пів лютого

I wonder if fonts carry over to the blog?  This looks appropriate for a Valentine's day post.  Decided to go ahead and invite 8 teachers over for my birthday.  Now I have to make some food and clean up my apartment.  Tomorrow I'm also having my peace corps neighbors over to cook dinner together and then play games or watch a movie.  Hung-Chi is 60 and lives about 30 minutes north.  Ezra is 26? and lives only 18 kilometers to the East, although the rough road and slow bus makes that also about a 30 min trip.  The peace corps groups volunteers together in little clusters like ours to avoid complete isolation.  This past week was made kind of boring by tests, tests which I will soon retype to reduce typos and maybe improve the tests a bit.  I realize that as much as it sounds like the devil, I need to see the tests way in advance and teach toward them, or at least have them in mind.  What I would prefer to do is change the tests to fit what I am teaching, which is not realistic.  So, I will continue to teach them how to communicate (speaking, listening, writing, reading) but also put more into my lessons that will be on the tests and testing formats that are a reality in Ukraine.  Now it's time to go to my apartment, make some dinner, create some flash cards to improve Ukrainian vocabulary, and practice some violin.  I might read a Newsweek, or some more of that novel my mom sent me.  Come on springtime, snow and wind are blowing.