Blogs from North America - page 7964

I awoke this morning, slowly, to the sound of a fan going 'round and 'round. Moments later, Dave staggers into my bedroom and loudly proclaims that he'd like to kill himself. What? Huh? Oh yeah, another night out and none of us got ass. What is this, February? Then the night came back to me, seeing how we only went to bed a few hours ago anyways. You see, in the summer time, we don't sleep, we just take short naps between working and drinking. I sit up in bed and survey the wreckage: my cousin Brion, groggy and on my floor, my roommate Collin smoking on the back porch, our friend Sarah, comatose on the pullout couch. There was the Beachcomber in Wellfleet last night. I showed up around midnight, as I had to ... read more

The Havasupai Indian Tribe consists of 650 people and have lived in their remote village for over 700 years. They are very traditional in some senses: farming is still a dominant way of life, they prefer to speak in their own language, and you can't take their picture because they're afraid it will "steal their soul". Some of the luckier tribesmen, however, do enjoy modern amenities like television (Direct TV is the only signal that can reach out there) and get to tote around their dirt roads on golf carts. There wasn't any public access to phones (don't even bother bringing your cellular) and any major supplies had to be flown in by helicopter. Overall, their standard of living was very poor and simple, we could have been in a remote jungle village in Vietnam and ... read more

This all started in 2003 with a casual comment made at my dinner table by mentor and friend, Jim S, "Janet, you should go to the Orff Institute." I hadn't even thought about it before, and certainly didn't consider that I might get to go someday. I glanced at Lisa across the table and her eyes lit up. We've been planning for it every since then. Thanks to Fund for Teachers (http://www.fundforteachers.org) for making it all happen. They have given us an opportunity of a lifetime to go and experience Orff at the Mozarteum, the place where Gunild Keetman herself co-founded the Orff Institute. We're looking forward to rich and rewarding musical experiences in Orff process. We also expect to be challenged, but we hope that we don't have homework! This will give us the opportunities ... read more

Today, we started our day fairly early. We decided to take a walk down to the Puget Sound for our breakfast. We picked up a pastry and a drink at Starbucks (Imagine that!... There is one on every corner here) and headed out to the end of a pier. After breakfast and a few minutes of taking in the beautiful view of the Olympic Mountain Range, we headed back uphill to the hotel. The Moore's picked us up around 10am and we headed out for a personal tour. We headed down to Safeco Stadium to try to pick up some tickets for the Mariner's game on Sunday, July 15th, but the box office was not open. From there we headed up to the Queen Anne Hill Section of town to take in the beautiful view ... read more

Independence Day! We're leaving Las Vegas and heading to Disneyland and if we thought the drive into Vegas was hot and nerve racking that was because we hadn't driven out of Las Vegas to California. 110+ temperatures long climbs, steep downhills even more traffic and an antsy co-pilot .... lotsa fun! It actually got more relaxing once we got to LA with 8 lanes of traffic since it was flatter, straighter and about 20 degrees cooler. Yeah, I know we have air conditioning but when it's that hot you just can't have enough to make it comfortable. Through all that we still made it to our hotel a short distance from Disneyland around 3:30 unpacked and "chilled out" for a little while. Our place is great it's walking distance to the park (although we'll likely ... read more