Weekend Fantástico!

It's SO great having Alexandre back!!!!!

He counted. It was 45 days apart. That's longer than that Jesus guy went without food. I don't know how military wives do it.

I had to go to a useless 3-hour meeting at Crazy Boss Job on Friday, only to learn that he has decided not to officially start the semester until February. (We'll go back to work with mos of our old classes, but any class getting new students isn't going to start until February.) It's kind of ridiculous. My boss closes for every possible Brazilian holiday-- a 6 weeks for summer (now), 4 weeks for winter (July), 1 week for "semana do saco cheio" (spring break), 1 week for Carnival (late February), every piddly national holiday, state holiday, and even local holidays. The result is that the school is closed for almost 25% of the year... and he wonders why teachers come and go so quickly.

The good news is that the boss has hired on this older woman who is a veteran Portuguese teacher (haha, Kristin) at one of the private (less good) universities here. She is incredibly organized and dominating (as I can be), but I think she actually makes progress with my boss because she's older than him. She talks to him like a child, which is apparently exactly what he needed. She has whipped him into shape, convincing him to create (or, in some cases, pay people to develop) a lesson plan calendar for each level and textbook (forcing all the teachers to be on the same page and allowing students to make up classes on other days if they're absent), a grading system and website for the grades, a school calendar (which is why we know about all of the dates we're closed already), and contracts for the students and secretaries. It's amazing! All of the structure is slowly getting into place... it'd be nice to see it pan out.

We spent the rest of the weekend lounging around, mostly watching season 2 of The Big Bang Theory on my laptop. I substituted all day (6 hours...practically overtime status for a teacher) at Nice Boss Job on Saturday, and did a bunch of translations. A high point of the weekend was the translator add-on that I found for Mozilla Firefox. It hooks you up with a whole bunch of online dictionaries that you can set to your language preferences. You type in the word or phrase you're looking for into the toolbar, and then choose the dictionaries that you want to use to translate it. I know it can do more, like translate webpages, but I haven't really played with it enough yet to fully appreciate it.

Oh, we also forced the cat to take pictures, including some with the new safari hat that I brought her from the US (it is clearly evident how much she loves the hat):

On Saturday night, we got all dressed up to go out, but the few bars in our city were packed with long lines because it was raining, so the outdoor seating was closed. We ended up just going to a churrascaria (country-style bbq restaurant) by our house and having a couple drinks and free appetizers there (mmm... bread with garlic butter sauce...).

When I came to Brazil the first time, I forgot to bring a cookbook that my grandma made me (I left it in what became my sister's apartment). I got it back during my trip home, and brought it back with me. So on Sunday, we decided to try out one of her recipes for a big Sunday lunch. She called it "Nanny's Stir Fry," and I don't think I'd ever actually eaten her version of it, but we had all the ingredients already and it seemed easy enough.
We did such a great job! It was delicious. We also successfully re-created Nanny's chicken gravy to put on top. Here's a pic... we hope you're proud, Nanny! :


...and now we face the daunting task of cleaning the apartment. It was uninhabited for a month (= DUST), and we are sloppy unpackers. I think it's messier than it's ever been. No pictures of that for you.

It's so nice to be back to my day-to-day life.
One more cute gatinha picture for you: