Today was supposed to be my first evening off during the week since we started - my Wednesday’s are officially scheduled to end at 4:00, a scandalously early hour round these parts. The plan was to get home super early, do a little laundry, make some mashed potatoes and stuffing and gravy and enjoy an early and abbreviated Thanksgiving. But, plans are made to be completely disregarded, right? Yeah….
Since Seth’s been sick for a while, even after going to the doctor, and also I think because he called in sick today, the CTs at bushiban decided he needed to go to the hospital. Not to worry, parent-folk! Going to the hospital here is roughly mnyore like going to an actual doctor in a large group practice, whereas just your normal going-to-a-doctor often feels more like the doc-in-a-boxes (urgent care, minor med) back home. He’s got a heaping boatload of drugs (all with differing dosage instructions, ingestion schedules, and how many days worth to take); so many, in fact, that we went and got some pill boxes - three of them, actually. Ha! I think I’m going to start calling him Gramps. You know, “Hey Gramps, have you taken your pills yet? Go check your lunchtime box!” Oh, I think he’ll love that.
Anyway, since he called in sick, I get asked to cover his Treehouse 5 class that meets at 4:30. I can hardly say no - I mean, really, one-time subbing like this is pretty painless, but man! I was looking forward to coming home early on time.
And, since he’s not really in a mood to eat (the doctor at the hospital prescribe rice soup - more of a gruel, really - yummy), I didn’t really want to make our Thanksgiving dinner (such as it is) tonight. So, I made rice and cheese. Just like macaroni and cheese, except with rice. It was good, but certainly not a permanant substitute of the real thing! I’ll just boil noodles next time.
Well, today sort of sucked. And sort of didn’t. It’s all relative, I guess.
Kindy was, as always, annoying. The kids wear on me, and that “wearing on my last nerve” feeling comes sooner and sooner all the time. Also, there are issues with management, but I don’t really feel like getting into that right now.
Then I had a nice long break, during which I had planned to go to the bushiban to do some grading and planning, but instead I just went home and wasted time online, catching up with a bunch of blogs.
After that, I headed back to the kindy to teach Clubhouse. Oy. Some days (most days) I just really don’t like teaching that class - the curricum is junk, and the kids’ ability is frustrating. Their ability to basically communicate in English is great, but their actual English ability is not so hot. They’ve got really bad syntax and pronunciation. I can work on the syntax, to some degree (really, I only see them four hours a week - how much can I really do?), but they’re 12, and have been “speaking English” since they were 4 or so - the pronunciation is pretty much stuck as is until they go to America and get some immersion, if that even happens.
I stayed after to work with my worst student to make up his assignments. We’re on Unit 4, and tonight we made all 3 of his Writer’s Book assignments from Unit 1. Next time we’ll tackle Unit 2. Oh, joy.
So then I ran to bushiban (since I didn’t do that this afternoon) and did some grading and planning. The planning went extra quick, since the class I was going to plan is an oral test I had forgotten was coming up. Woo - 30 minutes or so of reviewing the questions verbatim, then one-on-one oral tests with every student in the class while the rest work on their written test. It’s a nice easy couple of hours.
So that brings us to the end of the workday. I ran to the store to grab a few things (orange juice, Sprite, cookies and cream Häagen-Dazs) for Seth, as he’s sicky-icky today. He even called in sick for his bushiban classes, and he hates to call in sick for anything. It seems like a cold or sinus infection, but the Robitussin we picked up at Costco hasn’t touched his symptoms at all. Good thing we had that Tylenol 3 our dentist back home prescribed before we left, “just in case we get a really bad toothache or something, and have trouble finding a good dentist.” He’s sleeping now, snores and all.
Blargh. Stupid culture shock, stupid depression as a manifestation of the former. I don’t wanna write anything.
Also, I’m catching up with Ugly Betty. I’m loving Mark’s hopelessly unfashionable boyfriend!
This will be a short one: Lisbeth got me a PSP for my birthday! We aren’t home enough to play the Gamecube I brought, and we ran across a PSP at a night market shop in Shilin, with the newest custom firmware already installed. So now I can play some games between classes hopefully, and most importantly, with the new custom firmware it can run homebrew, meaning I can load SNES and Genesis games on it. Woohoo! Sonic 2 and Mario Kart, here I come!
So, we spent the better part of our waking weekend in Taipei. While my wallet is most certainly lighter now, we’re also pretty happy with our purchases - a birthday present for Seth (I’ll let him write about that one - it’s a doozie), some new shoes for me, a new backpack for me, some new pants for me (seems like I got around to picking out my birthday presents a bit late, but am making up for it now). I’ll take pictures soon and write up a nice show-and-tell post.
We also picked up a bit of a gift for our new NST. See, yesterday, we went to Taipei with a coworker to meet up with some of her friends for dinner but N. (the new NST) had asked to come over to our place to do laundry. Of course she was more than welcome, but I haven’t been a model housekeeper in the past few weeks, and warned her about it. Before we left, we realized she had been quietly doing our laundry as well as her own! We protested, of course, but she said it made her feel better, and well, shoot, I’m just not too good at protesting when it’s something that needs doing that I hate doing. We did ask if there was anything she needed still, and all she mentioned was a mug, for her coffee. So, we stopped at Starbucks and picked up a nice travel mug, as well as a single-serving French press and some Christmas blend (as she’s been getting by on instant - ewww) for her. I don’t really feel like it’s enough, since when we got home last night, she hadn’t just done our laundry. She had cleaned our entire apartment.
It’s incredible, and I was (and am still) gobsmacked. I don’t know how to truly thank her - I mean, it was like if Mom came over and said, “Sheesh, Lisbeth, you are living in filth. I know you are working too many hours, though, and I love you, so I’ll clean it all up - happy random clean house day!” A coffee mug seems insubstantial, somehow. But for now, that and about a million thank-yous is all we’ve got.
Just in case we don’t get back from Taipei before midnight. I don’t think that’ll happen, but sheesh, you never know, right?
I don’t have much I feel like writing about tonight.
In other news:
- Seth got an ipod knockoff tonight. I’m sure he’ll write about it soon enough (if not, you should bug him to).
- We’re going to Taipei tomorrow night with our bushiban secretary to meet her friend who wants to meet us. We’re meeting at TGI Friday’s, actually, which pleases much, much more than it should.
- I’m currently suffering from bi-polar onset culture shock. Or, in other words, swinging wildly from being just fine and liking things, to hating my job, feeling massive annoyance just from looking at some of my students, and not being able to listen to the disembodied Chinese voice that’s piped throughout the grocery store we frequent (seriously, I had to leave about 30 seconds after I went in - normally, I don’t even notice it). Culture shock sucks.
- It’s looking like I may have found a bit of knitting mojo. More details later, as I don’t want to scare it away.
Last weekend we went into Keelung and, at BB’s insistence, went to visit the ship graveyard. It was a bunch of old, decrepit ships, just bobbing gently in the water. It was cool, but sort of nerve-wracking, as I have this thing about land-water transistions; they give me the heebie jeebies. Anyway, here are a bunch of high-quality images (hah! Our camera sucks.) (oh, wait, that’s not cool) of the dead ships.
Dead ships. Uplifting, no?
Scooters and rust. Two things that I hardly even notice anymore. Except when I do. Taiwan’s funny like that.
Me and BB. In front of a dead ship. That’s all rusty. And some scooters.
Seth and BB. In front of a dead ship. That’s all rusty. And some scooters (wait, no, you can’t see the scooters in this one).
Geez. It’s like I’m repeating myself or something. Am I back in kindy? I could have sworn we still had the nighttime hours off from work.
Then BB got a migraine from out of nowhere, so we went to a nearby 7-11 to get some water so she could wash down some Tylenol Seth had. It was a little boring sitting outside of the 7-11 waiting for the drugs to kick in, so I decided to try to get a good picture of Seth that he could use to update his Facebook profile picture.
It wasn’t entirely successful.
I used this one, though, to update mine. I played with it a bit, though, and now it looks more like this:
I love Picnik. I used the Lomo-ish filter on this one. Fun!
Scooters.
Scooters.
Scooters.
BB.
Me.
(”Mmm…I’m bored. Maybe if I lean over like this, Seth’ll take my picture. I bet it’ll look awesome.” Hah! Imagination, why, why, must you screw with my head that way? In my imagination, I always look fan-tab-youlous in pictures - even candids in poor light. )
Ahh, a smile! Has the migraine gone away? Well, no, not really. But it retreated long enough for her to scoot on home and sleep through the worst of it! Yay!
Today Seth went with his kindy class to a science education center in Taipei. I get to go with my class on Friday.
“It was a pretty easy day, actually,” Seth said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. At one point, before we went into the 4-D movie, they had the kids in this computer room. They just turned them loose and let them run wild.”
“Hmmm…I don’t know that mine could do computer games. I mean, they’re pretty young still.”
“Well, mine didn’t know what they were doing - they were just playing with the mouse, sliding it all around and watching the colors on screen fly around.”
“Huh. Paddy peed his pants three times today.”
I don’t know. I mean, a science center? Really? I guess most of it will be in Chinese, so they might actually understand, but as far as keeping the English going all morning, uh…. This unit’s vocabulary is colors and shapes: we’ve learned red, orange, yellow, gree, blue, purple, pink, circle, square, triangle, diamond, and star. So, I’ll spend the morning pointing out colors and shapes and (ooh, the advanced stuff) colored shapes. You know, “What color is this? What color is this? Can you see a square? Can you see a diamond? Who can find a blue circle? Do you see the yellow square?” Bleh. I’m getting pretty tired of it.
Hmm…other things that are interesting to pretty much nobody, let’s see….I taught my last Kids Club class tonight (yay!), and my last Tuesday/Friday Step Ahead 5 class, since the new NST is starting her regular schedule tomorrow. Woo! No more crazy hurrying from the kindy to the bushiban to make it in time to start teaching (well, except for Mondays and Thursdays, but that’s been my official schedule from the beginning, so I don’t mind that one so much), and more time to do stuff I want to do! Ah, speaking of that “more time” thing, I finally got around to washing some dishes tonight, and Seth worked on cleaning out the grody toaster oven our landlord gave us. He scrubbed it inside and out, and now the racks are sitting in the sink soaking in hot soapy water. Here’s hoping it’ll work once we plug it in - I’m thinking a toasted bagel with a melty slice of American cheese would make and excellent and quick breakfast before we rush off to work!
We made macaroni and cheese tonight, and my belly hurts a little since I stuffed it so thoroughly. Mmm…cheese.
So, the new NST begins working officially on Thursday, and I’m super excited, as I get to drop four hours from my official work load. I’ll lose 2 1-hour shifts (on Tuesday and Friday evenings), and 1 2-hour shift (on Wednesday afternoon). In both cases, the class I’m getting rid of is at the end of my workday, so theory I’ll have more time in the evening to clean/cook/knit/read/fart around on the internet (which one do you think is the most likely?). Woo! I’m pretty excited, actually.
One of the things I really want to do is get back into knitting a little more - I’ve got a wedding present to finish and send home, and I’d like to knit myself a cardigan, or maybe finish the Artfibers Tussah silk sweater that’s been on hold for more than a year. Or make some new socks - I’m really loving my handknit socks lately more and more, but I’ve only got four pairs. Ooh, or maybe a scarf! I could use an everyday all-the-time-scarf that I could wear when I’m a little chilly instead of putting on a jacket (at least until I finish that cardigan…), and then I’d look so effortlessly cool, right? I mean, only effortlessly cool people can really pull off the casual, all-the-time-scarf. Although, with my luck, I’d probably be one of the people who look less casually, effortless cool and more like they’re trying really, really hard.
Oooh, I got my ATM card today! So now I can get money at the 7-11 or at a random street corner. Yay for easy access!! And for ATMs that have English along side the Chinese on their menus!
