It's GECKO, not Geico!

Sorry it's been awhile. That phenomenon happened where you put something off and put something off, and then more and more builds up of whatever you have to write/clean/study/whatever. All of sudden, I realized I still needed to blog about Thanksgiving, my car arriving, my Canadian accent, my house gecko, AND keep you up to date on how the job is going, and it was all too overwhelming to think about putting into one blog post. But *deep breath* here I go.

Thanksgiving: Some really awesome folks from the embassy invited me over -- and most of the other invitees happened to have specific Celiac/allergy/vegetarian needs. The dinner was AMAZING!!! Yet again it has been proven that necessity fosters creativity which fosters genius! The Celiac-friendly cornbread stuffing was definitely my favorite, though the mushroom gravy was pretty dang good too.

My Car Arriving: My JEEP is here!!! And I haven't gotten lost yet, which is the real miracle. Don't worry, I'll have a story about that soon enough :) Driving here is actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. I just do the opposite of what I think the rule in the states would be. If I usually yield to cars in the roundabout, here I enter the roundabout with the right-of-way. If I usually go through an intersection, here I yield to the car turning left. If I usually signal, here I don't. Just kidding, I still try to signal. Running red lights is all the rage here too, though it's actually a safety issue, if you're stopped at a red light and there are no other cars around. Better to go than to get robbed. I'm going to be a terror when I start driving in the states again. Running red lights and speeding into roundabouts. Woohoo!

My Canadian Accent: one of my applicants recently told me that she has a granddaughter in Canada who speaks Spanish JUST like I do. She kept looking at me and shaking her head. "Just like her, you sound just like her." I said "Ma'am, are you telling me I have a Canadian accent?" I wanted to throw some "Eh's" and "loads" in there, but I wasn't sure she would understand. Pretty funny.

My house gecko: So one night, I walk into my apartment, and lo and behold on the kitchen floor is the tiniest lizard I have ever seen!!! Of course my immediate thought was "Grab the camera and take a picture for the little sisters!" Priorities, people. So right after I snapped the picture above, the little bugger scurried under my washer. Dang it. I spent the next hour trying to fish it out, and researching online to figure out if it was friend or foe (i.e. if it was going to crawl on me in the middle of the night and kill me with newt poison or something). Turns out, it was a house gecko, which are friendly, eat cockroaches (yeah!) but are capable of killing a full-grown human if they fall into your soup while cooking. And if you eat the soup. That's the fatal part.

Anyway, I gave up, went and did more research (which is hard, by the way, have you ever tried to google a lizard?), read that they can get fairly big (I haven't confirmed that, by the way), and that they make loud kissing noises (super), and decided I didn't want a loud gecko in the house, even if it did eat cockroaches. I went back to the kitchen, and there it was! I caught it in a tupperware, and ran outside to ask our building's guard where I should set it free. I got down there, and although I had just been googling "lizard" in Spanish, I was totally at a loss for the word. I held up the opaque tupperware and said "guess what I have here!?" This time, he was at a loss for words. I said "It's a....you know......you know.....it's a reptile!" At least I remembered one word in Spanish. His eyes got kind of big. "No no no, it's not a.....a......" (now I had forgotten the word for snake). The guard later told me that he totally thought it was a snake. Finally I told him I would just set it free and he could see it. I'm not sure he really consented, but I let it free anyway. The little guy scurried away, and the guard laughed. "Largatija!" he shouted.

The Job: Well, work is going OK. I'm still probably the slowest officer on the line (right now I'm getting up to about 75 visas/day, NOT GOOD ENOUGH!), but I know what I need to do better and I'm working on it. Among other things, I talk too much to the applicants, but really, who would have thought I'm verbose? I mean, look at this blog post, it only took me twenty-five lines to tell you about a house gecko. :) Less is more, Shannon. The work is super interesting to me, and I think once I'm doing better speed-wise, I'll really enjoy it.

So that's a wrap! I'll try to be more regular so you don't have to scroll down for five minutes to read the whole post.