Adventures in Cooking: OSU Tribute, Buckeye Cupcakes!!

Well, they started out as the usual birthday cupcakes. And then I got an idea!

First, make some vanilla cupcakes, and if you're feeling festive, add a little food coloring to make them pretty.
Second, with a knife, cut a cone out of the top of the cupcake. Scoop a spoonful of peanut butter into a ziploc baggie, and cut off a corner. Squeeze a dollop of peanut butter into the cupcake.

So it looks all cute. Put the top of the cone back onto the top of the cupcake, so you've hidden the peanut butter.

Add icing (in this case, nutella) and a dollop of peanut butter to finish it off.

Enjoy with friends! (But be sure to hoard a few in your fridge for later...they're great with Georgian coffee!)

Feeling Fall

With the beginning of school and the changing of weather, it's officially fall. Nar is growing on the trees, pears fall and make a thudding sound on the roof of my kitchen. And things move along.

Typical of the Azerbaijani schools, my school still doesn't have a set schedule, so teaching has been sporadic to say the least. It's good to see the kids, and it's nice because this year, I'll be teaching extensively with two different counterparts. I'm hoping that this week we'll have something a little more set, so that I can begin to select classes and make a plan for the year. I'd like to do another English Evening (a la my Azeri Christmas Pageant of last year...), get some teacher trainings set up, and maybe even take some of my own time to drop in at the Internat School once a week or so. I also need to arrange a clubs schedule, but I'm waiting for the schools to have everything in place, and for students to finalize their tutoring schedules, before getting anything written down.

Tuesday we'll be taking the kids to Sheki for the FLEX exam like we did last year, the only difference is this year, I feel like some of our students have a very good chance. We've been preparing them for a while now, and the group this year is stronger and more enthusiastic. Fingers crossed.

October is going to be madness (as I find October always is), because softball is in full swing. In one month we have three tournaments to get to (a little ambitious considering we haven't been to a tournament yet...), but I think we can get our kids ready. On that note, a big THANK YOU to everyone who donated to our grant, we ended up filling it at the last minute, and now we're able to compete!

In the personal sphere, good news on my end! It comes in the form of a successfully completed GMAT. That is one stressful test, and I'm glad it's over. I got the score I wanted, and luckily, am still in the running for all the programs I wanted to apply to. It's a big amount of stress off of my shoulders, though I know there is more around the corner in the form of applications, essays, resumes, and recommendations. Sigh.

I took the test in Tbilisi, and went along with Trey, Jake, Jake's parents, and Lori. We had a lovely time, and it was a nice way to really acknowledge the end of summer and time to get back to work. We spent the first day taking a tour of a winery in Sighnaghi, a small town on the way to Tbilisi from Balaken. We wandered the vineyard, plucking different grape varieties right off the vine. (There are over 500 grape varieties growing in Georgia - impressive considering there are only about 1200 known grape varieties in the world - and the owner of the vineyard has collected about 230 of these varieties and planted them just for tasting - not production - in the vineyard). We saw the traditional winemaking style of Georgia, putting the grapes for fermentation directly into qvery, or clay pots, buried in the ground. We drove to the town to the tasting room for a great meal and a nice wine tasting. The wines were definitely better than anything I get in Azerbaijan (save Caspian Coast wines - those are pretty good), but they weren't amazing. Unrefined might be the best word.

That night Lori and I headed to Tbilisi for our tests, we checked into the hostel and had a hot chocolate night cap in the nicer part of Old Town Tbilisi. Next morning I headed to the test a ball of nerves, but ready. That afternoon we met up with the rest of the gang and spent the evening and next morning eating delicious Georgian food (it's sooooo good, potato xenqeli that reminds me of pierogies, badimcani that is eggplant with a garlic-walnut paste, and of course, xacapuri - cheesy bread!), wine tasting (you can walk into any wine shop and immediately be offered a taste of the shop keepers favorites), and delicious ice cream (a great shop, like gelato, only lighter - strawberry/lemon and banana-coffee were the highlight combos). And then, back on a marsh, and back to reality.

I've got a lot ahead of me. A lot to do, a lot to accomplish, and yet, I still feel like I need something more concrete to keep me occupied. It's hard, watching the 7s get ready to leave, knowing that I'll be here for another 6 months. Sometimes I question my choice to stay, but then I see my kids and I know what I'm doing here. I just need to remind myself of that when I'm back in my empty house. Dad's doing great in the UAE, and Mom's getting ready to move. It's hard being apart from them, and knowing that we're all in different countries. I feel fragmented. I feel like I'm not completely in one place at any one time. Martin Seligman would say I've lost my flow. (Points if you get that reference...) I'll find it.

I'll leave you with some images of Georgia!

St. Stephan's Church in Sighnaghi...


The wine's we tasted, all from Pheasant's Tears Vineyard. (Those are the reds, on the right is chacha, which is alcohol distilled from the remains of the winemaking process - grape skins and the like. It is usually clear, but this one is gold because it is aged in oak. Makes it so much smoother than typical chacha...)

The little road of Sighnaghi.
The vineyard and qvery - the clay pots. Generally they are buried, and the ones Pheasant's Tears uses are much larger - about 4 meters deep.
And Tbilisi. Lovely lovely Tbilisi. Photo taken from the fortress on the hill.

...and SCENE!

So we had some fun last Saturday, Mike came up from Zaqatala and helped us make a movie. Our kids took the book "Play Ball, Amelia Bedelia" (anybody remember those books?) and turned it into a script. It's our first pro movie, can't wait for more. Any Oscar noms coming out of this one? Not sure yet, but pay close attention to the evil-American cameo...

Enjoy!

World Map Project Comes to Azerbaijan!

Order.
Design.
Composition.
Tone.
Form.
Symmetry.
Balance.

More red...
And a little more red...
Blue blue blue blue
Blue blue blue blue

(points if you can name that musical...)

And so, that's how the creation of the world began.

Well, actually it started with a coat of primer, on an empty wall in the local Children's Library.

We taped out some stuff, painted an Ocean blue, and then using a projector, we sketched the world onto the wall.

And then, the fun began. Country by country, matching it up to a PCV-produced handbook, deciding which country should be which color. Defining the borders, filling in the middle (I can say more than once we did have to re-negotiate some territories. Due to a pixelated projection, there were more than a few disputed areas.)
Some kids had really never painted before, so we had to go step by step with them, how to hold a brush, how to get the right amount of paint. But they have turned out to be great little artists, with quite the curiosity for geography. Before letting any of them paint, they had to identify which country they were painting, and sometimes even the capitals!

Each day, we took a progress shot...
And each day, more and more kids showed up. If you paint it, they will come...The World Map Project is a thing many volunteers do around PC countries, but as this was the first one in Azerbaijan (what what!!), we wanted to make ours special. Around the sides, we have cities and the distance to them from Balaken, and along the top we listed several different cities and the time differences from Balaken.And of course, we had to put the Peace Corps Azerbaijan logo...

Finally, complete!!
Looks good? I think our next one will be a more freeform mural...we've tapped the talent, let's let it loose!

Back to Acting

I should be studying for the GMAT right now. I have all day...

Instead, I made muffins. Made some coffee. And read the NYTimes.

Kind of like a normal Sunday morning?

Came across a fantastic article, all about Hugh Laurie. Apparently, he's releasing an album.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/magazine/hugh-laurie-sings-the-blues.html

There are only so many film actors I truly admire for their work (though let it be noted that most of these great film actors got their start/have also had significant roles in the theatre). Marlon Brando (duh.) Bill Nighy. Emma Thompson. Meryl Streep (again, duh). Phyllip Seymour Hoffman. Of course there are more. And of course there are plenty of stage actors I also have deep respect for. But let's deal with the big names...

Hugh Laurie is also one of those actors, as he seems to be able to do what he wants when he wants, and pull it off rather gracefully. That was the kind of actor I always wanted to be. Smart. Competent. Consistent. I never really aspired to be the actor with moments of brilliance, but just one who could always be relied upon to deliver a solid performance. That seemed to be more in my skill set. And I suppose if I go back to it and continue to work my butt off, I could achieve that. But with that comes so many other obstacles, and so many other challenges...

Image, for one. I'm a little too tall, I have this crazy birthmark (more than once I've been told by the costume director, "We'll probably have to cover that. But let's see how it plays in the light." A respected Cleveland actor told me about my headshots, "I'm glad you're confident enough to show your birthmark here. But you probably can't use these.")

I for one, appreciate Laurie's comment: “I think good-looking people seldom make good television,” he said. “And American television studios almost concede before they start: ‘Well, it won’t be good, but at least it’ll be good-looking. We’ll have nice-looking girls in tight shirts with F.B.I. badges and fit-looking guys with lots of hair gel vaulting over things. So at least we’ll have achieved that base standard of entertainment.’ ” Now, I think there are some pretty competent, pretty attractive actors out there (Natalie Portman comes to mind...yes boys, I appreciate her talent, not just her looks). But the idea that you have to be pretty to be successful is just downright offensive.

I encountered a similar bias in one of my auditions for college. I walked into the audition, and the director of the Musical Theatre program looked at my application, looked at my GPA and SAT scores (enough to get me to NYU and to graduate to 10 in my high school class...) and he said to me, "Why do you want to be an actress?" Implying that I was somehow too smart to be an actor. Thank you sir, I officially hate your program.

I suppose like any business, there is plenty of crap out there, and plenty of foolish people who give a bad name to what I still believe is a truly special, and truly necessary craft. But in Hollywood, when someone casts a movie, nowadays they aren't casting a part, they're casting a celebrity. I don't want to go to a movie and see Julia Roberts fall in love with Richard Gere. I want to see characters, I want to see real people I can relate to. I can't relate to Julia Roberts. Her legs are too long and her mouth is too big. And she makes way too much money.

That's part of the beauty of acting, and the beauty of the theater. It's a space to watch other people play out our biggest hopes and our biggest fears. We let them make the mistakes, we let them speak the words that we ourselves are too afraid to say to each other. But when they are up on that stage, right in front of us, we can't help but live through it a little bit too...

That's why, this is for you Sarah Palin (ahem!), organizations like the NEA are important. Probably even more so now, when families are dealing with a bigger crisis than they've known before. How many of the great American Theater pieces are about financial instability, economic hardship, and family strife?

I don't know when this turned into a manifesto on the need for theater in an economic crisis. I just wanted to talk about how cool Hugh Laurie is.

I suppose it's on my mind, as I hear about theaters losing money, and thinking about my own future, attempting to jump onto a sinking ship and try and see what I can save. (Man, I am melodramatic.)

But, to bring it back full circle, I have a huge respect for these actors, who are intelligent, humble, talented, and can remain somewhat normal in the face of an unstable career, that puts limitless demands on you. You chose a lifestyle that I just don't want for myself. But you do wonderful things with it.

I'm going to go take a 3hour practice test. Hopefully I'll score high enough to get into a program that'll help me get a job, and give you a place to work your magic.