August 23rd

One week of school down! All in all I think the first week went really well. On Friday the kids were really excited that it was the last day of school. I gave them a couple quizzes and then didn't do much else. It's a short day and I let them chill a bit. I had trouble keeping them quiet because they were so ready to be done with school. I know how they felt because I felt the same way.

Friday afternoon I went out surfing again. That rounded off a full five days of surfing. Can't complain about that. Zac and Tony got out there with me. They were about to catch a couple waves and they were really stoked about that. They are new surfers and they haven't caught many waves yet. Ben was taking pictures and got some really good ones. My camera was set on high speed and he got this one sequence of me dropping in on a barrel. I'm dropping in at an angle as it breaks, digging the rail into the wave, riding it down the face. I was about to pull into the barrel, but he was right there in my line so I didn't pull into it. The other waves I caught weren't barreling. That's ok, but I'm anxious to get tubed again. I was reading in one of Dameon books about how to do that and other surfing tricks. They said that the tube is the safest part of a wave.

Friday afternoon and walked down to the EZ Price, which is a ways away. I picked up some Soy Milk, which was really cheap, only $1.29, so I got four. I already had some crazy cheap cereal from Payless so I'll be in milk and cereal for awhile. I'm learning to look for those deals. They had a deal on Oranges for 99 cents a pound. I've been trying to eat one a day to get me that Vitamin C and other stuff that fresh food has. Fresh stuff tends to be really expensive here, so you have to look for the deals.

Friday night we went to Vespers. This Filipino guy spoke and he was really good. He had Sabbath School as well. It was a nice change from the island speakers who don't speak good English. He was from California, so he spoke good English. The sermon was about 7 Habits of Highly Effective Prayer. He had some good stories about how God answered his prayers.

My housemate, Rudy, keeps a sheet of paper by his bed and he writes poems in his sleep. They are a complete mess, crisscrossing everywhere. But he sits down and spends time decoding them. Once he puts them in a coherent order, they actually make sense. Some of them are really funny. One was about him being a girl in his past life. The punch line is at the end when you find out he was a lesbian. It was pretty funny. He doesn't believe in reincarnation or anything, it was just something random in his sleep.

We had potluck after church with just the SMs. We all brought a dish to the principals house and the food was really good. I ate a lot. We celebrated the birthday of one of the SMs. Her birthday is really today, Sunday, but we celebrated it yesterday because everyone was there. After that we slept all afternoon. I've been going to bed at 11 pm or after and getting up at 6:30, so the sleep was needed. Satuday night was open gym night. I played volley ball a little, but there was too many people running around and it was a mess. My team always sucked. Party due to my lack of skill, but we just couldn't get a single good play going on. Afterthat we watched a couple movies that someone rented.

Today I've got to get a lot of lesson plans done. I've been planning one day ahead. Now I know about what we can get accomplished and I can start making plans. I've got a lot of papers to grade as well. I had them write a personal narrative. It is a first draft and I'm giving them full points for writing it. I assumed they could put together decent sentences. That proved to be a false assumption. It makes grading them really tough. I will do it differently next time. I'm having to correct everything and restructure a lot of sentences.