I bite my tongue ...

This'll be short. I wrote a long blog entry when I was angry about something, and I decided not to post it. Long story short: I'm not going to a math teachers' conference in Almaty, I'm going to Kyzylorda for a language camp instead (with my own money, of course), and the government here wastes a lot of money and time. I mean, my school can't afford chalk, they haven't paid teachers' salaries yet this year, and then the ministry of education blows such enormous sums on such absolutely transparent wastes of time - why, it's enough to make a fresh, rosy-cheeked, idealistic volunteer spew spittle and fume.

But I'm not going to write about that. Instead, I have posted pictures of me. Every picture has me in it. Which a few readers have been asking for. Enjoy!

P.S. I do have good news - today I figured out how to make a new kind of complex sentence in Kazakh. I had a guess about how to do it from some ways I had heard a grammar structure used, and tonight I tried it on some Kazakh speakers, and they not only understood, but repeated it back to me the way I had said it, so I think I got it right. I wanted to say "We say what we think". There are no conjunction words in Kazakh like "what" or "who" to form embedded clauses, so I was just unable to say stuff like this before today. The way you do it is you use the pronoun for we, the verb for to say, the ending that usually corresponds to "used to be doing something", as in "used to think", add the personal ending for first person plural that means identity, and then to think conjugated for first person plural. A literal transcription sounds to me like "We are used to think we say" - "Biz oilaitynbyz aitamyz". What a crazy language. This language camp is going to be great.