Pancakes and spelling bees

The other day I made banana pancakes. The came out pretty well, but I really had to work at frying them because our house's frying pan was an old lumpy piece of metal that the pancake batter kept sticking to. My family argued with me that pancakes were in fact breakfast food and considered dessert food occasionally putting ice cream on top of them.

My host sister Connie has finally started to warm up to me. She shows it by calling me ugly and silly (in English) and by tackling me. She is absolutely fearless when wrestling with me … the other day she headbutted me! I was so surprised I fell down laughing.

I was talking to a Chilean the other day about the work schedule for people who work in the mines (I still know how to enter the work schedule into IDC). Most of the workers have 4 days of work followed by 3 days of down time. However many of the workers want to have a schedule of 7 days of work followed by 7 days of rest, which would allow the workers to live practically anywhere they wanted to in Chile. For this reason the local politicians are strongly against any changes to the work schedule because they want the money from the mine to go into Antofagasta and not into other parts of the country.

Watching the Chilean news can be amusing. Today there was 10 minute segment on the dramatic rescue of a dog from a flooding river. I keep joking that the sports segment of the news should just be called soccer because thats the only sport that is ever mentioned.

Today was the school English spelling bee for which I was judge. I was fun and cute watching the kids spell. The cutest moments were when a student resigned as soon as heard the word and when a kid spelled library lightberry.