Happy Valentine’s Day! or mind-melting mouthgasms

I am celebrating my first valentine’s day in a Muslim country!....by eating dark chocolate with cashews in bed, tossing a tissue in the air for my kitten to pounce, about to watch william shakespeare’s romeo and juliet. i was briefly swept away by the idea of reading by candle and moonlight on my rooftop then opened my door to see the sky and was distracted by the ghost-like plastic bags being slowly swept away by the dark flood waters outside- raining again. cuddling in bed with a kitten is not so bad.

As an earlier part of my valentine’s celebration i also showed my 3 host brothers and host sister how to do Tim Tam SLAMS!!! This was very fun, lots of laughs, and chocolate all over our faces. I am forever grateful to Eric Keen for introducing Tim Tam SLAMS into my life. I shall try to explain but it is a phenomenon that can only truly be experienced in practice.

Step 1. Gather friends. Take smallish bites off of two diagonally opposite corners of one non-melty Tim Tam. This should make your Tim Tam into a straw. You can test this by sucking hard on one end, air should flow through.

Step 2. Submerge one end of the Tim Tam straw into ridiculously delicious hot (not scalding) chocolate , start sucking!

Step 3. AS SOON AS you feel the hot chocolately liquid reach your tongue, toss (slam?) the entire Tim Tam into your mouth

Step 4. Experience the mind-melting mouthgasm that is a Tim Tam Slam. Gather more friends. Repeat.

supposedly refrigerating the Tim Tams prior to Slamming them helps to improve structural integrity, as does using the chewy caramel or double coated variety.

I have started a poetry unit with my students and on Thursday we wrote love poems in honor of valentine’s day. I am really such a hopeless romantic- i actually harbored hopes that at least a few of the love poems written by my students in class would eventually end up nervously and hastily slipped into a secret crushes’ desk or would be left in the sun on a motorcycle in a mad dash of bravery. I even taught them the phrase “secret admirer.” They started off by writing a simple and short rhyming Roses are Red Violets are Blue poem. Here are some of my favorites:

To: My First Love- Roses are red, violets are blue, although your face is bad, but i still love you

Roses are red, violets are blue, the alphabet begins of ABC, and the love begins are me and you

Roses are red, violets are blue, when i sit down in my bed, i scream I LOVE YOU!!!

To my special someone- Roses are red, violets are blue, seeing your bare toe, want to buy you a shoe

Mmmm YUM just found 3 insect larvae- probably mosquito, floating in my ginger tea.