what's a nopple?

so this loud old man asked the mexican waitress in El Nopal, "So what's a nopple? El nopple...what does that mean in English?" And the waitress was trying to say cactus (El nopal), but was having a hard time pronouncing it (cact-OOCE), so the guy was like, yeah, but what does it mean in English? She tried to say it several more times, and the guy just stared at her and said, "I don't know what that means." So I was finally like, from 10 ft away, "CACTUS!!", and he goes, Oh. Then as he was walking away, we could hear him saying, "She was saying 'cactoose, cactoose'". Ah, good times with the gringos. I felt bad for the waitress, but honestly, their English is hard to understand even for me. I had to ask one of them 3 times what she was saying, and I finally figured out that she was asking me if I wanted gravy on my burrito, and then I realized she meant the red enchilada sauce. Um, I'm not ordering mashed potatoes here. :)

i'm going to start tutoring a local college student in Spanish a couple of times a week. we're meeting for the first time tomorrow in a public setting just kind of to get to know each other, and i assume from there we'll figure out a schedule week by week, depending on what's going on with both of our schedules. hey, trolling craigslist does pay off once in a while! :)

still haven't heard back about any freelance work from the translation company in NYC that should be sending me some work soon...i was thinking it would be last week, but nothing so far. maybe the folks are still working on getting the files ready to send to me. the not knowing is the most frustrating part about freelance work...you just don't know when it will come in, or how much, or how fast they need it, etc. i'm trying to find out as much as possible ahead of time, but i can't bug them about it constantly. i just have to wait and see for now, which is hard for me to do.

our ward seems pretty cool. we had kind of a ward conference thing going on today, so church was a lot of talks. they were good, though.

we just got back from the parental ellisi household, where we had coconut chicken rice and played 'pass the pigs' and 'personal preference'. braden wanted to watch the seahawks game from this morning, but his dad didn't get a chance to tape it, so suerie for braden.

oh, and we played beethoven's 9th and 'there can be miracles' (prince of egypt soundtrack) for jenna this evening. she wasn't responding much at first, but then she almost kicked the phone/mp3 player off my stomach! not sure if that means she liked it or wanted it to go away! :)

good night, everybody!