Wow, it쳌fs been 12 days since my last entry. I am slacking off. Fortunately nobody noticed. Of course, I쳌fve had trouble getting into the Mudcat lately.

Last Monday I had my first substitute job. I was called in by the Liberal Academy to teach English as a Second Language. There were two students with very different abilities. The Korean man speaks English very well with an easily understandable accent. The Japanese woman is new to this country and suffers from a lack of vocabulary, needs work on her grammar and is hampered by the need to not make mistakes. She is easily embarrassed. I worked with them for three hours. It wasn쳌ft until half way through the lesson that they admitted to me that they are regular students and that they had homework assigned by the regular teacher. So, we went over their homework and I assigned them more based on what they쳌fd been working on. I hope it is enough.

Wakana stopped by the school yesterday and they told her the students had asked for me again. I guess I did all right.

Last night Wakana suggested that I advertise language classes in the newspaper and start teaching on my own. I hadn쳌ft thought of that. I need to skull that out a bit.

The canoe house continues to rise from its own ashes, or wreckage. I don쳌ft know if I explained that point but the club already had a canoe house on that site but it was destroyed in the super-typhoon that hit the island six months before I arrived. We are only now getting a new one up. Last weekend we got more rafters in place and a couple of braces to prevent end-to-end racking. The scaffold was taken down as well. In a couple of weeks we will be ready to begin thatching.

I have been investigating bio-diesel as a fuel. There are very few diesels on the island. According to some friends and some of the web sites I have been reading I can run a diesel on vegetable oil. I think I can get used vegetable oil for free here on the island. All I need now is a diesel pickup truck. I have always wanted a big gas guzzling monster pickup but I am too eco-conscious to ever actually own one. With a vegetable oil burning engine I can!