this is the most i've listened to steely dan in my life

Hello everyone. Sorry agian for not posting in such a long time. I wanted to thank everyone for their love, support, respect, and friendship. I would also like to apologize fr writing such worrisome things last time, I realize that is doing a disservice to anyone who reads this and will save those for private conversations or keep them to myself in the future.
The past 2 weeks have been extremely busy and I have had very little downtime. I have been teaching 4 english classes a week (usually 5th 6th and 7th graders), observing my fellow PCV's lessons, taking russian class for 4 hours a day, running and english club at the school, and doing a community project..sigh. Often, email time takes a back seat...thigns should slow down considerably around halloween.
We will find out where our permanent sites will be on Friday evening, everyone is anxious and it seems to be all anyone talks about as of late. I have the feeling I will be sent to southern kazakhstan because all of my observers of classes have been from southern kazakhstan, but that is just speculation. The south has its advantages and disadvantages just like everything else. The southern part of the country is known to be a little more wild west like....where assaults are a little more common, maybe just a little more lawlessness in general is more common, but on the plus side it will be much warmer there than the far north which averages about 15 below in the winter.
My obervations by my peers and PC have been coming back very well. I am usually praised for my ability as a teacher, which is very encouraging, espeically since i feel very deficient in Russian. We have our language test next week, where we will judged on our speaking ability. No one gets sent home for a bad score, its almost all a matter of pride, but no one wants to be a novice level language speaker.
For the most part I am enjoying teaching, and think I do a good job. It has been difficult because the 2 textbooks I teach out of are from 1978 and 1983 (Soviet Era) so many of the English tasks revolve around talking about how Britain's government does not defend the working class..sometimes I dont know if I should laugh or throw the books away. I have pictures below of what is actually in some of the books, you should click on them and read it (especially the how patriotic are you quiz)..always a good laugh. Generally, I try to avoid the books lesson as much as possible and use my creativity to come up with a lesson that might be more about vocabulary, phrases, and grammar that are more important to thier speaking ability than dicussions of British parliament. The visual aids you see below were on a lesson about traveling and compleltey killed my saturday night a few weeks ago, but were worth it because PC, my teaching counterpart, and the other volunteers could not believe how well made they were and how effective they were in the classroom.
This past weekend as particularly interesting. It was a holiday for the teachers and my host Mom got gifts of chocolate, flowers and a cordless telephone (Why??!) for the house. The cordless telphone is only in english and I have had to set it up, and wait while they picked the best ring tone and volume for it...then I got lucky enough to have its permanent location be decided as my room. For the first 2 days after they got it I could not enter the house without being asked to look at it, add information into it, or why it didnt work. Sunday morning my mom and a bunch of her teacher friends were in my house drinking vodka, singing and playing the dombra and had finished an entire bottle by 9 Am. I have never seen anything like it. I have been noticing many more oddities like this and will keep many of them for private stories after I get back.
Pretty excited to see the phils in the playoffs again and wish i was there.
one more thing....HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM


i love and miss all of you,
nick