My, I'm getting to be an erratic blogger! I'll try to straighten that out and be more reliable. This has been a busy time of transition for me, starting my new job and getting adjusted to a totally different schedule and transportation scheme. My days go like this: Wake up, get ready for work, help with breakfast/cleanup/teeth brushing and getting dressed; Take the older one to kindergarten and then take the little one somewhere fun. This often involves the playground, and we walk through a farm to get there. Coming and going we stop to talk to the pigs, feed the chickens grass, and sometimes, if we go at just the right time, we watch the farmers moving the cows from the upper pasture back down to the barn. There are a lot of baby cows at the moment, and they're pretty quick about escaping under the electric fence, and the farmer has to jump fences and skirt hedges to herd them back into line. That is some quality daytime entertainment right there...although I don't know how they feel about us standing there watching the spectacle. :) After that, we might read or color, or play hide and seek, and then it's back down the hill to pick up S from school, and back UP the hill once more to make lunch, iron and fold clothes, vacuum and so forth. Fridays I do house and yard work instead of primarily watching the girls, and that's a nice relaxing change of pace.
On the whole, this nannying business puts me in a strange peer group. I'm getting to know all the women in town with children under 5, and of course I'm on my extra good and social behavior (no going to the store without showering first here!) since a new nanny in an itty bitty town lives in a glass house. I think every person I've met knows more about me than I've told them, including where I'm from and what I'm doing here, how long I've been in CH, and who I'm living with and working for now. Other than the pressure to look presentable every time I go out (which I'm sure will wear off in short order, and I'll soon be marching all over Pfeffingen in my running shorts, showered or not), it's nice to be known...kinda cozy and connected-feeling, if you will. Christmas could be problematic since I'll undoubtedly feel compelled to bake or make ornaments, or at least personalized Christmas cards for everyone I know in town, and by December, that might just be everybody.
I have mostly picked out my classes for this semester. The list includes cultural epidemiology; British Social Anthropology; Gender, Race, and Empire (a history class); African National Congress (South Africa history); Epidemiology and International Health; Disease Ecology: Human and Animal interfaces; African Auto-biographies; Islam in Africa, Christianity as an African Religion, Conflict and Media, Statehood in Transition, Urbanization in Southern Africa (a literature class); and History and Anthropology, but a few of these options conflict. I'll finalize things next month, but I'm fairly pleased with the courses offered this term. I'm thinking about taking Arabic too.
I'm off to study some German! More soon...I promise. :)
I thought with Islam in Africa, Christianity as an African Religion, you can fill a whole semester with discussions and essays. Certainly a very interesting field.
ReplyDeleteHuman interfaces I understand, but animal interfaces? Are we getting our furry friends computers? Do cows use Moogle to retrieve information? Do coyotes correspond with Wahoooo! mail? Do dogs get territorial on each other's whizzbook accounts, and order food from amadog?
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