I'm discontinuing my blog. I never write in it anymore, nor do I feel the inspiration to take photos to post in it. I used to be proud of my blog, but now I'm not motivated to do anything with it.

It's okay, I'm doing all right. This is something I've been thinking about doing for a while. And now I'm on vacation so I actually have time to use the internet and take care of some business.

Au revoir! Thanks for reading.

Crystal

Things are looking up this week. I found a place to live and a new roommate, my classes are going well, I got paid so I can finally buy groceries and get a haircut, and I went Black Friday shopping. I'm not often in the mood for clothes shopping, I think it's stressful and tiring, but I was feeling good so I went to the mall and found a lot of great stuff. I bought a pencil skirt in darkwash denim. It fit and was only $18 on sale and I've always wanted a pencil skirt to show off what my mama gave me. I'm pumped.

Saw the movie "127 Hours" last night. It was amazing, though not for the faint of heart. It's about a guy who's out hiking in Utah and gets his arm trapped between a boulder and a canyon wall. All he has is climbing gear, a Nalgene of water, and a crappy multi-use tool (Leatherman knockoff) with a dull blade. You can guess what he did to escape.

I also saw "Burlesque," starring Xtina Aguilera and co-starring her silicone-enhanced cleavage (it was everywhere!) Fun movie, though.

I called my friend Darey from Niger. It was great talking to him. I asked about the cows (they lost over half their herd with the drought last spring) and his response was "They're there," meaning "not so great." He said they are patient and when the time is right they'll find a way to get more cows. Then I teased him about his braids (he cut them off last year when his brother died - only old men shave their heads in his culture) and told him I'd give him one of mine and he can attach it to his head. Then I asked him to drink some hura for me (millet with sour milk and spices), and he asked me to eat some American candy for him, then I told him to eat kilshe for me (Nigerien beef jerky, it's amazing), and he told me to eat some potatoes for him. He's still adorable after all this time.

Next I'll call the village to see what's shaking there. I am a bad friend for not calling them on Tabasky (The Hajj holiday) but I was working and also didn't have money to make calls. I'm sure they'll get over it. :)

So yeah, that's the latest.

My life's been crazy lately. Some things have been very difficult for me. Not only has there been some bad and sad family news (my dad has cancer, although benign, and my aunt suddenly passed away), but I'm struggling with a new career and now I'm having some roommate problems. Let's just say there's been some miscommunication between us (ahem - mostly from his side) that has evolved into a somewhat sticky situation, and now I need to move out. So I'm looking for a place to stay, as always seems to be the case for me while I'm living in Madison. I'd also like to mention that the first session of my job is a trial period, so I'm not even sure I'll be working there next term, and that further complicates the housing search because I don't want to sign a lease for a place when I may not even have a job in this city. So should I stick it out with my roomie until Christmas, when break begins, or move out asap and live somewhere else for only a month? I swear, my blood pressure has gone up a hundred points in the last week.

The first week of classes was rough, but now that I have the hang of things (for the most part), I find myself becoming bored. I'm also living a very frugal lifestyle (read: I'm broke), so I've taken on a couple of hobbies.

I applied to become a foster parent for a cat from the Humane Society. I really want a kitty, but am not willing to commit myself to adopting one for good. I think fostering one would not only help a kitty in need but fulfill my cat-petting cravings without the commitment involved in adopting one. Oh, and sometimes there are mama kitties with babies!! Who wouldn't want a box of kittens in their closet? I meet with the lady from the HS on thursday.

I've also taken up a drawstring-bag hobby that I used to have in Niger. (Team Konni, anyone remember this?) I take colorful fabric scraps and hand-sew them into little bags. I've figured out a way to make them with no visible seams and with liners, therefore they are reversible. Last night I stayed up way past my bedtime making one. It's to hold my laundry soap.

Today my Muslim students were fasting and then, right during our reading lesson, busted out a bag of dates to break their fast when the sun went down at 4:30. Tomorrow's the big day for them. I gotta call my peeps in Niger and congratulate them on celebrating the Hajj.

We just finished our second week of school, and the students got to fill out early teacher evaluations for us newer teachers. This is so we can learn how we're doing and find ways to improve during the next 6 weeks of classes.

My evaluations for Reading 500 were good, which isn't surprising because that's my best/ most well-behaved class.

My Reading 400 evals were good, except some people complained about "all the writing assignments" I give them. Seriously? I consider a couple of 2-paragraph book reports to be not that bad. This is supposed to be a college prep course, and if they expect to attend college without ever writing anything about what they read, they're in for a BIG surprise.

As for grammar class, well... let's just say there was a big range of opinions. One guy complained that I didn't remind him to give me his homework and that I don't even know grammar so why am I teaching it? (a really good point, but I'm trying really hard.) I think this is the guy who misses half of each class and was the only student to fail the exam. On the other hand, a different student said I was her favorite teacher. So there. (ha ha) My favorite thing is that since these are ESL students, their grammar isn't all that great. "She not good teacher. She different, " so that just adds even more hilarity to what they're writing.

I am thankful for these evaluations and get to talk to my boss about how to address my students' needs. I'm also looking forward to some classroom management advice. My Reading 400 class is out of control - people yelling across the room to each other in Arabic, the girls talking incessantly while I'm trying to give directions... it's seriously driving me nuts.

A rainy day here in Madison, not that that's stopping all the Badger fans from walking around in their red sweatshirts. My roomie's out of town and I just realized I don't have anyone to hang out with. Hm. So I am chilling out downtown and doing "computer chores."

Wow, I have been really MIA for a couple months. I know what you're asking - "wtf, Crystal?" Yeah, life's been crazy.

I started taking my TEFL course in Madison, WI back in September. It was very intensive but super fun. First, I'll tell you what TEFL means. It's "Teaching English as a Foreign Language." It's what you'd use to travel overseas and teach people English. It's different from ESL (English as a Second Language) because ESL is for people living in an English-speaking country. You need a lot more schooling than what I had to become an ESL teacher. EFL is for people whose countries don't use English.

I had four different classes - Speaking Skills, Reading/Writing Skills, Lesson Planning, and Grammar. The grammar class blew my mind - did you know we have twelve different tenses in English? "I was going to," "I had been wanting to," "I had wanted to," etc. Wow, crazy. Every night I was swamped with homework assignments and lesson plans to hand in the next day. I didn't have good cell phone access at my home and no internet access outside of school. This is the point when I fell off the face of the earth.

Included in the Lesson Planning class was student teaching for two hours a week. The student teaching was my favorite. The school I was enrolled in, MTTP (Midwest Teacher Training Program) is connected to WESLI (the Wisconsin ESL Institute), so I got to practice on some WESLI students. I taught an intermediate-level conversation class. My students were from a variety of places, but most were from Saudi Arabia and South Korea, as is the norm at WESLI. They were wonderful and willing to work with me and my clumsy teaching. We had a lot of fun in our class.

BTW, the students at WESLI are in their early-to-late 20s and are studying English so they can get into a U.S. university. So WESLI is mostly a TOEFL preparation program.

Then I got a job at WESLI. Apparently they have the highest enrollment they've ever had, and needed more teachers. I started there last friday and have been working there ever since. The first week was hard. I know how to teach a conversation class, but instead I was given two reading classes, a grammar class, and a writing class to teach. Yikes! So I had to figure out how to teach those and familiarize myself with the materials and I only got 1-1/2 days to do it.

But I survived. My grammar class is the most challenging for me at this point because, as a native English speaker, I never had to learn the grammar that ESL students need to know. My reading classes became easy once I figured out the textbooks. And my writing class is my favorite. The students have to write in a journal once a week and I get to read it. Fun!

I've been making friends with a lot of the students. I have a couple of Saudi girlfriends and there's a couple of West African students I like talking to. Last night I saw "The Town" with my friend Ruqayyah, then we went clothes browsing. I taught her what "cougar" is and we talked about the differences between "f you" and "f me" (it was mentioned in the movie.) She's adorable and we had lots of fun.

I've been living with my friend Djam, who needed a roommate in his 2-bedroom apartment. I needed a place to stay, and at only $300 the rent is very reasonable. And it's a good location, next to the library, buslines, a Walgreens, and a grocery store. Djam's a great roommate who makes delicious African food and cleans up after himself. He also makes me coffee every morning while I'm in the shower.

So yeah, things are going well. I'm enjoying my life in Madison. It's so nice to be in the city again.

Saturday I will be saying goodbye to my life in Grayling and moving to Wisconsin to take my TESL certification course. The class is 5 weeks long and I will be gone for no longer than 6 weeks, but moving from Grayling marks the end of a period in my life.

I will go from living with my wonderful parents and brother (and cat) to being on my own again. I've only lived here for 9 months, but it feels like forever. I don't know if there will be a period in my life where I will live in Grayling for this long again. I have come to consider myself a resident of this town and not just a visitor.

Things I will miss about Grayling:

Living with my parents - fun, relaxed people, no rent, no bills, no grocery expenses. There's always someone willing to join me on adventures and to offer support when I need it.

My friends - George and Lorna, my homegirl Liz, the Peace Group, drum circle, bank and K-Mart friends and customers, etc.The beauty of the area - tall pine trees, "natural" rivers (i.e. log-filled and impossible-to-get-through), crystal clear lakes, rugged bike and walking trails, Hartwick Pines.The lack of retail development - you really feel like you need less when there's less to buy.My darling sweetheart Juan who's stolen my heart these last couple of weeks. I will miss his beautiful smile, great sense of humor, and firecracker personality.

But small-town living ain't all it's cracked up to be. I guess unless you have a family, there isn't much here for entertainment. There's certainly a lack of non-alcoholic venues where you can meet other people, unless you count flirting with someone in the produce aisle at Glen's. I'm pretty excited to meet like-minded liberal free-thinkers in Madison, attend university events, buy ethnic groceries and cook for myself, and ride my bike for transportation.

Hello, Madison! Goodbye, Grayling!

I just talked to my friend Issoufou, from Niger, for about 30 minutes. It was so great, it was like we had just seen each other yesterday when it's actually been over nine months.

We used to talk a lot, back when he had a cell phone. But he sold it to buy food for his family, so I would call other people in the village but wouldn't get a chance to chat with him. Now times are looking up and he bought another cell phone and was able to call me. I was out of town and my mom answered the phone. She used my Hausa-English cheat-sheet we keep by the phone to say, "Zeina is not here. Who is this?" Her Hausa's improving because this time Issoufou didn't have to correct her on her pronunciation. :)

Issoufou is doing well. Actually, the whole village is doing well. They got plenty of rain for their crops and didn't experience any flooding like other villages. That was a relief to hear because I keep hearing on the news about the famine in Niger, followed by flooding that swept away people's houses and ruined their fields. I was glad to hear that Korap wasn't affected by this. I was also happy to hear that other villages nearby who had had problems received food assistance from the government. Thank you, Niger government, for not forgetting the villages.

Other good news - his wife, Omeima, successfully gave birth to their baby daughter, Mariam. She and the baby are both doing well, but she asked me to send her some warm clothes for their daughter for the upcoming cold season. I spoke to Issoufou's mom, and when I asked her if she carries the baby around she said, "No way! She's too white for me to carry around." (some babies are very light-skinned until they get older.) Then I asked her if the baby has a nose (another thing they joke about, not liking a baby because it doesn't have a nose), and she goes, "no, she does not have a nose!" Ha ha. It was great having this sort of banter again.

Then Issoufou shared with me the story of Idi Buzu and his cell phone. He lost it somewhere, probably in the city nearby (Konni). A few days later he called his number and spoke to the person who had his phone. He told the guy, "hey, this is my phone you have. Can I get it back from you?" and the guy was like, "yeah, where do you live?" So Idi tells him, and the guy is in this village about an hour east of ours. So the guy promises Idi that he'll somehow return the phone. Issoufou relayed that they're skeptical the guy will actually return it, but we will see what happens.

Some bad news - this girl, Suyeba, had a baby but passed away during childbirth. Issoufou said the baby's doing okay and other women are looking after it. He mentioned that it's because she had two babies close together, like only a year apart, and it's not good to do that. The woman's body needs time to rest between births. I'm just glad that's common knowledge - now if only people would follow that advice and start using birth control to space out their childbirths. And if only pregnant women didn't fast for Ramadan. And if only there were enough food to feed all these children...

I gotta call a couple more people, especially on thursday when they celebrate Id al Fitr, the festival marking the end of Ramadan.

Oh, and finally, Issoufou asked about Mandy and how she's doing. I said she's doing well, living with her fiance and working and stuff. Then he goes, "what about you? when are you going to find a husband?" and I said, "I met someone and we hung out the other day. I really like him, and we'll see where it goes." And he goes, "what's his name?" so I told him (translated into the Hausa version of his name, Yahaya), and he goes, "I will be praying for you and Yahaya to make it." It was so sweet it brought tears to my eyes.

On August 21st, my mom and I attended Africa Fest in Madison, Wisconsin, hosted by the African Association of Madison.

I had been to Africa Fest once previously, back in 2007. I remember having a ball seeing African dancers, hearing wonderful music, and hanging out with friends. It was the first time I'd seen Djam's portfolio and realized what a talented artist he is.

Djam spent most of the day in his booth trying to sell drums.

His cousin, Aggo, is one of the event organizers.

There were tents with exhibits displaying items from different cultures. In the North Africa area, my mom got henna done.

There were some foods for people to sample, too. I was really excited to taste tiger nuts again. And I had some delicious yogurt mixed with couscous and a little sugar.

Tiger Nuts - they're crunchy and kind of taste like coconut.

I saw some cool shops with imported African goods. I recognized a few things. My mom tried bartering with a Gambian shop-owner for some perfume. It was $5 for a little tube, and I told her she should try offering $10 for 3. When she tried bartering, the guy told her no, then proceeded to ignore her. She would have paid the $5, but he wouldn't talk to her any more, so she walked away.

There were a lot of great music and dancing acts. These people invited kids to join them onstage.

My favorite act was this Igbo group performing a New Yam Festival dance.

Tani Diakite excited us with his beautiful Malian music.

The group WADOMA was awesome and had lots of drummers and dancers.

And this group played Moroccan music, interpreted by a beautiful belly dancer.

Mom and I made a new friend - Kofi, one of Djam's friend's kids. He is such a sweet little guy!

I didn't meet a single Nigerien person there, though I did find one guy who spoke Hausa and got a picture with the Niger flag.

Afterwards, mom, Djam and I went out for pizza. Mom and I split a pitcher of beer and got a little loopy before heading back to our hotel for the night. Overall, Africa Fest was a great time and I can't wait to go again next year.

Today's been a long day. I did a lot of things:

My mom and I went to her friend's house, a guy who keeps a really nice little farm, even on our poor, sandy Grayling soil.

I got to pet his friendly chicken...

And we played with his nice little dog, Princess.

He cut us some collard greens...

Dug up red potatoes...

And gave us some corn. We had a great time!

Tonight my mom, our friend Cathy and I processed the collard greens. It took forever. We washed, sliced, blanched and packaged them into freezer bags.

Also today we visited my friends Patrick and Abbey's house to pick up some sourdough bread starter. Patrick made his own starter using the wild yeast found on blueberries. Right now we have some dough made and it's hanging out in the fridge until tomorrow morning, when we'll bake it.

I helped Cathy scrape paint off her garage today, as well. And we repaired the Boy Scout tent poles (replaced the worn-out elastic that holds the poles together).

So yeah, it was a great, busy day. I love long weekend days because that makes the weekend seem longer.

My life is kind of hard to describe. I can't decide if I'm happy or not. The day-to-day stuff is more boring than I'd prefer. I miss living in a city where I can walk/ride my bike everywhere and know lots of people to chat with. Sometimes I feel like there's nothing happening, no reasons to laugh uncontrollably or jump around with excitement.

But there are a few things that have really excited me lately. Now I will share those things with you.

I've joined the NLSC (National Language Service Corps) as a charter Hausa-speaking member. The NLSC is an organization that provides language assistance to government agencies. They have a database of members who speak languages from all over the world, and contact those members for assignments when needed.

So first it was really exciting that I was asked to join. My Hausa's okay, but not awesome, mostly conversational and not at all technical. But apparently it's good enough because I was surprised to see an invitation for membership into the NLSC. They are looking for other African-language speakers, so all you RPCVs should check them out.

Then I got an email from them saying some agencies are looking to hire African language-speaking people for temporary translation projects. I applied and got an interview, now we'll see what comes next.

Second, I've joined RAIN for the Sahara and Sahel, a NGO that helps the nomadic Wodaabe and Tuareg people of Niger. When I first came back from Niger I contacted RAIN asking if there's a way I could help my nomadic friends in Niger, and mentioned my friend Darey wanting to find help for his village, Teyiss. They told me they'd consider helping Teyiss when they had more money to work with, and I figured that might take a while.

The chief of Teyiss.

Well, I was really surprised when, a few weeks ago, RAIN contacted me and said they'd like to start helping the people of Teyiss. They told me to connect Darey with their local representative, a Nigerien man named Mahmoud, and they would see about starting some work there. Well, today I spoke with Darey, and he told me RAIN has sent money to Mahmoud to buy food for the children and animals of Teyiss! I was so excited!

The kids of Teyiss.

My third exciting piece of news is that I translated my resume into French using Google Translate and sent it to Darey to give to the teachers in Agadez so that I can find a job there teaching English. It's kind of a long shot, considering the Niger government went for months without paying school teachers their salary because they didn't have the money for salaries (or because of corruption?), but we'll see what happens. How cool would it be to live in Agadez, an ancient caravan town on the edge of the Sahara, as an English teacher?

A couple backbreaking hours of blueberry-picking weren't without rewards. Two weeks ago we feasted on two delicious blueberry pies.

The berries...

... assembling the pies...

... the finished product.

Yum!

Fourth of July weekend was a pretty eventful one. I didn't go anywhere special, just hung out with the fam, but we had a lot of fun.

Saturday:

Saturday was a hot day. My mom, Chico and I went to Traverse City to the Cherryland Festival to see the Blue Angels. We parked on the other side of town in the mall parking lot so we could take the bus downtown, thus avoiding traffic and parking issues. Once we showed up at the mall I went inside the grocery store to ask about the bus (it was supposed to show up there at :40 after, did we have the wrong place?) and this guy standing in line offered to give us a ride. So we got a ride in his nice Mercedes to the downtown area.

The Blue Angels were neat, but not uber-exciting. I spent most of my time try to avoid sitting in the sun. I actually was so un-enthused about the whole thing that I didn't find any photo-worthy moments. The bus-ride back was long and hot - we were in the very back seat and the air conditioning unit was directly over our heads and blowing cold air out in front of us so that none of it blew on us. And the windows didn't open. Plus this guy was standing in the aisle next to me and he smelled kinda funky, I'm not gonna lie. We were on that bus for like 40 minutes. When we finally got home we were all exhausted from the heat and sun.

After a few hours of rest we attended the Grayling fireworks show and it was great. I am so proud of our town for providing such a nice fireworks show for the community. We sat near the courthouse and it was like having front-row seats. Of course we saw people we knew, including Tom's doctor.

Sunday:

Sunday I had plans. I noticed in the paper that the local state park, Hartwick Pines, was having a

19th-century Independence Day celebration. So my dad, Chico and I attended that. It involved the park historian, Rob, reading the Declaration of Independence, then an old-fashioned baseball game.

Dad and Chico watching the game. I'm not sure who the guy in the orange shirt is.

Picking teams for the baseball game. The guys in the red represent the 1890s-era baseball team. They also played by period rules, including pitching to make the batter hit (rather than strike him out) and no stealing or sliding. The game was really fun to watch.

Some of the players were small. They were so cute! I think in some plays they were "favored" so they could make it all the way around the bases.

We stayed for a few innings, then went blueberry picking. It was really freakin' hot out but with the breeze we felt okay. We picked enough blueberries so that, combined with the ones I picked a few days before with Shawn and Liz, we had enough to make two blueberry pies. The blueberry plants are about 10" high so it was backbreaking work, but it was worth it.

Blueberries

Stay tuned for pictures of the blueberry pies.

My mom and I went kayaking that night down our section of the river. It's a slow, easy river, but has lots of obstacles in it, like logs and sandbars (not that I have photos of any of them.)

This is from an old train bridge that crossed our span of the river. In some spots of the woods you can still see the trail from where the tracks used to be.

So that was our July 4th weekend! It was pretty great to rest and hang out with my family. Tomorrow I will post blueberry pie pics.

My dad is a Boy Scout troop leader and organized a 5-mile hike on monday. I went with them to interact with the Scouts and took some photos.

Walking through the characteristic sandy soil of our area:

We saw a couple of monarch caterpillars (they make their cocoons on milk weed):

Having a little talk about safety:

This area behind me had been wiped out in a wildfire a couple years ago. It's already recovered quite a bit.

I would like to take this opportunity to announce my support in Ghana for the World Cup - go Black Stars!

I was at my friend Cathy's house, where we have our Grayling Peacekeepers meeting. She has an incredible hat collection, and I was particularly drawn to this hijab she got during her world travels. So I tried it on with my sweet Obama shirt that I made my buddy Issoufou give me.

Me, to Issoufou, in typical Nigerien fashion of shamelessly asking for things: "I like your shirt. Give it to me."

Issoufou: "okay, I will bring it to your house tomorrow."

Me: "I was just kidding!"

Issoufou: "I will still give it to you." The next day he brings it, sprayed down with a heavy layer of cologne rather than freshly washed.

Hadjia Crystal.

Okay, next is the dollar sign-shaped cupcake cake I made for work. We had an investment banking day and my boss recruited me to make a cake for it (she requested that it be in the shape of a dollar sign):

And then my friend Liz and I went to a bar in Roscommon. I know, not your first choice for excitement, but we had a blast anyway. Roscommon people can be pretty cool.

Here's Liz. I'm always telling people, "she can drink like a fish!"

Here we are together, trying to imitate one of those old-fashioned serious-people photos (Black Stockings used to live in her house, I believe they were the inspiration for this photo):

We were there to see the local band Generations and these creepy Canadian guys kept hitting on us. This guy was talking to Liz and asking her if she's a "local." And his buddy and I had a conversation where he insinuated that "all I have to do is wink at a guy and he'll know what I want." And he kept talking about his "very lucrative" business outside Toronto. Like that's what it takes to impress me. These guys were basically trolling and had no care whatsoever how ridiculous they looked. Here's Liz's guy, dancing with a different lucky gal:

The band was good, though. I met Logan and Al at Dharma Music while organizing Djam's Drum-building workshop in April.

Logan can talk to anybody and be charming. He's got great stage presence and is a natural performer.

Al is kind of quiet at times but is very charming and funny once you get to know him. He told us about the time he met Fred Bear and that was his introduction to life Up North.

I had just met Ron, he's the lead guitar of the group. He's actually really good and had me impressed with his ability to play Santana covers. Plus he and his wife raise horses and I like talking about animal husbandry with him (like I'm some kind of expert, lol).

Last but not least is Jake on drums. With his curls and charming smile he is like the Michael Jackson part of the Jackson 5 - the cute, young one for all the young ladies out there. But he's actually very talented and I loved hearing his solo act between sets.

I've been doing some thinking.

As much as I love baking, and as wonderful as it is to flex my creative muscles doing it, I think I may put off pastry school yet again.

I've just been thinking about how much I love people and working with them. I've been told many times that I'm a natural teacher. I enjoy learning about other cultures and would like to see more of the world. And I just think there's something more out there for me than baking.

I think I will pursue becoming a TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) teacher. Not only would I be able to visit other countries and learn about other cultures, but I could make some money at it, too. Returning to Africa to teach people English would just be the icing on the cake.

There's a program in Madison, WI (my old stomping grounds) that's only 5 weeks long and you get the certificate for TESL. I'm thinking of enrolling. It would be so sweet to be back in Madison and learning something new.

This is a continuation of my prior entry on attending Geerwol. As a Peace Corps volunteer I was lucky to have a latrine at my house in the village. Most people don't have this luxury and depend on using the bathroom either in the bush or behind the nearest tree.

Here's something I wrote while I was at Geerwol. Pooping in open public places and pooping in the bush can both be stressful. First, you gotta make sure you don't step on other people's poop that's already there. Then you have to make sure you can squat without people seeing you - if there's anything more exciting than watching a white person, it's watching a white person take a crap. I had a lot of experience in this area, hanging out with Darey and friends for days at a time with no latrine in sight.

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, I hope this guide helps.

Crystal's Guide to Pooping in the Bush

Find a spot not in eyeview of people and cars (duh!)Plant feet so that they are uphill from your ass (this prevents bodily fluids from getting near your shoes.)Remove a shoe and use it to make a hole or just scrape away sand.Poop. Wash/wipe yourself, being sure to move back a little so you don't accidentally touch it.Use a stick or your foot to kick sand on top. If you didn't poo in a hole, cover it just enough to keep flies away. You don't want to disguise it too well because someone could step in it before it dries. If you poo'd in a hole, fill the hole back in with dirt.Wash your hand as well as possible in the circumstances.Discreetly pull up your drawers/skirt. Get the hell out of there before someone sees you and greets you while your pants are down. [this happened to me a few times. awkward!]

This is from when I attended Geerwol in 2009. I was the only white person around. Sometimes being in these situations is stressful, because you don't understand what the other people are saying, and when you see things that are unique/different but that they are used to, you have no one to share the experience with. This can actually lead to loneliness while being surrounded by people. However, my journal kept me company.

In true Niger form, it was hot (over 100 degrees) with lots of sun and no chance of clouds. We were in the scrubby Sahelian land, which has only short, thorny Acacia trees that provide very little shade. Water is scarce, as there are no wells, so we brought a big 5-gallon jug with us. Other people got water from the nearby lake (which animals take baths in).

November 6, 2009. Geerwol.

Took Sonitrav bus to Abalak. Leave in evening to Bagam [the location of Geerwol, out in the bush] and car kept falling apart. We get there late at night.

Hear singing in Bagam which is Geerwol and it goes on all night. Dancers wear bent metal plate chained to one foot and stomp to make it rattle. I try to go to sleep but the tea I drank is strong and I get up and watch the dancing instead.

November 7.

Everyone is up at or before sunrise. I try sleeping in but once I wake up I can't go back to sleep. A scared camel creates a scene by running all around the camp and we watch a horse and camel (plus a big herd of people) chase it.

Early morning dancing and singing.

The camp. Imported western tents are set up as people in traditional robes lounge on mats, pouring tea, eating food, and hanging out with friends.

Chasing the runaway camel.

I love the giant herd of people running after it! You could hear the shouting from far away.

Singing and dancing in the heat of the day.

Now losing my mind because camera shutter piece is missing. [I let Darey's little brother, Bugo, borrow it to take some photos. He dropped it in the sand while the shutter was open, and the shutter got stuck.]

[About an hour later] Ok, it's OK now. [Managed to get the sand out of the shutter mechanism and it began working again, to my tremendous relief.]

Camels continue to entertain me. Just now another camel got frisky and started running around, but people managed to subdue it pretty quickly. And then I saw a guy who opened his headwrap, tied the end to the camel's nose ring, and used it to lead him.

[I drew a picture so I could remember it correctly.]

Soon I will watch Darey help get Bugo ready to dance!

[I didn't actually see that because I was napping, but here's a photo Bugo took of his friends getting ready.]

Darey and I. He's cleaning his teeth with a stick in this photo.

November 8.

Went to bed at 8 so I could get up to see Geerwol in the middle of the night. I woke up at 11 - it hadn't started yet. 2am - I woke up and struggled to stay awake. We left at 4, I think. [This was in reference to the Geerwol, the final dance where the finalists are chosen. The contest goes on for a week before this. The challenge is for the men to dance and sing all night and all morning, without drinking or eating anything.]

I saw women's hair in their profiles lit by the rising sun. The dancers became slowly visible. The old people hooted "woo hoo" as they studied the beautiful men.

The women.

Old ladies admiring the young men.

Soon the voters arrived. It was two beautiful, thin young women who held one hand to the side of their face as if to avoid being distracted by anything in their peripheral vision. The old men who constantly fuss over the contestants selected 8-10 finalists, and attached a tuft of white cow fur to their head. The women somehow indicated the winner and his tuft of hair was removed. The the crowd followed him out and away; to his house, I guess.

Attaching cow fur to a finalist.

The beautiful judges, who picked the winner.

We are having our morning tea and will leave for Teyiss later. Hopefully I will finally see Darey's actual house and cattle.

[and later, apparently a few thoughts I wanted to remember...]

Conserving water by not bathing. Now I understand why in the old days people only bathed once a week.

Camels grazing a few steps from the tent.

Baby horse!

In the Sahel it's hot, sunny, windy and arid. Being at the real Geerwol, which is the most traditional, one can see the warrior resemblance with the feather headdress, red face paint, makeshift "axe," and stomp dance which rattles the foot plate. [the word "Geerwol" means "war" in the Wodaabe language, Fulfulde.]

Last night was James and Bonnie's wedding, and I made the wedding cake.

It's a lot of work making a wedding cake. At times it was frustrating, at times disheartening, but for the most part I had a lot of fun. The bottom tier was marble, the middle tier was chocolate, and the top tier was darker chocolate. The marble turned out the best.

I think some people were turned off by the icing, which is mousseline buttercream. It's made with egg whites, butter and white (not powdered) sugar. It's very light and creamy tasting, not like the confectioners' sugar frosting which is very sweet and sugary. To each his own. What mattered was the bride and groom were happy. :)

Transporting the cake was an adventure in itself. We drove to Lovells, not far from Grayling, probably about 15 miles away. However, to get there you go down two-lane county roads. We were driving like 25 miles an hour tops, and all these cars would get stuck behind us. So my friend Liz (she was my date) made this sign and hung it in the back window:

It was pure ridiculousness. It took us nearly an hour to get to Lovells and we missed the wedding ceremony, but the cake made it intact with only one little smudge (we just turned that part to the back). Here's the final product:

It was a fun project, but I'm glad it's over.

I've been taking walks down my road in the evenings. I've found that since I've come back from Niger I appreciate nature more and notice birds. I used to never notice birds. Now it's like I see them all the time.

Here's some photos of the cool things I've seen while walking down the road.

The new growth on jack pines is known as "candles" because it curves upwards.

I call this "Michigan Millet." It's actually called mullen, but it reminds me of millet because it's got a long stalk that grows seeds. I like the bent one.

I saw this huge, dead bug being devoured by little ants. I don't see many huge bugs here and it kind of reminded me of a cockroach, then brought back memories of being in Niger and using my latrine while fighting off cockroaches with a stick so they wouldn't crawl on my feet.

The new oak leaves are so pretty and colorful.

This is a burl on what I think is a jack pine. I've never seen a "fresh" burl and its color was intriguing. When it dries out it will just look like a big wooden lump.

And what would a walk down the road (or anywhere, for that matter) be without seeing some tent worms? Also known as "army worms," "gypsy moths," and "forest caterpillars," these little bastards will defoliate anything. They multiply and you start seeing them everywhere - on your house, your clothes, your windshield. It's disgusting.

The beautiful AuSable River.

I am reading three books at once - "Kitchen Confidential," by Anthony Bourdain; "Savannah nomads: a study of the Wodaabe pastoral Fulani of Western Bornu Province Northern region, Nigeria," by DJ Stenning, and "The Bone Collector" by Jeffrey Deaver (something to read while at work).

I have forgotten how stressful baking can be. I am remembering being stressed about getting things baked back when I lived in Wisconsin. I remember being this crazy Dragon Lady and freaking out over failed baking ventures and being stressed about baking experiments in progress. I remember Zach (my ex-boyfriend) being like, "those cookies weren't made with love, so I'm not eating them." This week's been tough. Let's just say Dragon Lady made a few short appearances. My apologies to my family.

I'm making a wedding cake for my friends James and Bonnie, and their wedding is Memorial Day weekend, May 29, this saturday. They want a three-tiered cake with marble on the bottom and chocolate in the middle and top tiers. I've made a couple of practice cakes to make sure my marble cake recipe is going to work. I also frosted and decorated one of the small practice cakes to make sure it turned out okay, and it did. So now I'm making all the cakes and sticking them in the freezer until friday. Then I will pull them out, let them thaw, and frost the little buggers.

Practice cake - ignore the flaws. :) I'm just happy I successfully piped the Cornelli lace (it was my first time.)

Yesterday the middle and top tiers were baked and are now sitting in the freezer. Today I will work on the marble bottom tier (14", baby). Things are going pretty smoothly. I'm not getting crazy just yet.

On top of this, I'm trying to assemble cabinets from Home Depot for my bedroom, make a scrapbook of my pictures from Niger, take hour-long walks to keep my ass in control, burn sweet African music CDs and mail them to friends, practice the djembe, and arrange a trip to Muskegon to look at Baker College's pastry arts program.

Yumyumyum, you are going to love this recipe!

"Groundnut" is what they call peanuts in Ghana, by the way. So it's really peanut soup. But wait, "soup" is what they call sauce in Ghana, so in reality, it's "peanut sauce."

Ingredients

4 raw turkey legs with the skin on (or substitute chicken pieces)

3 chicken bouillon cubes, crumbled

Pinch of salt

Ground black pepper

1 large red onion, chopped

1-3 whole habanero peppers, or to taste

3 oz. tomato paste (no more than one half of a small 6 oz. can)

1-1/2 cups natural peanut butter

2 C water

3-4 carrots, sliced

Note: Djam recommends not adding spices (including garlic and ginger) because they take away from the peanut butter taste.

Instructions

Cut the flesh off the turkey legs into large pieces. Don't worry if you can't get it all cut off.

Combine the turkey meat and bones, crumbled chicken bouillon cubes, pinch of salt, some black pepper, 1/4 cup of the chopped onion, and habanero peppers in a large stockpot. Place lid on pot and heat on medium until it begins sizzling. You don't add any liquid because the meat and onions will give off their own juices. Then turn down heat to medium-low and steam 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

In the meantime, combine peanut butter and tomato paste in a frying pan. Heat on lowest setting, stirring constantly, until it turns brownish red and you see the oil separate and come to the top. This will take a while, like 10-15 minutes, so be patient.

Add 2 cups water to the peanut butter mixture, then scrape into the meat pot. Add carrots and remaining onion and more water to cover. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then reduce heat to low or medium low heat. Heat, uncovered, about 30 more minutes, or until the oil separates from the mixture and comes to the top. This way you know the flavor has developed.

Before serving, use tongs to remove bones and habanero peppers (if desired).

Serve over hot rice. It's good with jasmine or basmati rice, but any variety will do. Serves 8-10.

I feel like I should post something. I haven't blogged in a while and I know everyone out there is wondering where I've been. (ha ha)

So yeah, what have I been up to lately? I've been really, super duper busy. The last week of April I went to Midland to train for my new job at the bank. The training was pretty interesting, though for a while I felt like I was in college again and had to think for once. Midland was cool, after training I hung out at the mall and other stores to amp up my professional wardrobe (for an $8/hour job, ha ha). It was hard finding appropriate clothes, as the bank has a pretty strict dress code (it was 4 pages long).

Right when I came back to Grayling, I had to take care of some dire business. Djam was coming to town to do a drum-building workshop, and for a while his friend Tani was going to come with him and they were going to do a show. Before I left town I hung up posters and flyers and handouts about the show and everyone was really excited about it.

And then Tani got into a pretty serious car accident. He was side swiped by a big truck on his side of the car, resulting in a broken arm, broken leg, jaw broken in two places, and broken ribs. Poor guy. He was in a coma, and when he woke up in the hospital he was strapped to the bed (to prevent him from moving his injured limbs) and no one else was around. He thought he was in jail. Naturally the show was canceled, but Djam came to town anyway to do the drum-building workshop. I spent a day running around town letting people know what happened and taking down signs.

Djam and Tom with the Boy Scout drum that he re-headed and fixed up.

Djam leading a drum circle at the local coffee shop.

The drum-building workshop was a huge success. There were four participants and they kept Djam pretty busy with all the steps involved in building a drum. Djam is incredibly patient and a great teacher, so he handled it really well. We provided the participants with an African luncheon as part of the workshop fee: hibiscus flower juice (aka "bissap"), peanut stew with turkey, jasmine rice, and spice cookies. Djam taught me how to make good peanut stew, I will post the recipe soon.

Then I started working full time at the bank (I'm now on my second week there.) That's been going well. There's a lot more going on in a bank than you would actually think, but I like that it's complicated. This saturday marks my last day working at Kmart, and soon I will have wonderful banker's hours with weekends all to myself.

My skin took a beating from the sun while I was in Niger. I came back to America and saw new wrinkles around my eyes and some lines on my forehead. Nooo!! And I even wore a hat all the time.

Here I am in my trademark hat with Buddy the Camel in the background.

I've been slathering on the sunscreen, but I often forget to reapply and yesterday I got sunburned.

I miss my Niger hat. Yes, it wasn't the most fashionable hat in the world, but it did the trick. I didn't get sunburned on my face or neck even once. But somehow I acquired some more wrinkles, perhaps due to a combination of squinting, aging, and those few times I didn't have my hat on. So now I need to stop that from happening further.

I ordered these hats from Sunday Afternoons.

This will be my bike-riding, walk-taking, doing-stuff-around-the-yard hat.

This is my out-and-about hat:

And here's my fancy hat:

As excited as I am to go to pastry school, I am also considering other career paths. Yesterday I did a presentation to a church senior citizen group (called the Elderberries) about my experiences in the Peace Corps. After my presentation, a couple of people came up to me and told me I should be a teacher and a tour guide.

I'm not sure about teaching. I like kids, but do I really want to make dealing with them and their shenanigans a career? Also, I've come to realize I'm not much of a disciplinarian. I'm more likely to be an enabler (something I'm working on not doing).

But tour guide... I think I'd like that. Travel to exotic places, do lots of public speaking, put my outgoing and enthusiastic personality to good use, eat interesting foods. That would be more my speed. There's a tour guide school in San Francisco that I could attend. But I feel like I'm getting ahead of myself. I should stick with my original plan of pastry school and add "tour guide school" to my list of life goals.

Either I'm getting pickier and seeing my baking faults more easily, or my baking's not been so good lately.

I made some mint-chocolate brownies for Chico's Boy Scout meeting. I had some leftover chocolate glaze from my black-and-white cookies (which, miraculously, turned out pretty good), so I figured I'd use a box of brownie mix that's been sitting in the cupboard for a few months (see? Saving time and using products before they expire - now that's smart), whip up some mint frosting, then top it with the chocolate glaze. In my head, they would look like this:

But the chocolate glaze set too quickly before I could even scrape it all out of the bowl, then when I spread it around it started getting all smeared with the mint frosting and there were green streaks all over the place that could not be confused with a nice marbled effect. A few attempts to make it look better resulted in more streaking and the hardened chocolate glaze wasn't cooperating with me, so I eventually forced myself to stop messing with it before I ruined the whole thing. Overall the brownies didn't look pretty, but they must've tasted great because the Boy Scouts wolfed them all down.

Yesterday I tried making the basque cake using this recipe. The guy mentions in his blog post that the recipe had been scaled down to make enough batter for one cake, but I think his math was off. The recipe made way too much batter for one cake and even though it called for 1 lb of pastry cream, his pastry cream recipe only made 8 ounces. I doubled the pastry cream recipe to accommodate the recipe, but the resulting cake had way too much pastry cream in it and was a big, gloppy mess (a huge waste of expensive butter and vanilla). Also there was enough leftover batter to make a second cake. My solution? I sent him a message asking him to check the recipe, then immediately impulse-bought the cookbook he cited.

My black and white cookies actually turned out okay (this is not my picture, but they basically looked the same).

I also made homemade pizza yesterday, and that didn't go so well, either. I used a pizza stone on the bottom rack of the oven and 475 degree heat. This is normally okay as it creates a crispy crust and cooks the toppings, but this time I amped up the ingredients and used tons of vegetables on the pizza. As the pizza cooks the water seeps out of the vegetables and creates little water puddles on the surface of the pizza. I left the pizza in the oven long after the crust had cooked, waiting for the water to evaporate. However, by the time the water evaporated, the crust had burned - it was completely black. I cranked down the heat to 400 for the second pizza, but the same thing happened. It wasn't as bad that time, but the crust did get scorched. So I need to balance the heat and placement of the oven racks so that the toppings and the crust cook at the same rate.

Tomorrow I'm making chocolate chip cookies for the newspaper guy (he wrote an article about my upcoming African music show) and soon I'm attacking a lemon layer cake. Hopefully that will go better.

While I was at my baking/pastry class in Napa Valley, I got to eat all the wonderful creations of the other students. One of the pastry arts students made this amazing cake. It was very simple looking - one layer, no frosting, just powdered sugar on top, and not a chocolate chip in sight. It looked like a plain brown slice of cake with a little custard in the middle.

Although it looks simple, it tastes amazing. I was stuffed from eating my huge dinner and already sampling like four other desserts, but I wolfed down an entire slice of this cake. It just had an amazing richness for looking so plain. I asked the pastry students what it was, and they said it's Basque Cake. I did a little googling and found it's from France and/or Spain. Now I want to make this for my family and friends just to show them its deliciousness. I'm using this recipe.

I've discovered it requires six sticks of butter and 5 eggs. No wonder it tasted so good!

Now I must make it.

I have to say, I'm better at coming up with ideas than actually organizing things. But I'm trying really hard to put on this drum-building workshop and plan a couple of shows for my friend Djam.

I'm working as a liaison between Djam and the local music venues and the music store to make this a success.

The drum-building workshop will be May 1 and May 3 at Dharma Music in Grayling.

On Saturday, May 1 there will be instruction on building drums and includes carving, sanding and oiling the base and heading the drum. There's also a Ghanaian food luncheon featuring delicious tuwo (you overcook rice to make it a mushy paste, then scoop it into balls) served with okra soup. I have some hibiscus flowers to make bissap juice, too. Yum! The created drums will take a day to dry.

Monday night (May 3) we will tune the drums, followed by a drumming lesson from Djam. The cost for the class is $350, but everyone gets to take home their own djembe along with the instruction on building one for themselves.

Djam explained the class to his friend Tani, and now Tani is going to come to Grayling with Djam and they will do a performance here. Tani plays the kamele ngoni, a Malian instrument that's like a cross between a banjo and a harp. He's a great musician with a beautiful voice and I'm excited about the shows. His music is like African blues with a little funk and I think it will be a welcome change from the usual music scene in Grayling.

I scheduled them to play at Grey Rock Cafe and Lounge saturday night (May 1) with a $5 cover charge. Then they'll do a free, family-friendly show at the local coffee shop (Thanks a Latte) on sunday (May 2) from 10-2.

I've submitted the event to the local newspaper and put an ad in classifieds. Now I just have to make some posters and get them hung up around town. Hopefully tomorrow, when I have a day off, I can get started on that.

Djam's beautiful drums.

Tani and Djam.

An interview was conducted with Crystal regarding her trip to Napa Valley, California, during the week of April 4-10. She attended the CIA's (Culinary Institute of America) Baking and Pastry Arts Career Discovery course.

Interviewer: Hi Crystal, thanks for meeting with me.

Crystal: The pleasure is certainly mine. I'm so glad I can get my story out to the general public.

I: Would you care for some wine? [holds out a bottle of Folie a Deux's Menage a Trois, a Napa Valley wine]

C: Well, I don't usually mix business with booze, but today I can make an exception. Thank you.

I: So I'd like to start by asking you what the course is about and why you signed up for it.

C: The course is for people interested in learning about careers in baking and pastry arts. For example, working in a bakery or food writing or becoming a pastry chef in a restaurant. I've always loved baking and have considered going to baking/pastry school but wanted to test the waters before plunging in headfirst. So that was the point of the course - to try to make up my mind on whether on not I should enroll in pastry school.

I: And did you come up with a decision?

C: Yes! I loved the class so much that I've decided I'm going to do it - I'm going to go to pastry school, and hopefully this fall. In all my years of college (6-1/2, but who's counting?) I was never as interested in a lecture as I was for this course. I was hanging onto this guy's every word. And I don't feel too guilty about making such a huge jump (from wood products engineering to baking) because baking involves a lot of science, and I'm confident I can transfer my wood science skills to the baking field.

I: Tell me more about the course. What did you do? Did you make food? Who was your instructor?

C: My instructor was Chef Aaron Brown, a really cool, funny, and smart-as-hell guy. He acted kind of laid-back which gives one the impression that he's spacey, but man, that guy is on the ball. You could ask him anything and he'd have an answer. I was totally impressed with him and his vast knowledge of baking. [finishes glass of wine] So here's how the class worked - first we'd attend lecture for about 2 hours, going over each recipe we'd be making and discussing the theory behind it. Then we'd go up to the kitchen and begin working. We were assigned to teams of 2, and were usually given about two different things to complete in the next five hours. My partner and I made:

Chocolate chip cookies and walnut shortbread (where we studied the creaming method),

Lemon meringue pies and tiramisu (making pie crusts, custards, and whipping cream),

Sourdough bread and soft rolls (yeast doughs),

Lavash and pita bread (flat breads made with yeast doughs), and

Chocolate ganache tart and white chocolate-cointreau-coconut bonbons (tempering chocolate = huge pain in my ass.)

I: And what about the other people in the class?

C: There were eight of us, all women. Four of us were between 28-38, and four of us were in their 50s or 60s. The younger women were like me, trying to figure out if they should go to pastry school, while the older women were business entrepreneurs wanting to know more about baking and experienced chefs working on their technique.

C: Oh, and I have to add something. My career discovery class weren't the only people in the kitchen. There were culinary students and pastry students there, too, working on their own creations. Every night I looked forward to dinner, where at 7:00 we'd drop what we were doing and eat. All the food the culinary and pastry students made that day was served. It was just tons of entrees, one after another, taking up two 20-foot tables. The week I was there was "Asian Week" for the culinary students, so I got to eat Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and Indian food all week. Plus the TAs have to make food just in case the student-made foods don't turn out or are running late, so there were more traditional foods served, as well. And for dessert you could choose from about 25 creations from the pastry class. I had to try at least four different pastries, cookies, cakes, and pies each night. It was amazing.

I: Wow, sounds delicious. I bet I'd gain 50 pounds if I went there.

C: Yeah, I admit I went a little apeshit while I was there, but I think if I were a "normal" student I'd be more careful about not stuffing myself. But since I was on vacation I just enjoyed myself and lived life to the fullest.

I: So are you going to go to school at the CIA?

C: I don't think so. I just can't afford the tuition. As it is, I'm still paying off loans from my first round of college, so I don't want to add onto that too much. I'm currently looking at the Culinary Institute of Michigan at Baker College in Muskegon, so we'll see where that goes.

I: What did you do in Napa besides go to school?

C: Well, I was a couch surfer for the week. I stayed with my friend Anthony and his housemates, who were really cool. I like hanging out with artists and poets and musicians because I feel like they're my kind of people, so I really enjoyed their company. Plus we went out at the end of the week for some dancing, and it was fun to just let loose and have fun (not easy to do in Grayling). Other than that I went to a local museum, ate a great burrito, and did some cooking for my new friends.

I: Did you go wine tasting?

C: No, and I can't believe it. I just didn't get a chance! With my class being from 2pm-8:30pm it just wasn't conducive to taste wine and go to class tipsy. At a normal college that would've been okay because you just sit in class and daydream, but being in the kitchen you gotta be on top of your game to make the best pastries you can. So I was waiting to do it on saturday, but that day there was heavy rain, which isn't good for touring vineyards, and I ate an awesome burrito that unfortunately made me feel sleepy. So it just didn't work out. I bought a $6 bottle of Napa valley wine at the store and called it good.

I: Did you take any pictures:

C: Naw, my camera's batteries died and I never got around to getting new ones. You'll just have to imagine Napa valley with its rolling green hills, vineyards, winding roads, and "quaint" mansions.

I: Well Crystal, thanks again for the interview. It sounds like your trip was a success.

C: Absolutely! And thank you.

Okay, so I made it to Napa in one piece. It was some serious traveling - first a 3-hour busride from Grayling to East Lansing. Then a night in a run-down Super 8, but near the MSU campus so I found some good Thai food and spent some time hanging out at Meijer. Then a 5:00 bus to Detroit. That was interesting because first the hotel's shitty alarm clock never went off, and the cell phone alarm either didn't go off (I guess the phone needs to be on) or I silenced it in my sleep. So I get up at 4:15 and jump in the shower. I had arranged for a taxi to pick me up at 4:30 and they showed up at 4:20 and started banging on the door and calling me. I'm like, "dude, you're early. I'm coming." So anyway, I make it to the bus station, head for Detroit airport, and then proceed to travel until 8pm getting to Oakland. Three different flights with stops in Colorado and Salt Lake City. Good times.

I make it to Oakland and practically have a heart attack when the car rental guy says they need to charge my debit card an extra $250 as "insurance" in case something happens to the vehicle. So today I am at the library to check my account and make sure there's enough money to cover this little incidental.

I'm couch surfing with a guy named Anthony. His house is freezing. It's about 45 degrees outside and it's the same temperature inside. The house has big single-pane windows and is heated by a woodstove that sometimes is lit. But Anthony and his roommates are really nice and I'm headed to the thrift store to pick up some sweatshirts. And soon I will be going to my first career exploration class. Wish me luck!

I have exciting news!

A few weeks ago, while I was working at Kmart, this customer, the manager from a bank across the street, liked the way I interacted with customers and encouraged me to apply for their seasonal teller position. I took her up on it, put my application in, had a couple of interviews, and... I got the job! I will be starting at the end of the month. The good thing is I get 40 hours a week and $8 an hour (Kmart is $7.40/hour and I get 25-30 hours/week). I will also have a consistent schedule, none of this weird 3-9 pm stuff one day, 9-5 the next.

The bad news is, I actually like my job at Kmart, and I'm worried this job will be boring. And I have to dress up.

But that's also good news, because I love clothes and dressing up. So I'm kind of pumped to go shopping for "business attire." When I was a little girl and thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I just imagined myself wearing a powersuit and high heels. I never had an idea of what job I'd be doing, I just knew what I wanted to look like. I'm glad I finally have an excuse to wear a powersuit and high heels.

The bottom line is, I'm going to stay at Kmart, as long as I don't get too burned out. I don't want to burn any bridges there. And I was just starting to get tight with the girls in fashions...

So yeah, that's my latest job news.

Tomorrow I'm going to Napa for a career exploration class in pastry at the Culinary Institute of America. I found a couch to crash on, and it's in a good location and the dude has roommates so it doesn't seem too scary. I'm going to rent a car so I can explore the area. Tomorrow I'll be hopping a bus to East Lansing, then spending the night there and flying out of Detroit City. Hopefully this class will help me find some answers about what I want to do next.

The weather has been beautiful here lately, and I'm trying to take full advantage of it.

I took a walk down my road. I purposely didn't bring my mp3 player because I wanted to hear the birds and see the beauty of my surroundings with no distraction. Here's some things I saw:

Mailboxes hit by plow trucks.

There's a state-owned game refuge along one side of our road.

I liked this knobby-looking tree with its shiny new sap droplets.

I love the ground cover - dead oak leaves with lots of dried-up moss. Very crunchy when you walk on it!

And some nice pussy willow down by the riverbank.

Last but not least, my favorite picture:

I've been collecting things to send to Niger for quite some time. We even had an earring-making party to send to the ladies. I sent the packages out today, one for my villagers in Niger, one for my friend Ma Mouda in Ghana (he takes care of my villagers when they travel there to do work).

To my villagers, I sent:

2 big packages of bubble gum.About 40 pairs of earrings, plus necklaces and bracelets for the ladies.A couple leftover euros to buy the kids a soccer ball.Small bottles of hand lotion.

A WWE t-shirt for Issoufou (only 99 cents at Kmart).

A pair of sunglasses for Malam Ousmane, the village Fulan leader.Malam Ousmane. I had a secret crush on him. :)

I also sent a few things for Ryo, the local JICA volunteer (like Peace Corps from Japan) who I'm sending the package to - he will then give it to Issoufou to bring back to the village. I had to send the stuff to Ryo because he has an address and my villagers don't. I hooked him up with almonds, granola bars (with raisins, since it's hot season right now and chocolate will melt), and jelly beans.Petting baby camels with Ryo.

And for Ma Mouda in Ghana, I sent:

$40 cash for him to exchange. When I went to Ghana he hooked me up (let me crash at his place, took me out to dinner, bought me minutes for my cell phone) and now he takes care of Issoufou and friends.Granola bars (again, without chocolate chips).Makeup samples and a few headbands to give to the girls (Blackie had to try them on first).

Ma Mouda

I'd like to extend a special thanks to Alanna and Heather for sending me goodies to send to my friends. :)

My Peace Corps buddies told me about couchsurfing.org, a program that connects people to crash on each other's couches while traveling and, in return, host people to crash on your own couch. My first thought was, "is this safe?" I mean, you sleep on a complete stranger's couch. What if that person is a psychopath or a rapist? But my friend Chelsea assured me that yes, you have to be careful about whose couch you sleep on, but there are ways to check that person out first. You read their profile. People who have already slept on their couch "vouch" for them - "John is a really great guy. I enjoyed hearing his music and his friends were really cool." Also, they can be "verified" by couchsurfing.org, where they contribute some money and their identity and address are verified to be true so you know it's not some creepy freakazoid pretending to be a cute female college student. Also, there are "friends" like in facebook, only in this website you have to say how you know that person. You can use all this to make sure it's someone you want to stay with. Then you send them a message, asking if you can surf at their house, and voila - you have a place to stay and a potential new friend. That's the best case scenario.

I joined couchsurfing.org so that I can find a place to stay while I'm taking my pastry career exploration class at the Culinary Institute of America. The school is in St. Helena, CA, which is right smack dab in the middle of Napa Valley. Wine country, baby! In the past month, I've sent out over 20 messages to people asking if I can surf on their couch. Some never gave a response. Others said they're going to be out of town, or have someone already staying with them, or that their couch is just "not available."

I'm getting frustrated. I'm leaving for Napa this saturday, and I have no idea where I'll be staying. I'm starting to lose my faith in the whole program, as it's not helping me out so far.

The good news is, I have a backup plan. I found a cheap hotel that's only $50 a night. After living in Africa for two years, even the shadiest hotel is probably "not that bad." Hotel's got some cockroaches? Try having them crawl over your foot when you have to pee in the middle of the night. Hotel's got shady plumbing? Hey, at least I can drink it without getting diarrhea. And it includes a continental breakfast. I'll give it a couple days. If I don't have a place to stay by wednesday, I'm booking a hotel room.

I like my job at Kmart. It's challenging, I get new things to do, and I like interacting with people. But the problem is, I still don't feel like I fit in there. The people I work with, the other cashiers and the customer service people, have their own little cliques going and, as usual, I'm the odd one out. It doesn't matter how long they've worked there, there's this group of people who hang out all the time and even new employees somehow have joined this "club." But I'm never invited. I get that I take my job more seriously, more professionally than others. Maybe they see me as someone different because of that. And I get that I'm different because I'm in my late 20s while they're a lot younger, like 20 or 21. But that doesn't mean that I don't feel left out.

I don't know why I'm so upset. For the most part I don't even like these people. There's the girl with the newborn baby who drops the baby off with her parents and goes out every night. There's the girl with a new scuzzy boyfriend each week, complaining about her relationship problems. And there's the lazy boys who, at every given chance, run off to a corner and "hide" from the management, thus ignoring their work and leaving more for me the next time I come in.

These are some of the feelings I had in high school, where I never felt like I fit in and didn't make connections with most of the people I knew. I've never been a cliquey person, and that's something I'm usually happy with. But every so often I feel left out, and it's lonely.

My Niger boyfriend, Darey, finally rejoined civilization and was in an area where I could call him. I was so happy to hear from him, and hear how he and his family are doing.

Now who is this guy? I use the term "boyfriend" loosely. While I lived in Niger we had a kind of third-grade romance: we'd see each other every few months, bring each other little gifts, express how happy we were to see each other, etc. When I left he was like, "please don't forget me!" and how could I? I had a lot of adventures with Darey. He taught me a lot of Hausa (my Niger language), he taught me about his culture (the Wodaabe people), he taught me some cultural norms, and we just had fun together.

I first met him at a herders' meeting near Abalak. He is very much a politician, always meeting people, making contacts, trying to get help for his people. He's also handsome, with dark skin, high cheekbones, a straight, long nose, and beautiful white teeth. I also like his polite, soft-spoken manner. Never one to get angry or upset, and always gentle.

We were together for about a year, but only saw each other every few months for about a week at a time. He would come down to Konni to visit me, and a few times when I hadn't seen him in a while, I traveled up to Abalak to see him in his village and to stay with his people.

Staying in Darey's village was so different from living in my village. My village seems rich compared to his. In Darey's village (known as Teyiss), there are only about 5 houses. The houses are made out of sticks and old rags, and some don't even have a roof. The land is dryer as his village is further north, and so the lush, leafy Neem trees that we get in Korap don't even grow in Darey's neck of the woods. All they have are thorny Acacia trees and this invasive exotic tree from Asia that looks like a woody milkweed. You really gotta watch out for those thorny Acacias - the thorns fall on the ground and will pierce your foot right through your shoes. If you want to sit under one for shade, you have to be careful not to get stabbed in your butt and legs.

These people are truly bush. They don't listen to the radio like my villagers because they can't afford batteries. The kids don't speak Hausa (they are Wodaabe and they speak Fulfulde), and flashlights are a rarity. The Wodaabe people's livelihood is their cattle. Some cows have been around for a decade at least, and wherever there is grass, that is where the herders take them. They walk through trail-less, thorny bush land to get water from the wells and find something, anything for the cattle to eat. They camp out under the stars every night, carrying their possessions in a backpack or in calabash bowls they balance on their heads. There is never enough water for bathing. While some family members are herding, others are staying in the village, the homestead. These are the people I stayed with.

In the true Niger tradition, they gave me the nicest bedding - a cot with blankets and a real pillow. At nights we sat around fires (at least there's more firewood up north since they don't have farms), the old men making individual pots of tea, us young kids sharing our own pot of tea. The Wodaabe people are cuddly, young men and young women not shy about touching each other, and I would snuggle up with my friend Mariama as we huddled under a blanket. When darkness really fell, we would go to bed, where I slept warm and comfortable under the cold Sahel sky.

In the mornings I'd awaken to the sounds of fire-building, tea-brewing, and goats and sheep running around bleating. I'd find some kid to fill my water bottle, my Nalgene bottle which never left my side, and use the bathroom (go to some bushes). It's culturally appropriate to walk around to each house greetings its occupants ("a waali jam?" "How did you sleep?"), then taking them up on any offers to have tea or eat food. It would easily take an hour to visit four houses.

To kill time, I'd read a book I'd brought (I remember reading "The Poisonwood Bible" in Teyiss) or do some sewing. When you live with others, you feel as though you have no personal space or time to yourself. Being a visitor can be trying on a person. Plus, I didn't speak their language, so the energy spent trying to learn Fulfulde would kick my ass. I also couldn't take part in conversations unless they were in Hausa, and listening to people speak in a language you don't know gets boring. Throughout the day we'd move our mats around to follow the shade, as it moved along with the sun. At midday they let me stay in the teacher's house, the only building with a roof, so I could get shade.

If school was in session, I'd go sit in class just for something to do and to talk to the teacher, my friend Boubacar. He had each of the kids draw a colorful bowl, then gave me all the pictures. These kids are about 7 years old, so the pictures were pretty cute. I still have them.

One afternoon Darey's grandmother invited me into her little home, a 4' by 8' tent made with a wood frame and rags. I walked in and it was just full of stuff, including a pair of Darey's shoes that I remembered giving him a while back. She laid out a mat and invited me to sit down. Then she laid down, saying she was tired. I realized she was inviting me to take a nap with her. It was so sweet. Unfortunately, I had just awoken from a nap, which I told her, and when she was close to falling asleep I left her on her own. It is not unusual for people to sleep together in Niger - men, women, kids, women and kids. Often grandmas will sleep with a couple of grandkids each night. I remember my neighbor/best friend Rabi offering me her daughter Habsu to use as a sleeping friend.

The beautiful Darey.

One of the old guys, I just call him "Baba" (Dad).

Zamani, who braided my hair and whose house I hung out at the most.

Darey's cousin, I forgot the guy's name. He was just stopping through. Notice the tea brewing on the charcoal stove.

My homegirl Mariama.

The kids! I taught this girl, Halima (the taller one), how to play cards. Jyo'di, the boy, is the little guy in the Niger shirt. And the baby is my little friend Zeina (we have the same name).

My dad's workplace had a potluck lunch on St. Patty's Day last week, and he predictably signed up to bring a dessert (he knows how much I love baking.)

I tried to get creative with this one. When I think of St. Patty's Day, I envision corned beef, cabbage, and potatoes (who doesn't?). But those don't really fit with desserts, so I went a little further and thought of Irish coffee - coffee with a shot of Irish whiskey and a shot of Bailey's Irish Creme. I did a little research on Bailey's to figure out how I could replicate its flavors, and learned it's cream flavored with chocolate, vanilla, and possibly caramel and hazelnut. So maybe I could make a cupcake with an Irish cream filling (that you inject into the cupcake using a pastry bag), and with some kind of chocolate frosting.

I made standard yellow cupcakes using a recipe from The Cake Bible. For the cream filling, I made pastry cream, which is basically a thick custard. I flavored the pastry cream with vanilla, a little chocolate, a little coffee, and just enough whiskey to give it a kick. For the frosting, I wanted to try working with ganache, as it's something I have little experience with. Ganache is a chocolate glaze made with heavy cream and chocolate, and works perfectly when making chocolates, chocolate-covered strawberries, and any cake where you want a glaze hanging over the sides that isn't too fluffy like frosting.

Something happened to the pastry cream and it came out kind of thin. I had a hard time injecting it into my goods because it just tried to squeeze out the top of the pastry bag. Even now, I have leftover chocolate-coffee-whiskey-flavored pudding in the fridge, and I'm not sure what to do with it. I've already put it back on the stove twice for additional cooking, but it only helped a little. I'll try stiffening it by mixing in some cool whip, then use that to make a couple pies for people to bring to work.

Injecting cupcakes.

I didn't have cupcake liners, so I tried making some by squishing parchment paper circles into a cup shape. It kind of worked.

Voila! The final product.

Here's how they look on the inside.

The only mild-weather coat ("mild" meaning anything above 45 degrees) is a long leather jacket that I got at a thrift store. This guy I knew in college called it my "pimp coat," and the description rings true.

Since pimp coats are not in style at the moment, I need something to get me through the Michigan springtime. My criteria:

It has to be stylish, so I'd prefer a military-style jacket or something with studs.The coat must have a lining to stand up to this chilly Michigan weather.It needs to fall at the hip - anything shorter and my already substantial hips would look bigger; anything longer would look too formal for daily wear.To complement my shape, I want it to have a belt, drawstring, or tailoring at the waist.

After hours of searching for the coat online, I finally found something I like. Behold, the Hurley Newman YC Jacket:

I'm getting it at zappos, my favorite shopping website, for only $60 including shipping. I can't wait to try it on!

When you live in hicksville and you're craving good food, the sludge at the local dives just doesn't cut it. You gotta make it yourself. Last weekend I made Chicago-style deep dish pizzas. Today I made hummus and pita bread.

It actually took some forethought. I had to prepare the pita bread dough ahead of time so it could rise a couple times. I used this recipe to make it. The bread is said to be best when it bakes up puffy, but out of 16 rounds I could only get 2 of them to puff up. I have no idea what makes them do that, but it turns out they don't collapse and then you have this crazy bubble bread that you can't put anything inside of, so I actually prefer the flat ones.

I made roasted red pepper hummus. I used canned chickpeas, but first I removed all their skins.

Ever wonder how chickpeas got their name? I personally think it's because if you look closely at one, its shape resembles that of a butchered chicken. Like those roaster chickens you see in the supermarket.

I attempted to blend the skinned chickpeas in my mom's blender, but it wasn't powerful enough. The chickpeas just sat in the bottom while weird fumes wafted out of the blender's motor. So I moved some of the mixture to the Magic Bullet, which still wasn't able to puree the dang things. After going back and forth between the two appliances, I realized the Magic Bullet had the best chance of pureeing the chickpeas, as long as I added a lot of liquid. It took about an hour to do it, but we finally had some delicious hummus for dinner. Next time I will dig my food processor out of the attic.

I got my first Kmart paycheck (a whole $88) and desperately needed a few things. So I went internet shopping.

I checked this book out from the library and it's amazing. With recipes like deep dish pizza dough, lemon squares, and raspberry-coconut cloud cake, I need a copy. I got one used from amazon for $21 including shipping.

My life has seriously changed since I got a Kitchen Aid mixer back in 2006. It makes kneading bread so much easier, and my loaves rise and bake better, too. So I want to try making sourdough bread. However, you have to have a starter to get that nice, sour flavor, and I read that homemade starters for sourdough don't usually work out. So I ordered one from here for $6 including shipping.

Yesterday my dad, Tom and I took a ride to the rinky-dink town of Falmouth, near Cadillac, to go to their amazing meat store. It sells all sorts of local meats and jerky, and we've been talking about going there for a while. The bad news is, the place was closed because it was sunday. But the good news is, we stopped in Houghton Lake, went to this cute gourmet food/meat store, and I scored some salt pork (2 6-oz packages for $1.50 each). Even better, daddy-o paid the bill.

You're probably wondering what one does with salt pork. Well, when you're cooking something and you need to brown meat and onions, instead of putting oil or butter in your pan, you can throw in some salt pork and let the fat melt, then use that melted fat to brown your onions and meat. It gives an extra dimension of flavor to food. Yum!

Now I want to get some juniper berries (they're great in sauces with meat). I tried to get my dad to pick some off the hedges at his office, but he said they may not be "food grade" and he'll just buy some for me. Now we just need to find them. Maybe my next paycheck I'll look some up on the internets.

Since we're on the subject of cooking, I should mention I'll be brining a piece of beef round roast to make corned beef for St. Patrick's Day. It's going to rock! Stay tuned!

The last two weeks have been a whirlwind.

I've been working mad hours at the Kmarts and that combined with a nasty cold last week kind of kicked my ass. Plus our internet was down for a couple days, and when I wasn't working I was making my mom's birthday cake, giving a talk about Peace Corps to some high school students, and having lunch with would-be employers from a local wood products company.

Okay, what do you want to hear about first? My mom's birthday cake? Okay.

I made her a Blackout Cake from an America's Test Kitchen cookbook I got at the library. Blackout Cake is basically rich, dark chocolate layer cake with chocolate pudding filling. Then you "frost" the cake with the pudding, take one of the cake layers, crumble it up, and cover the cake with it.

The picture doesn't do it justice. It was so decadent and rich, the first time I tried it I could hardly finish my slice (and that's saying a lot - I can really handle dessert.) Since both the pudding and the cake were made from scratch, the amount of sugar was perfect and it wasn't overly sweet like you would experience with packaged cake mixes and pudding mixes. Once it sat in the fridge a few days, it just got richer and yummier. I finally ate the last piece last night.

So this would-be employers thing. While I was in college for Wood Science, I met "Maria," a Michigan Tech alumnus and fellow female wood science person. She works for the local wood products company that is here in my hometown and we've kept in touch over the years. I was featured in the local newspaper, which ran an article about my Peace Corps experience, and she read the article and heard I'm back in town. It turns out the company is looking for someone to work for them doing quality control, a 9-month job on swing shift, and they asked me if I'd like to take the position. I had to think about it for a while. First of all, I realized I don't really want a career in wood science. I wish I hadn't chosen it as my major in college, but I'm not being hard on myself because I was just a kid and didn't know what I wanted. The job has good pay, but if I committed myself to a 9-month gig, that could interfere with doing something I really want to do, like going to pastry school or finding a better job elsewhere. Plus I'd be holed up in a laboratory doing monotonous work, and I really like talking to people (which is why I like my job at Kmart). So against my parents' advice (they still have dreams of me being a high-paid engineer, like that's going to happen), I turned the job down. But the people from the company invited me to go to lunch with them to talk about my Peace Corps experience, and that was a blast. I showed them pictures and we laughed and it was a great time.

I'm really trying to share my Peace Corps experience with people in the community, so I emailed the social studies teachers at the high school to see if I could do a presentation for their class. A few of them said maybe the next trimester, when things are less busy, but one guy was available that week. So I went to his Financial Literacy class and talked about Peace Corps and volunteering, life in the village, the work I did, Buddy the Camel, etc. Everyone seemed to love it. I did get a couple of "huh huh huh"s from the back of the class when I talked about how shocking it was at first to see women openly breast feeding their kids - I guess I forgot who my audience was for a second (boob-obsessed teenage boys). Next I'm going to email my parents' friend from the Rotary Club and some language teachers from the high school to see if they'd like a little presentation.

And I've been doing stuff with my parents' church. Friday was the World Day of Prayer, and my parents' church hosted it for all the churches in the community. Unfortunately, since it was on a friday during the day, not a lot of people could make it, but we had about 35 women anyhow. The focus for World Day of Prayer this year is on Cameroon, and since I was the local African expert, I was asked to talk about village life and share stories of the hardships and also the sense of community they have there. A lady brought all sorts of African artifacts sent by her son, who works in Africa, and we were provided with a CD of African-style church music. I wore my embroidered Wodaabe skirt and my mom wore one of my crazy African shirts. It went pretty well.

The next day, Saturday, was my mom's Women of Wisdom meeting. This group is organized by Sister Jean, a wonderful, progressive local nun who is an inspiration to me and others. She organized a drumming workshop where a woman came up from Ann Arbor with about forty drums and we had a big drum circle with games and exercises. Then Sister Jean led us all through a meditative clay-molding session, where we were supposed to mold something from our hearts. I had been thinking a lot about my friends in Niger and the everyday struggles they face, and I let my hands take control. They flattened the clay into a disk. Then I wondered what I could do with this disk, so I kind of played around with it, and when I rolled it, it reminded me of a headwrap. So I molded a little head wearing a headwrap. It wasn't anything special but I felt it really represented what I had been feeling at the time.

After the Women of Wisdom meeting, our friend Bernie led an earring-making workshop to make earrings to send to my friends in Niger. You see, there is a problem with super-cheapo earrings from China containing cadmium, and I know the earrings my villagers wear are from China (cadmium is a hard metal and extremely toxic.) So I wanted to send them some American earrings that would not only be safer to wear but something cool and different from what they get at the market. The problem was, earrings are expensive here. My mom and I have all these beads sitting around and some earring hooks we could use to make earrings, and I mentioned to Bernie the idea of having an earring-making party after Women of Wisdom. So we did it. She did all the arranging and brought in her own beading materials and taught us how to wire wrap. It was super fun, and although only six ladies could stay for it, we made 25 pairs of earrings. My mom and I want to make some more and hopefully I can get them in the mail next week. I'd also like to send a big shout-out to Alanna for thinking of my villagers and sending me a package of wonderful jewelry, lotions, makeup samples and washcloths. They are going to love it!

Okay, I'll quit now. I know this has been a long post. I'll try to make them shorter and more frequent!

I developed a taste for instant coffee with powdered milk and sugar while I lived in Niger.

I've never been a coffee drinker - first of all, it tastes gross. Secondly, I don't want to be addicted to anything. You never know when you'll be in a situation where you have to get up at the crack of dawn and function with none of your vices (be it coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, or crack) nearby. And it always bugged me how on Christmas morning we couldn't start opening presents until my dad drank his morning cups of coffee. Plus, it stains your teeth. So I always kind of had a negative impression of coffee.

That was before I woke to hearing animals squawking, the muezzin calling prayer at 5am, and random people showing up at my house before I was ready to get up. And that Nigerien sun is so hot that at times I would wake up with the sun in my face, sweating bullets.

Unexpected wake-up calls aside, I started drinking coffee because I liked the caffeine kick I got from the green tea my villagers drank.* However, by the time my lazy buns got up (at the late hour of 8:00), they were finished with their morning tea and were out in the fields. So I'd have to find my own caffeine kick - instant coffee.

*Green tea is a big thing in West and North Africa. It's brewed very concentrated, so that you get a cupful worth of tea (and therefore caffeine) in a tiny shot glass. The same tea leaves are brewed three times with sugar added each time - the first round is "bitter like life," the second round is "sweet, like love," and the third round is "light, like the breath of death." Past noon I can only drink #2 and #3, as the first round is so strong I won't sleep at night.

A tray with blue ceramic teapot, metal teapot, shot glass, loose tea leaves, and two metal cups for "foaming" the tea (pour it back in fourth and the tea gets nice and frothy).

My friend Feirodji drinking his morning tea. Notice the pot brewing on a charcoal brazier.

Issoufou's all, "have some tea. No, go ahead. Seriously, for the love of god, drink some tea!" (Typical invitation and what happens when you decline.)

So back to my tea replacement. You can get Nescafe just about anywhere, which is, as I'm told, a particularly horrible instant coffee. However, since I never drank "the good stuff," I didn't know what I was missing. I came back to the U.S. and saw some instant Folgers in my parents' cupboard that expired in 2006, so I've been working on drinking it. Last week my friend Issoufou called and I was like, "I just woke up and I'm still tired, so I'm going to make some cafe au lait," and he was like, "Oh, save some for me, I'm on my way over right now." And I was like, "okay, I'm waiting for you." We used to always drink coffee together. Actually, since it's more expensive than tea leaves in Niger, I was the only person in my village who drank it on a consistent basis, and Issoufou would come over in the morning not only for conversation but also for coffee.

Here's my coffee recipe. It's sweet and milky and weak enough that my heart doesn't start pounding.

Crystal's Sugar-High Coffee

Mix together in a mug:

1/2 tsp. instant coffee

2 tsp. sugar

Fill the mug halfway with:

Water

Fill the mug to the top with:

Milk, preferably 2%

Nuke it for 1 to 1-1/2 minutes on high. Enjoy!

Since I have a TV in my bedroom, I like to watch those late-night cable TV shows as I'm brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed. That's also when they have their best shows.

I love catching Throwdown with Bobby Flay - that show makes me want to cook foods I've never imagined cooking, like Spanish paella or arroz con pollo.

The host of Man vs. Food, Adam Richman, has an enviable appetite and enough charm and creativity to make his show entertaining and also rev up my appetite. I'll admit, it's kind of disturbing watching him plow through a 5-lb hamburger - it's such a demonstration of gluttony and the overabundance of food here in America - but I do like when he visits restaurants just to try their signature entree. The way he moans and groans about it makes me hungry. He made a Philly cheese steak sound so tempting that my whole family wanted to eat it.

I'll sometimes catch an episode of Friends or Sex and the City, and sometimes I'll tune in to Millionaire Matchmaker or VH1s Celebrity Rehab. And sometimes when a new episode of a show is shown at 9, it'll be repeated later on, so I'll catch Project Runway or Launch My Line that way.

Wow, I can't believe it. There's been a coup d'etat in Niger.

I googled it as soon as I heard the news. Today at midday while the President, Mamadou Tandja, was in a meeting, a group of soldiers came in and captured him. Now he and his cronies are being held captive at a military camp while a new military-led government reigns.

I hope the people are okay. I hope Niger will be okay. I hope my Peace Corps friends are okay. Is the Peace Corps going to be evacuated? We will have to see what happens. Sometimes Peace Corps doesn't get evacuated after a coup if it isn't particularly upsetting to the country.

I'm in California, visiting my sister Becky, her husband Fonsi, and their kids Chris and Angie. Our brother Joe is here too, so it's the three of us here together!

So far we're having fun. The kids are really cute, ages 2-1/2 and 1-1/2. Becky and Fonsi look as beautiful as ever. And I'm eating yummy foods, like strawberries, blueberries, and Thai food (more on that later.)

Joe's luggage got lost and the airline said they'd reimburse him for $80 worth of clothes, so yesterday we did a little shopping at Old Navy. I found a pair of black jeans and a black fleece to go with my red K-Mart vest. You would not believe how cold it is working in a big store like that. The personnel manager told me to dress warm, so my first day I wore a shirt and a sweater. It wasn't enough, I froze my buns off, so now I wear two pairs of long underwear, a shirt, and a sweater.

Today we went to Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. The parking lot was full so we parked further down the road and walked uphill to the place. The kids really wanted to walk (and we wanted them to get tired enough for their nap) so we spent most of our time getting there. It probably took 45 minutes to walk from the car to the observatory. Once we made it there, we just hung out in the grass, soaking up the sun, and the kids ate snacks. They were tired enough to allow us to carry them back down the hill.

Walking up the hill with Angie. That girl can move!

Then we went to a Thai restaurant, Sapp Coffee Shop in Hollywood. Becky had watched Anthony Bourdain sample their food and recommended the Boat Noodles with Beef. So that's what I ordered. It was rice noodles and pieces of beef, tripe, and liver meatballs in a rich, spicy beef broth. There were a few pieces of fried skins, like pork rinds, in the dish, too. It was delicious!

Joe and I got the Thai iced tea. It was very sweet, cool and refreshing.

Angie eating her yogurt appetizer.

Chris with his buddy Uncle Joe.

Tonight Joe and I babysat while Becky and Fonsi went to a birthday party. Surprisingly, things went well. The kids didn't get too upset when they left, then we had fun playing with toys, then ate dinner, which they only threw a little bit of on the floor, then successfully got their diapers changed, jammies on, teeth brushed, and off to bed with no crying. Yeah, baby! Tomorrow Becky and the Fonz have a dinner date for V-day so Joe and I get to do it all over again. I hope it goes as well as it did tonight.

Joe took me through some YouTube videos that were talked about while I was in the Peace Corps, like David Goes to the Dentist and the rollerskating babies commercial. Now he's watching the Olympics.

Okay, I'll be back tomorrow or the day after.

I seriously feel my butt growing. All that hard work, exercising with Gilad every day (or so) and watching my desserts, just went out the window.

I ate a paczki ("punchki").

Like a filled donut on steroids, this special little pastry comes to local bakeries about a week before Fat Tuesday, as if we Americans need to get any fatter.

I got the chocolate one. It was like eating a cup of chocolate frosting in a tiny little donut shell. My god, I didn't realize a paczki had so much filling.

While I was in the Peace Corps, wasting away from a limited diet of starch and losing weight by having frequent diarrhea, I dreamed of eating a paczki. This was part of my reasoning for eating one today - "just think about how much you wanted one while you were in Niger."

All I can say is alhamdulillah.

From a letter to my former colleagues on my last few weeks in Peace Corps and what it's like to be back in the U.S.

It started November 15 (I remember that date because it's opening day of rifle season in Michigan and we'd get the day off from school. Once a hunter, always a hunter.) I had just returned to my village after spending a week in a village further north, staying with my friends the Wodaabe nomadic cattle herders and attending their annual Geerwol festival. I had just been in my village one night. Usually when I get up in the morning I turn on my cell phone to check my text messages, then turn it back off to conserve the battery, since there's no electricity in the village to recharge it. In the afternoon a guy from the neighboring village about 3 miles away pulled up on a motorcycle and gave me a note. The note was from my friend Jessie, a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, telling me "there was an attempted kidnapping and we are on consolidation. Come to the Peace Corps hostel in Konni." After waiting four hours for a car I finally made it to Konni, which is only 20 km away. I know, I could've made it there faster by walking. Welcome to transportation in Africa.

Once I made it to the hostel I heard the news about what had happened. There was an attempted kidnapping in our regional capital, Tahoua, about 130 km away. At first I wasn't fazed; it seemed like every month we heard news about attempted kidnappings on the border of Mali (presumably by AQIM, a North African terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.) However, this one was different because Tahoua is not near the border of Mali and the kidnappers were specifically targeting Americans. Peace Corps wouldn't tell us exactly what happened, but through the grapevine I heard the following: A group of nine American Embassy workers was staying at a hotel in Tahoua. The kidnappers, a group of men armed with AK-47s, came into the hotel, pointed a gun at the front desk clerk's head, and demanded that they give them the Americans. Apparently a hotel employee heard what was going on in the front room, quickly alerted the Americans and escorted them out the back door. This affected us Peace Corps volunteers in the region because Tahoua isn't far from most volunteer villages, and if AQIM can go to Tahoua, they definitely can get to Konni, where the Peace Corps hostel is. We were consolidated at our Peace Corps hostel for about six days. No one could leave the property by himself and we had armed police in the compound to protect us from any intruders.

After five days of the Peace Corps and U.S. Embassy deliberating, it was decided Peace Corps would be shut down in our region. None of us could return to our villages, even to say goodbye to our friends or grab our belongings, and we had to move to the capital, Niamey, as soon as possible. I am so lucky my village is only 20 km from Konni because my villagers got to come and see me and we said our goodbyes. A Nigerien Peace Corps employee was given a list of belongings to grab from everyone's house, so at least I could get some of my stuff. The goodbyes were hard; after crying for hours my villagers and I sat around in a depressed, catatonic state.

I went to Niamey, did a bunch of paperwork, saw the doctor and dentist for physicals, got a lot of blood drawn to check for parasites, was given liver-cleansing pills to take in America (for any leftover "aliens" that might be hiding in my gut), and left town November 29. After a chilly layover in France (I didn't have any warm clothing) and a quick layover in Detroit (I ate a Wendy's hamburger!), I finally met my mom in snowy Traverse City, Michigan. I had called her ahead of time to have her bring me a warm coat and some real shoes. The first thing she did was take me to Kohl's, as she had a coupon and it was only good for that day. She wanted to buy me some sweaters but I seriously couldn't pick anything out because of the reverse culture shock I was experiencing. Everything looked the same. Everything looked fine. I let her pick it out.

The first month in the U.S. was strange. I often felt disoriented and confused. Was I really in Africa for 23 months? It all felt like a dream. I couldn't believe how much meat people eat here, I caught myself using the Hausa language a few times, and I refused to wash my hair more than once a week. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and throwing my legs over the side of my bed, searching for my shoes. Then, every time I went to the store, I saw a bunch of things I wanted to buy for my villagers and other friends. I signed up for an account on Skype (internet telephone) and bought a headset, and ever since I've been calling and communicating with my Nigerien friends. My best buddy Issoufou is in Ghana right now, earning money for his family by doing street manicures and pedicures, and he calls me about once a week. I just sent a package to him including gifts for our villagers (developed photos, keychains, whistles, makeup, jewelry, perfume, and candy). I also taught him how to use my film camera while I was in Niger, and bought him his own camera and sent it to him. It's a good way for him to make money and it benefits the village. And I am so grateful that I can speak to my villagers whenever I want. I just call someone in the village and they pass the phone around. It's wonderful.

I started looking for work and am finding ideas for my next adventure. I've applied for some Peace Corps recruiter positions, but the jobs are on a continuous open basis so who knows when I'll hear anything from them. I'm taking a class at the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) in Napa Valley this May for people who want to explore their options for a career in baking/pastry arts. And I got a job at K-Mart, which because of my low living expenses (living with mom and dad) I should be able to save some money to fund my future endeavors. Today I tried my first announcement over the speakers - "Attention K-Mart shoppers..." I've been baking a lot (cakes, bread and cookies), some of which are experiments and some are by request from family members. And I'm arranging to give talks at the local schools and library.

Wish me luck, and salaam alaikum.

Crystal (aka Zeinabou)

I started my new job at KMart yesterday. It was kind of a disaster and I left feeling discouraged and not sure I can handle working there. It wasn't that the store was a problem, it was just watching those ridiculous training/orientation videos that make you want to shoot yourself in the head. Not only is there text on the screen but you have to listen to someone read it to you and since you read faster than you hear, that voice just drones on and on and on...

And it was freezing in there. I was told to dress warm so I wore a long-sleeve shirt under my sweater, but I wasn't warm enough and wore my coat the whole time. And sitting in the training room, a sad-looking, dark-wood-paneled, poorly-lit little dungeon in the corner of the store... well, let's just say it wasn't warm and it wasn't inspiring.

But hey, at least I got through it.

Today was better. I did a little bit of computer stuff, then learned how to work the cash registers. There's a lot to learn and I certainly didn't learn everything today, but otherwise it went pretty well. The lady training me was really cool and we seemed to hit it off, so that helped, too.

Blackie the Cat's latest obsession is a piece of paper that's on "his" couch. It's actually some crochet instructions I printed up, but he's totally taken it over and sits on it whenever possible. He will also bat at it to move it to the right place to maximize comfort. I think he likes how it crinkles beneath him, must make him feel like he's crouching in the underbrush.

Blackie on his favorite piece of paper. Notice his fleece blanket and red pillow - yes, he owns this couch.

I am going to be a working woman. With a little help from Joe the HR Pro (my brother), I applied for a job with K-Mart using their online applicant screener (basically you take an exam). Some of the questions were no-brainers: "True or false: it is okay to steal because you see your manager doing it." Some of them were more difficult: "You are assigned to train a newer employee who is always talking about other employees behind their backs and it bothers you. How do you deal with the situation?"

a) Tell your boss you won't train him. b) Train him, but when you hear him talk about other employees stop training him. c) Train him, but beforehand tell him you don't want to hear his negative comments. d) Train him, but when he says a negative comment tell him you don't appreciate it and ask if he'll stop. e) Just deal with it and get the training over with.Which would you actually do? Which would you pick to make a good impression on your employer?

Apparently I did a good job on the exam because today I scored an interview and was offered a job on the spot! Not bad for Grayling, where there is no industry and very few jobs. :) I start orientation on monday at $7.40/hour (again, not too shabby considering my low overhead.)

Also, my passport came in today so now I can travel anywhere in world I want to. I always had government-business passports before.

Yesterday's Dinner:

Barley risotto with parmesan

Roasted vegetables - potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, red onion, and button mushrooms with fresh rosemary

Dirt cake

My brother Tom and I have been talking about making homemade root beer since December. He has root beer extract so all we needed was the yeast. For making root beer (and other sodas, and maybe wine and beer?) you need Champagne yeast. I googled it, bought some for $1 each on ebay (with like $5 shipping for a tiny little packet, grr), and it's been sitting in the cupboard for over a month.

Today we finally made the root beer. First we gathered our ingredients:

We poured the yeast and sugar in the empty pop bottle, added the rootbeer extract, then filled it halfway with water. Tom shook it to dissolve the ingredients.

We filled it all the way up with water.

Now we let it sit at room temperature for three days. The yeast will produce the CO2 needed to make it fizzy. Then we just have to refrigerate it so it's cold. We plan to open and sample our homemade root beer monday night. We're also thinking of trying cream soda and orange cream soda.

Tom also requested that I make dirt cake with gummy worms. I found this recipe and went from there, but decided to make homemade chocolate pudding instead of using a mix.

You're supposed to combine cream cheese and butter, then add the prepared pudding. This morning I cooked up some chocolate pudding (using a combination of 2% milk and whipping cream), let it cool to room temperature, then mixed in the room-temperature cream cheese and butter. It came out really rich and chocolatey. Layered with the Oreo crumbs and gummy worms, it was an excellent dessert, though somewhat guilt-inducing (butter, cream cheese and heavy cream, plus all those Oreos?). Since we don't have a trifle bowl I put it in a glass casserole dish and it didn't look too sexy. (don't you like that? "Sexy" to describe a dessert?) I will have to invest in a trifle bowl for when I attempt tiramisu (which will, of course, be made from scratch. I don't do storebought ladyfingers. Not that they'd have them in Grayling anyway.)