of initiations and mine tours

holy cow...that was cold. and messy.

so sunday we had our first meeting as the new executive and then we had our initiations.this of course entailed all manner of disgusting pursuits in three stages. stage one involved all of the new exec filing outside in the snow. now the girls were lucky as we were allowed to keep our pants. the guys, not so much. the old exec had bought the most disgusting looking foods they could find at the superstore and then asked us questions out of the constitution. if we got the question wrong we had to eat the random food. these included curried pureed mustard leaves, grass jelly, sardines, lotus oatmeal, and perrywort juice (which really looked more like common mallow). they were all right as long as you didnt actually chew them or let them touch your tongue. stage two involved us getting down on our knees in the snow in the lineup. they put peanut butter in our right ear, mayo in our left, syrup and ketchup on our hair and then a handful of flour in the face. stage three was the worst, they took guinness and put it in the oven to warm up. we then were required to chug a can of guinness that was about as warm as your standard morning cup of coffee. now i can only sort of handle guinness when it is nicely chilled, but warm is a whole other story. the whole roast malt think is really strong. and then there were a couple of us that for a variety of reasons were locked outside and required to drink another one. after that we were officially initiated and part of the team.

other news, i got to tour a potash mine today and it was so cool. they took us all the way down the mine, just shy of a kilometer down. then we bombed around in the back of these toyota jeeps through the tunnels. it was the most awesome thing ever. it was dusty, boy way it dusty, but it was worth it. though we did come out of there pretty sure that we had all eaten our salt quota for at least a month. we actually got to see the miner excavating the raw ore. they showed us the the processing and the storage, but the mine was the coolest. definitely the best tour i have ever been on.