I threw your laptop down the laundry shoot...now your parents will never love you!

Wednesday.
Powdered Milk Love.

Do you ever watch The Real World....or I guess any reality tv show, and think, "those people are crazy!" Well, I am starting to realize why some of those people snap! Currently I live in an 8 bedroom, 4 bathroom house with 15 people, a dog, a parrot and multiple other "house guests" (a rat, some lizards, spiders etc.) Point being...the house is packed.

I think that the morning is the most challenging to deal with, because EVERYONE is trying to get read, and make breakfast, and use the bathroom, and get out the door by 7:30. When I first started here, I would escape to the balcony for a little peace and quite, however that has quickly become over crowded.....so now I just try to stay in my room for as long as possible.

I'm not anti-social.....I just need a little peace in the morning!

This morning I had the plan to get up at my usual time, but rather than staying in bed to read, I would get up and make my breakfast and then read after. So I go down to the kitchen and turn the hot pot on to boil water for my tea. Then I was going toast some bread in the frying pan. We have a gas stove, and I have only ever had an electric stove, so the task of lighting the stove makes me shudder every time I have to do it. First light of the match....it lit right away, but then the tip of the match went flying off (while on fire) and fell to the floor. Ugh! Second match...went out before it made it to the gas. Third match...(I am mad at this point) success!! Until I don't hold the gas on for long enough, and the stove goes off. Double UGH! Finally, someone just did it for me.

At this point, my water has finished boiling and is sitting in the kettle. I put my bread in the pan, and it is almost instantly toasted, so I am quite focused on not burning the other side. While I am watching my bread, someone asks if I was the one who boiled the water....I say yes I am going to make some tea as soon as this is finished. Apparently this translated into something along the lines of "yeah, I made it, but why don't you just go ahead and use it for yourself," because as I turn around to put my bread on the plate and pour my tea, I look over and see what should be my hot water going into someones bowl. Now....I understand this is just hot water, and it is not something to get upset about, but it was 6:00 in the morning, and I just wanted my breakfast! So, being the non confrontational person I am, I just stood holding my bread with a shocked look on my face as little miss hot oatmeal mixed her bowl, totally unaware.  RUDE!

At this point, the kitchen is now full of everyone wanted the stove and hot water and everything under the sun, so we fill up the entire kettle and I wait for water....AGAIN!

Ok, I am done, it just really made me mad.

Now, onto work. The plan for work today was to hold a workshop for the quality control team about measuring standards. The four of us that were going to put it on met this morning to go over the plan, when we decided that we wanted to run through it completely before we held it.  (If you are not interested in my school work just skip down to the next section) The plan was to pull a garment and have each of the workers measure 15 different spots. We would then compare the measurements to what the product specifications were. So, we decided that it would be a good idea to see what measurements we got when we did it ourselves. This is when things went crazy. We all found different measurements, none of which matched the specs of what should have been. Finding this out, we decided to cancel the workshop for today, because we knew everyone would end up being confused if we went on with it. Canceling it was not a big deal, because quality control is in this office and we were just going to interrupt their work to have the workshop.  We spent the rest of the morning trying to figure out the exact spots being measured by quality control, because we knew it could not be the same ones that we were looking at. Its a mess.

We needed a break from the measuring, because it was getting to a point where we were so overwhelmed that it was no longer a productive meeting. Do you know how we decided to solve this issues? 50 peswa rice and pepper stew!
It solves all problems.

I spent the next part of the afternoon working on about 10 things at once. Then I had to take someone to the trotro station to catch a car to Accra.

I left the office early today so that I could go next door to our neighbors house to batik. Well, I didn't need to batik today, but I thought I should get to know her before I use her house. On the way back to Elmina it started pouring rain! Of course all of the windows were down and the rain came flying in! This was around the same point I noticed that the speedometer was not working.....I watched as the driver manually pulled his window up, and then he proceeded to pull over and pull up the passenger side window as well. Once all the windows were up, we were on our way again. Seeing as this is Ghana, and the weather is naturally steamy, out car fogged up pretty quick. Now, we did not know the speed limit, I was feeling nauseous from lack of air, and the driver was driving with one hand so that he could wipe the fog off the window with his other one. Lovely!

I'm eating powdered milk and cereal for dinner again!

Peace. Love. 50 cent.