The marks of another month

Walking to campus today I saw the familiar signs of another month passing: the barge from Japan bringing new cars! Some novelties of St. Kitts have started to wear off, but others still remain a fascination. It's poured the past few days, but only when I'm in class. I'm not talking little showers, I'm talking hurricane or tropical storm winds, darkened sky, thunder claps. What's so striking is that before and after class during these, the sky is crisp, clean, and shows no sign of storm. Amazing weather.

The past two Fridays we've been forced to participated in so called 'leadership exercises.' Here were some of our challenges:

What if your space ship crashed on a new planet. The surface of the planet is covered in a liquidy substance that makes you automatically sink if you touch it. Our space ship is over on a rock not sinking, while we are on a pair of 4x4 posts 8 feet long that miraculously won't sink. Our task is to make it the 20 feet back to our space ship with out falling off the posts thereby sinking into oblivion.

How much do you trust someone? Your sight is gone (completely blindfolded) and you must navigate a maze with a partner by only asking yes or no questions. I liked this one; girls and vets communicate well.

We have a magical floating PVC stick (it really floated) and we must lower it to the ground. We can only touch it with the dorsal surface of our pointer fingers and have to start over if we lose contact with the stick. It's a game of mind over matter. (It floated because we kept lifting our hands to keep it from rolling off and there were 10 of us.)

Blow up a balloon as large as you can make it. Get in a line with this balloon separating each person. We had to navigate a course without dropping our balloon or touching each other our our balloon. There was a lot of push and pull as we squished together.

In other news, the Chicken Lady's (Valarie) nephew's (Bobby) cousin's (house directly behind me in shanty town with the barking dog) friend (Greggory) is the caretaker of the horses. My grey was loose Monday, so my neighbors knocked on my door (because he's really my horse right?). I went down and caught him and was petting him. While I was trying to figure out where to put him while I went to find someone legitimately responsible for him, Greggory ran up. We talked for a while and he told me all about the horses. My pony's name is 'Imperial 2' (but I can call him Jake still) after his father 'Imperial' and 'Imperial Stables.' I asked how he got the scars on his back leg. He told me that a Rasta got mad at the owner or horses or something and took a machete to them! Jake's dam (mother) and his sister's (Mona Lisa) foal was killed during this and the guy went to jail! This was about 3-4 years ago when Jake was a yearling. Jake's father died by jumping a fence into oncoming traffic. Very sad.

Anyway, Greggory let me hop on and ride Jake (halter and lead rope). He said I could come on the tourist rain forest tour for free sometime because the horse 'seemed to like me so much.' Jake is so funny, he stretches his neck out to lick the sugar out of my hands and whinnies now when he sees me (because he knows I give him treats). He doesn't like carrots or pepermints (like Zaldi) but does like mangos and watermellon rine.