Eating Things

Today, I asked you to complete a list of five things you would never eat. While I think there are things I would never eat, I am afraid I may have eaten some of them without knowing it such as dog and horse. In both Mali and the Philippines, some people eat dog. I can't swear that I never ate dog because I was invited to many dinners sometimes as a special guest and ate what the host or hostess gave me. In class I told you about my friend who went to the Philippines with the Peace Corps and had to eat grubs since that was what the people he lived with ate. Another teacher I worked with was in the Peace Corps in Thailand. She told of a fellow volunteer who was teaching in a village. This volunteer had gotten used to eating Thai food which occasionally included insects. Her students brought her an insect. She ate it and the students looked at her with puzzled looks, so she asked what the insect was. They told her they didn't know and wanted her to tell them.

Description: My friend Jack

I met Jack the year my mother died. My family, my father, my three brothers and I, moved from a farm to the small town in Kansas where I would live until I went to college. Our friendship began because we were about the same age, 6 and 5, and lived across the street from each other. Jack looked like he was made of angles and straight lines. His sharp featured face rested on a body of sharp elbows and thin legs. As sharp as his body was the way he spoke as he expressed strong opinions or gave orders to his younger brothers and sisters. Jack lacked grace in his movements but made up for it with a passion for any game we played. We spent many a full day and night playing baseball in our front yards, chasing our younger brothers and sisters to screams of fear and joy, climbing trees, and, in calmer moments, listening to baseball games on the radio as we played a game we had invented using baseball cards and dice. Jack and I disagreed about some important things since he was a loyal fan of my least favorite team, the New York Yankees. Still we remained friends until I moved away from home to attend college.

Spring 2007

Welcome aboard!
We will be using our blogs to do some writing and improve writing skills during this semester. I am going to try something different this semester in that I will write some of the paragraphs that I assign to you for the blogs.

Also, I want you to visit your classmates blogs and comment on them. To encourage you, I will use a different point system than in the past. This semester, I will give you 5 points for posting on your blog and 5 more points if you comment on at least 3 other blogs. I will comment on as many of your postings as I can.

Now we can get started...