I lost my dear one Nora to upstate New York this past week.

Nora has I think four friends back home who's parents have cancer and last weekend she got a call that one of them had died. She decided she needed to go back home and on Wednesday she left.

I'm mostly bummed about this because Nora's great and was my next door neighbor and now it feels rather lonely here. Donnamarie, the new teacher, came this week from Vancouver but her story's a little different as she's in her forties and is, I think, on the hunt for men. Specifically, as she told me, non-North Americans (um, honey, are you forgetting that we're still in North America here?), and "the darker the better."

Umkay.

I'm a little bit worried for this woman but I'm sure she'll figure it out. On the bright side since she's here Matthew moved me to Principiantes 1 and she's now responsible for teaching the evil lady from the morning class that I used to have. I asked Donnamarie how things had gone after her first lesson and she said she thought it went well but one of the women had walked out of the class mid-way through. Yep, that's Mary.

Meanwhile I'm now in a different classroom downstairs and across the patio. Freedom! Easy access to the trampoline! I'm doing the two beginner levels and it turns out that so far I like them a lot. More teaching and tangible learning I think in P1. P2 has less of that because so much time is spent on reviewing and practicing and re-reviewing and re-practicing the past tense, but this time around I'm more confident teaching it and is and is not effective. Also I have to say it is a big help this time around not to have Mary raining on my parade. :)

I was talking to two new students after class on Thursday and I asked where they were from because they kept calling me "vos" and being all accenty and whatnot and they said they were from Argentina but had come to Cozumel partly to learn English. (??) Strikes me as sort of flawed reasoning on their part but in any case I thought it was cool. You came all this way for me?!? Ahh, how sweet!

And then what else. My kids class is no longer because I have to now teach adults at 6 and the 3pm class was too small. These little babies are adorable and I will be sad to see them go. I've said before, teaching children is great because you get to stare at these cute things for awhile and they're easy to make love you. At least this is the emotion I'm choosing to believe Cielo was expressing the other day when she stuck my finger in her mouth and attempted to bite off the nail. Thank goodness for missing teeth.

Love.

I had a long conversation with Matthew before the beginning of the new semester and he threw in some stupidities and say whats? and then the next day asked me to be lead teacher, so that's kind of cool. It means I don't get a raise and that I have more work and responsibilities, but I'm kind of okay with that. I might get to boss people around.

That's all for now.