rats!!!

i wonder where the phrase "rats!" came from. you know, you miss your bus..."rats!" you lose a game of monopoly..."rats!" you stub your toe on the cupboard..."rats!" it seems like a very comical and not-intense replacement for other 4-letter words that i would probably use instead. rats just doesn't seem like you really mean it. well, speaking of rats, we caught rat #2. after escaping two of the traps we had set up, grant heard him the other night and went to the kitchen just in time to see his head get snapped as the little rodent went for the oh-so-obviously-placed peanut butter. i guess they're getting desperate. anyway, he was not dead, but just alive enough to hurl him, trap and all, under the stove, beyond our reach. so we called harry, our diligent maintenance man, to have him dispose of our little friend in a slightly more humane way than a brick and a shovel. so 2 down, how many to go? i've heard that where there's one rat, there's 10. fabulous. atleast we're moving in a month.

it's the 4th and final week at my music school's summer music festival. out of the 5 classes i'm teaching, i haven't had one white kid yet. i can't explain the agony of trying to pronounce all these names. citlali, naima, valeria, jesus (this one isn't hard to pronounce i guess, just strange to call a growing hormonal adoloscent boy the same name as well, you know, the jesus from the bible), travell, azelle, and the list goes on. so last week we had an intro to the piano class, and this group of kids comes in and in the mix of brown and black faces, there comes this little white face with nearly white hair and freckles covering his cheeks from the sun. he couldn't have looked more like every little dutch boy in every town of northwest iowa. after stumbling through every kids' name and sweating from pronunciation exhaustion, i ask him his name and with a grin he says, "andrew." in the most northwest iowa accent you could find. he was like an exact replica of my little brother 10 years ago. same name and all. strange.