more about the cat

The cat is working out nicely, and has been slowly getting used to us. Kanipa apa had another conversation with the neighbors and it sounds like they’re okay with him staying at our place. Apa has named him “Cheetah.” Today is the first day he’s taken flying leaps at anything, although he’s been more and more underfoot. The problem is that he is something besides me that Kanipa Apa talks to. “Eh, what are you looking at?” she shouted yesterday from the other room, and I told her I was planning lessons. But she was talking to the cat. I didn’t answer, however, when she said, “Are you hungry? Eat some mice.”

The cat, by the way, is a good mouser. However, he plays with the dead little body for an indecent amount of time afterward, and he likes to play with it in my room at 6am.

new cat

We seem to have acquired a cat. It is a very nice cat, black, with yellow eyes, and he's been coming to the door whenever he sees me come home for a while now. I don't usually let him in, but sometimes he slips past and I have to pick him up to get him outside again. When I pick him up, he climbs onto my shoulder. When I lift him off my shoulder, he climbs onto my head. My neighbor, probably in a haze of some sort, stopped to watch us on his way back from the outhouse. I ended up having to put down all my bags and use both hands and a pole to get the cat off.

I think Kanipa Apa missed me and decided the neighbor's cat would go a long way toward replacing me, since we have about the same level of language skills. She didn't mention how the neighbors feel about the situation when she explained it to me. The cat is apparently permitted to go wherever he wants. He is under my bed right now, and I hope he stays and kills something.

hard times

During the week, I stopped by the apartment where I go to church (the church has about 10 people – Protestants are in short supply here). The pastor's wife is an excellent story teller, and she has quite a lot of good stories. I forget what brought it up, but we began talking about post-Soviet times. She told us about how life was when her youngest daughter was a baby. They lived in Shimkent, a large city in the south of Kazakhstan. After the fall of the USSR, the city had electricity for only about half an hour a day. Which is livable if you’re set up for it, but they lived on the seventh floor of an apartment building in the center of a city, with a newborn, in the winter. They had to carry her baby around in a fur coat all day and light a candle under her cradle at night. They could make food in the apartment by lighting candles under a metal plate, but to make tea, everyone foraged for wood (I can't imagine there was much in a semi-arid city) went outside and made fires in the apartment yard. There were about two years like that.

raisins

I came back today from a language camp and slept for about 5 hours during the day, and I’ll probably sleep well tonight, too. It was an intense week, especially for a napper like me. I hope I've boosted my language skills, which I have been quite lazy about. I’m not sure how I would handle a group like us (“Saltanat, how do you say ‘why are you looking at me like I’ve got a banana growing out of my forehead,’ in Kazakh?”), but Saltanat, bless her, just rolls with it. Discussions/arguments about grammar forms and whether they match up with English ones (no) often swallowed 10 minutes.
Saltanat told us that a teacher must find each student’s raisin and re-hydrate it, meaning that everyone has something that motivates them to learn and a teacher has to, um, water it. Ryan pointed out that re-hydrated raisins are gross. I’m not sure what my raisin is. I did spend a fair amount of time, as I did during our training, laughing. Maybe laughing is my raisin.
The weather was gorgeous and warmish, until the last couple days, when it was below freezing for most of the day. . I showered THREE times in one week. Imagine! We made good food and drank lots of juice. And suddenly, it’s mid-November.