Charlie & Jess' American Samoa Travels: Where were we? September 28th

Hey wonderful blog followers!!! Jess and I are doing fine, thanks again for the wonderful packages that we keep receiving. It makes it feel like Christmas here! We got to go swimming this weekend and the dog who is now part of the family came too. His name is "ooch" and he's been dubbed "ooch the pooch." I think that living as we do, so far on the east side of Tutuila island keeps us seperated from the noise and havoc of the west coast. But, then again, we are also far away from fresh food and other fun things. We do have local stores that allow us to purchase dry and canned goods, but vegetables are a rarity. We are also dealing with a mini-fridge that makes us constantly rearrange things so that we can fit leftovers, etc. and it makes it hard to keep food that we might normally keep for a while.
The insect problem has not been very bad here. I did have a run-in with a wasp that was very ill-tempered and he left me a nice welt. Apart from that, the mosquitos are only out at night and don't tend to bother us very much.
School is keeping us both very busy, writing lesson plans and continually adapting them to meet our students' needs is hectic work. We do enjoy our students and I am really hoping that we've made a small difference so far.
I've gotten everyone on campus using Google Earth, it is a trip to see all of the teachers looking for their houses and their families with this. I've also been lucky enough to have a projector in my class and we've been doing all of my lessons with PowerPoint! My students are in the process of painting their favorite author's portraits on my classroom walls. I've definitely got some future Picasso's and Cezanne's.
I know what everyone wants to see is our new pad. You will have to wait until we get it nice and clean before I attempt photo postings of this. As it turns out video posting is not feasible due to firewalls set up at our school. I'd use a bypass proxy but I'm really trying not to get into trouble here. So, no video or pics of our home, but I hope you like these photos.