A long way to go

This might just be one of those stories that ends with "you just had to be there," but whatever, here it goes. My coordinator, a wonderfully talented and nice woman named Tatiana, is in Nikolaev (a city near Ochakiv), going through her "re-certification" process that all teachers must do/attend every five years here. Last week I sent her a text message that read "ya tibya skushat," which I thought meant "I miss you." However, as I learned yesterday, that's not exactly what it means. See, ya tibya skuCHat means "I miss you" and ya tibya skuSHat means "I will eat you up." Don't worry, she wasn't offended at all and actually thought it was really, really funny, in addition to getting what I was actually trying to say. She also got that text right when she was going into the dentist's office to have two teeth pulled and she was really nervous about it, so my accidentally entertaining text helped her relax and get through it. So, I've clearly got a long way to go in terms of learning Russian, but at least I'm having fun while I'm making progress!