Extreme Sheep

WOW this is awesome:

Woodchipper Goat

This Christmas, Sean and I adopted a refugee family, through the IRC. They are from Bhutan but had been living in a refugee camp in Nepal for many years, before arriving in the U.S. in April 2009. We received a 'wish list' from them, and went and picked out a few gifts for each family member. It was fun to buy things for people who actually need them, even though it added more stuff to our to-do list. (Which is already kind of full with the wedding coming up in less than a month!)

Friday after work we drove down to the family's apartment and dropped off the gifts. We sat down to chat with them for awhile (their two high-school-age sons speak pretty good English), and they offered us some tea. It tasted kind of like chai tea but super sweet (I'm guessing it was made with condensed milk). I was thinking, this is cool we get to have some authentic Bhutanese tea and talk to this nice, adorable family. The boys told us that they felt like the whole thing was a dream and they still couldn't believe that they were in America.

Well then it got a whole lot more authentic. Their mom brought us out some bowls of goat meat. Sean now calls it woodchipper goat, because it was essentially pieces of a goat that had just been passed through a woodchipper. Bones, tendons, etc. No fur though, thankfully.

I know, I'm a spoiled American. I claim to love experiencing new cultures and trying new foods, but when it comes to meat I am a giant wuss. I rarely eat meat, other than the occasional cheeseburger, because I hate gristle and fat. The worst part was that I knew Sean was silently laughing so hard at me. He knew that I was trying to be nice and polite and eat this meat, but that I was exerting all of my effort to force it down.

Then it gets even funnier. Despite my best efforts, I only got through about half of that meat (Ok maybe like 40%.) The mom took our bowls away and I felt bad for not finishing it but at the same time I was thinking Ok crisis over. We sat and watched a DVD of Bollywood movie excerpts with the boys while they told us all about the plots of their favorite movies. After about an hour and a half of this, we started getting up to leave, but one of the sons asked us to stay for dinner. We just looked at each other like how can we say no to that? and sat back down.

At first they just put two plates on the table for us, but we convinced one of the sons to eat with us. I don't know if that was rude or not, but I just felt so weird eating while everyone else isn't eating. Our meal was rice, bean soup, and more goat. Despite my misgivings about the goat, I must say that the spices on all of their food (including the goat) were very delicious. The way Sean described the situation later was: "Amy, they thought you didn't finish the goat because it got cold, so they reheated it to give you another chance to eat it!" By the way, he says this between mirthful peals of laughter because he thought I was getting my just desserts. However, he technically didn't eat the goat correctly either - we learned from watching the son that we were supposed to be eating the bones in addition the the meat & meat-ish stuff.

Anyway, I had the last laugh, as our nice dinner did come with dessert - a cup of yogurt. Sean doesn't really like yogurt, and he especially doesn't like watery yogurt with curdled chunks in it. I also didn't love the chunks, but I basically have no problem with yogurt so I ate mine and laughed silently while Sean choked down about half of his. Mmwwuaa ha ha.

No Internet

About a week ago, we shut off the internet at our place. Why? Mostly just pure cheapness. Comcast was giving us the "intro special price" of $20(ish) a month, and it just expired. Sean told them we would cancel unless they kept giving us that price, and they wouldn't do it, so that's it!

I actually do not miss the internet at all yet. I feel like I have so many things I've been trying to read, and now I can finally do that without getting distracted by the web. (You can look me up on goodreads.com if you are curious what I'm reading. Cause of course there needs to be a website for that.) The lack of internet hasn't really been that inconvenient because I can do all my emailing at work (I mean, during my lunch break of course!)

The only problem I've noticed so far is that Sean doesn't get up early and surf the web now, which means I have to set my alarm clock. It's nicer to have the 'natural' wake-up in the morning.

Sugar and Spice and All That's Nice

Ok but for real, what is the economy made of? Well, I took a macroeconomics class during grad school and I learned that personal consumption makes up 70% of GDP. But not according to this guy:

Jensen added that the notion of basing a revolution on changes to personal consumption is not only inherently flawed but dangerously misinformed. "This sort of festival is based on the mistaken notion that personal consumption represents a significant portion of the economy," he said. "In reality, 1,600 pounds of trash are produced per capita. If I reduce that to zero, it's great. But per capita waste production by industries is on average 26 tons. That is 97 percent of all waste.

I would just like to ask Mr. I-Have-Impeccible-Logic one question - exactly who are those mean ole "industries" making all that stuff for?

BTW I got that quote from this article.

Spanish Confusion

Everyone who's taken a Spanish class has heard at least one story about someone using the word "embarrasada" to mean embarrassed. As it actually means "pregnant" and not embarrassed, it can create some confusion.

Well, I haven't made that mistake, but I do have two Spanish words that I can't keep straight in my head. Here's the conversation I had with my Spanish teacher (in Spanish, but I'm writing it mostly in English here):

Prof: Hey, have you noticed there is kind of a big mess behind the school?
Amy: Oh yeah I saw it. I need to call the building manager. Creo que algunos sinhogares estan usando el rincon como un ordenador.

That last sentence says "I think some homeless people are using the corner as a computer."

So... the words ordenador [computer] and inodoro [toilet] are similar, right? It's not just me?

Retirement Plan B

Some of you may remember a while back (probably about 1.5 years ago) I had just started using Lending Club and I was super excited about it! I was going to retire to Costa Rica and live off of the money I made through LC. Well, then people started defaulting on me. Now, I stick to lower risk loans and my new portfolio is actually doing much better.

However, I realized that I will still need a little something more to supplement my LC income. I mean, even if I can get my general costs of living down to about $2 per day (rice, beans, mangos, and wifi bills), I'll still need some extra cash from time to time. Like for example when I drop into an 8 foot wave and then eat sh** and snap my board in half.

Allow me to introduce Retirement Plan - Part B..... drum roll......

Mechanical Turk

For those who haven't heard of this, it's a program created by Amazon where people get paid a few cents per task, for large sets of simple, repetitive "human intelligence" tasks, such as choosing the best category for a product.

I actually first heard about this program while in grad school but I somehow thought it was only for people in 3rd world countries. Recently I found out that retirees, housewives, the unemployed, etc. all use it too. I haven't tried it yet, and it looks like you would only be able to make a few dollar a day (depending how long you can stare at a screen I guess). But when I become a retired-unemployed-housewive-surfer-chic, this could be just the thing to help me make some extra money on those flat days. Are you guys excited for me or what?