju's birthday is to have my best friends here in one place for a day. Two of my girlfriends always stay till late (they are the LIXO as we say here, they go out with the garbage, when the party is over) with kids and husbands and everyone has a great time. I learned my lesson from last year and used only non-dye-running materials to decorate and therefore was able to actually enjoy the party. Ju was the only one to go in the pool, initially because he dropped a new car and it sank to the bottom (did I mention that he swims to the bottom of the pool by himself now?) and then I think just for the joy of trying to get the other kids wet. It wasn't exactly pool weather as I was cool enough to leave my hair down, but I think he is slowly turning into a fish, or perhaps a bobcat - don't they swim?

We have been reading The Missing Piece Meets the Big O. Ju has many parts of it memorized and likes to practice the exchanges with me at odd times during the day. He also can pick up the book and "read" some of it to us. He has learned several phrases and words just from watching things like Oswald and Sesame Street on DVD and now I see he is beginning to get more of them from books as well. The book fair is coming up at school, so I hope he will finally get to acquire a book of his choosing. I am curious to see what his tastes are and what they may be based on. He loves all the books I have chosen for him in the past.

I have been sewing a lot lately, creating things that come to my head during water bike. I don't have enough time to do them all justice. Eventually I will put some photos.

In other news, I see my Sandal boots have arrived in the States, finally. Come on USA, get with it - they came in and seem to have gone out of style almost a year ago!

"Mommy, you insane!"

"I'm insane?

"Yes, like the cats."



Well, at least I know where he learned that one.

As tomorrow is a holiday and today we had off because our school administrators wisely assumed that few students would come to school on a Monday before a Tuesday holiday, I got up early and went to the 6 AM water bike class. I absolutely love water bike. I feel energized and de-stressed when I leave. Anyone with the opportunity to try it should, in my opinion, and I am constantly badgering people here to come check it out (haven't succeeded yet, though).

Walking back from class at 7 AM, I found myself in the company of at least 50 other people, mostly women, possibly many of them housemaids, on the way to work. I enjoy walking and prefer it to taking the bus if the weather and distance permit. There is a woman who has a juice stand near the pool who was doing a small breakfast rush. A little farther up the street there was a woman all set up to sell "mingal" - kind of pourage like warm sweet breakfast liquidly thing. At the end of my street there is a guy who sells some kind of bread and coffee which I never noticed before (possibly because I rarely walk so early in that direction). It was so pleasant to walk with so many people, I wonder if they found it as pleasant as I did.