{"id":196,"date":"2014-02-16T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-16T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yule-tide.generalsemiotics.net\/index.php\/2014\/02\/16\/post-189-six-balloons-and-a-piece-of-cake\/"},"modified":"2014-02-16T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-16T00:00:00","slug":"post-189-six-balloons-and-a-piece-of-cake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/2014\/02\/16\/post-189-six-balloons-and-a-piece-of-cake\/","title":{"rendered":"Post-189: Six Balloons and a Piece of Cake"},"content":{"rendered":"
It snowed a lot in Washington, D.C. and shut down most things on Feb. 13th in 2014 (see post-188<\/a>) and also on one of the Feb. 13ths in the 1980s. The snowstorm notwithstanding, that Feb. 13th back in the ’80s was my most active day in life up to that point….as it was my very first.\n<\/div>\n
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I don’t know how, but someone in the CELTA group found out that Thursday was my birthday. They insisted on having a ‘party’. Pictured at left are J.F. (standing; going to Japan in March), A.F. (blue striped shirt), and S.R. (semi-hidden). In the center are bottles of orange and apple juice presented as gifts, which we shared. (In the background is the white board. Nametags of “practice students” are to the right of it. Lot of chairs, with those impossibly-small foldable-desks attached, are all around.)

The balloons were yet to come:
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On Friday, Feb. 14th, back came the “practice students”, adult foreigners of an “upper-intermediate” English ability (they had not come on the 13th, see the very end of post-188<\/a>). To my surprise, they, too, had presents for me, in the form of six or seven balloons and a small cake (at left). Also, a card signed in various languages by most students.

<\/span><\/span>I’ve only seen these students for two weeks, and I’ve only taught them five times, but they seem to really like me.

The cake was excellent.

Four of the balloons survive, as I write this.
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I got good wishes from many people via Facebook, though as I avoid logging into Facebook, I haven’t acknowledged them. I also got a book-collection of Washington Post<\/em> newspaper front pages from the 1940s, an excellent present, from my mother.\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It snowed a lot in Washington, D.C. and shut down most things on Feb. 13th in 2014 (see post-188) and also on one of the Feb. 13ths in the 1980s. The snowstorm notwithstanding, that Feb. 13th back in the ’80s was my most active day in life up to that point….as it was my very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yule-tide.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}