Q: what has four wheels and flies?

Happy day before Thanksgiving!!
I was having problems making this update flow so you are getting bullet points instead of paragraphs. Really important things I put in bold. This is all to your benefit because if you are super busy bullets make for a a quick read, but if you have lots of free time you can take this as an outline and rewrite it in letter form.
-Although I'm in Nicaragua we still get to celebrate Thanksgiving. Actually I've already had two Thanksgiving potluck dinners. They were both nice enough although they couldn't really compare to the Thanksgiving potlucks we had in college. The ones here had a better food to person ratio. And a better space to person ratio.
-My brother Joel is in town again so actually that means half of my immediate family is in Nicaragua, but not necessarily the half that is best at cooking. So tomorrow I get to put my skills to the test and try to make a whole Thanksgiving meal, except Cristina is making the potatoes because I don't want to be considered a sell-out.
-On Sunday night my apartment made some really nice hand turkeys to hang on the wall.
-Nicaraguans obviously don't celebrate our Thanksgiving but that means here Christmas is already everywhere.
-I made gallo pinto again today but this time the maid helped me so it is much better, and I guess the beans I used last time were too old so that is why they never got soft.
-I have been driving a lot more lately. On Saturday I drove to the airport and yesterday I drove to the beach to pick up my roommate's family. I still get frustrated by driving on the road with ox-carts but I am learning to adapt.
-Last night I talked, through the computer, to my college roommate that is living in China. Since we both live in developing countries the technology is a little lacking, or maybe we are the ones lacking. There was about a two minute delay so it was impossible to figure out what she was talking about but over all that makes a pretty amusing conversation.
-On Monday morning I got a call saying that the secret friend gift exchange party, that I hadn't bought a gift for, was at 11. So I ran to the store to buy a present then got dropped off at school for the party that ended up starting at 12. We had to play games, I really don't like public speaking in Spanish.
-A: a garbage truck
-Friday there are promotion ceremonies at school so I guess I'll see which students actually passed to the next grade.
-I am coming back next year, I don't know what all that entails but it means that I need to be back here by the last week of January. I also don't know what grades I will be teaching, our school is most likely expanding to include secondary grades. Traditional Nicaraguan schools are open to primary grades in the morning and secondary grades in the afternoons. So if I teach the older grades I will have a longer work day, longer than the 3 hours I was working this year.
Committing to coming back has definitely taken a load off but also it means I have a lot of work to do. I finally bought shelves to store all my school supplies instead of leaving them in my suitcase under the stairs and really feel I can settle down more. On the other hand I now have the task of coming up with an English curriculum for nine months instead of nine weeks. I think that means I will have to teach verbs and sentence structure instead of just nouns and adjectives.
-I'm coming to California in less than a week, well, barely less, thanks to a purely selfless donation from my parents I was able to change my flight to come home November 28th instead of December 18th. I figured if I'm coming back down anyways whats the point of being here now. I can't decided what I'm looking forward to the most (besides seeing you, of course) but I know that taking a hot shower is very high on the list.
Love and Thanksgiving, Joy