I did my first interview for the Census in Spanish. Two fellows were living in a trailer (there are hundreds of trailers on the Reservation being lived in with perhaps that many more abandoned) and when they answered the door, they told me in Spanish that they didn’t speak English.

No problem. With my handy-dandy Spanish cue card and my limited Spanish ability, we got through the interview. In a couple of cases, though, they’d get into quite the discussion with each other about what the question actually meant. Then they’d be speaking so fast (literally machine-gun-Spanish) that I couldn’t understand a bit of what they were discussing. Never-the-less, we got through the process and they are now counted in the 2010 census.

The question that always gets the most discussion is the question about race. In training we got a lot of instruction about how to handle questions about that question. Interestingly enough, none of the situations covered in training have come up. Most of the comments are,

Why is it “white” and not “caucasian”?

I’m just “American”. Why isn’t that listed as a race?

Can I list any race I want? If they can be African-American, can I be (English-American, White-American, German-American, …)?

Our instructions are to list whatever they say and to make no assumptions. I’ve had one person test me on that and had me mark “Other” and put in the comments “Albanian”. He was surprised when I did that and continued on with the interview. At the end of the interview he had me erase his flippant response and mark “white”.

The 7th was the first nice weather day in about a week and I took advantage of it. Today looks nice, but a cold front will literally blow through here this afternoon with high winds. That’s not a lot of fun.

The big event yesterday was a ruined tire. I turned around in a driveway at a house where no one answered the door and by the time I got turned around, I had a flat tire. I changed the tire with a great deal of effort. I’ve never had to change a tire on this Chevy Tracker I’m driving. The jack wouldn’t lift the car high enough to get an inflated tire onto the car. I had to find a large, flat rock to put under the jack. Of course, I discovered the problem after I already had the flat tire off the car.

The tire shop found that the tire was ruined. It’d been cut through the sidewall on something as I was turning around. So, all my earnings on Monday and Tuesday went into a new tire for the car. That plus spending almost 3 hours at the tire store while all this happened made for a somewhat frustrating middle-of-the-day.

The irony of this was that while I sat in this tire store, I was making arrangements with another tire store at the other end of town to put four new tires on the Avalon to replace the snow tires that are on the car now. The price for four tires at the store fixing my ruined tire was almost double the price at the other store.

TTFN!