So, just as I got a new job, the blog went dead. Partly, I suppose, I was just overwhelmed by two jobs. At the same time, though, I think I needed to take a break - we were dealing with the finding work, transportation, an apartment, and just getting out lives put back together after Tawain.
But here I am now. With yet another new job, a new, new apartment (as opposed to the new apartment, which happened 3 months ago, that we’ve already moved out of), and even a new scooter!
I feel like there’s too much to write all at once in one big post, so I’m going to cut this one off here. I’m back, though, so you’ll be hearing more soon enough.
Only one more teaching day left - then it’s 4 days to pack, a day (give or take a few time zones) to fly, and we’ll be home!
Our tickets came today, so we’re sure (well, almost sure) to at least have seats on a series of three planes that will take us home. What we’re not so sure of is whether or not we’ll be seated together, since there are no seat designations on these retro-style paper tickets.
I guess we’ll be headed to the airport extra early in hopes of snagging some good seats.
Things I Can Do In The US That I Can’t Do In Taiwan:
- Drive along a flat, open stretch of highway, where the sky is big and blue, the land is green all the way to the horizon, and I don’t feel boxed in by hills and clouds and rain and smog.
that would make me real jerk, if I had done them intentionally:
- Made a room full of 7-year-olds cry
- Made a 9-year-old wet herself and the floor* in front of a room full of her peers
*Seriously wet the floor. It was the biggest pee-puddle I’ve ever seen, and she kept peeing all the way to the bathroom, too.
So, I decided to make some no-bake cookies tonight. I used my regular recipe, and then added a scant cup of pistachios (mmmmmm………). They’re awesome, sure, but I overboiled the chocolate before I added the oatmeal and the pistachio, so they cookies are dry and crumbly, which just bugs me to no end. Seth sees no problem (chocolate? yup. oatmeal? uh-huh. pistachios? check. awesome? you betcha.), and yeah, sure, they taste good, but they’re just. not. right. So, no recipe, since I want to make a pretty post with pictures (of proper-looking no-bakes, not dull, crumbly piles).
Anyway, we had some (very) minor issues with our tickets. We bought them through a consolidator (or something, I dunno really), and as it turns out, they’re paper tickets. Paper. I had no idea paper tickets even still existed. So, of course, those tickets need to be shipped, which brings the cost up such that any savings we realized from going through this place initially is pretty much completely obliterated. Bah. They’re on their way now, anyway (well, I think - I asked that they hold off on shipping them until Friday so that they’d be sure to arrive on a work day, since our mailing address is, uh, our work address), so it’s done.
And, yeah, that’s the news. Since I completely forgot to post yesterday, today we’ve got a double header:
Things I Can Do In The US That I Can’t Do In Taiwan:
- Wash my clothes, and then dry them. In a dryer. In under 48 hours per load. Oh, technology! You are wonderful indeed.
- Attend multiple events we thought we’d miss:
- Seth’s cousin’s wedding
- My grandpa’s wedding
- Special Olympics events (okay, this one is completely Seth’s - I’ll likely spend that weekend hanging out with my parents)
- Winfield!
Today, in my kindy class, I let my students “read books” as they finished their snack. They love this, even though they don’t so much read as idly look at the pictures and then leave the books on the floor to stomp on as they go for another. I don’t really expect much more from three-year-olds, but it’s a little hard on the books. It’s especially hard on the hard-cover picture books with regular, thin paper. For whatever reason (I’ve given up on trying to find any logic in almost anything I don’t understand here, especially as it relates to this particular job), we don’t have many board books, but lots of pretty picture books.
Guess what? A few finally broke under the stress of providing 15 3-year-olds with such unrestrained entertainment. One lost 2 or 3 pages, but the other one actually BROKE - its spine split and the covers tore apart. My co-teacher sort of lost it on the kids, and wanted me to back her up. I did, but only half-heartedly. It seems unrealistic and unfair to expect these kids to understand how and why to treat the books properly, and honestly, I’ve never heard her say anything to the kids regarding the proper care and feeding of the pretty books (in Chinese or English), and nothing I’ve ever said about being nice to the books has really registered (them not really speaking much English and all). I think if I ran the world (or just had some modicum of authority over the materials my classroom was equipped with), I’d toss most of the regular picture books (or at least hide them and use them for story time only), replace them with lots more board books (and maybe even some fabric books) of the more indestructable variety, and enjoy the fact that the kids want to read books instead of getting angry when they love them too violently. (Oh, and I’d make sure a lot more of them were in English, since it’s a bilingual kindy and the parents are clearly paying a premium for all that super English learning. But that’s another issue, I guess.)
Things I Can Do In The US That I Can’t Do In Taiwan:
- Make and eat biscuits and gravy. Oh, lordy, biscuits and gravy. So good. So not hard to make, as long as you can actually get your hands on chub of breakfast sausage and have plenty of time to stir. (Once upon a time, I didn’t like gravy, preferring butter and honey and jelly, letting Mom and Dad eat all the gravy. Once upon a time, I was a so, so, SO missing out on the starchy, porky goodness that is baking powder biscuits and sausage gravy.)
Well.
What the heck happened to me? I go and tell you we’ve got big news coming, then let Seth tell you all about it while I forget to blog for two days running. Uh…that wasn’t my plan.
Anyway, as Seth said, we’re headed back home in the very near future. Lots of things factored into the decision, but really, when it comes down to it, we aren’t happy here, and that was affecting our health and our general outlook. Not cool!
Now that we’ve given notice, we’ve got one-and-a-half weeks of work left, and then 5 more days after that before we get on the plane. It’s a little crazy, and I look around our apartment and wonder how the heck we’re going to get it all taken care of. We’ll leave plenty of things here, of course - I’m not planning to lug home the toaster oven or anything. Still, it’s going to be whirlwind, but we’re excited. Seth has a pretty firm job offer already, and I’m probably going to concentrate on renewing my teaching certification, looking for a teaching job for 08/09, and finishing up my languishing master’s degree. There’s going to be so much to take care of, from finding a car to getting real winter clothes, but I’m really, really looking forward to being home.
T minus 19 days and counting!
Thursday night was the Parents’ Night Performace for two of our four Treehouse classes. For all the frustrations, it went really well once it started. The kids did their silly little plays and sang songs and then the managers said lots of stuff in Chinese, then told us to come up front and say a few words (um, hello? Heads up on that next time, please?), then I guess they took the parents on a tour of the new building while the kids stayed down in the stage area and got some candy.
It’s funny, really - it’s the same sort of thing as the musical programs we always put on in elementary school, but somehow, the post-performance mingling was less awkward, I think, because we don’t speak Chinese and the parents either don’t speak English or don’t feel comfortable enough to use the English they do know. So we just goofed around with the kids until everyone began to trickle out. At one point, while people were still working their way slowy to the door, Chelsea (one of my Treehouse 3 kids, who had the title role in our little play) grabed my hand and started pulling me upstairs, without giving me any hint as to where she was taking me. We went from the basement up to the second floor and then down to the first, back the area behind the office, and then returned to the stairwell, where finally she found her dad and jumped up and down a little, very pleased to have me meet him. I thought it was pretty funny.
This is Chelsea and me, just after the wordless introduction in the stairwell:
We did more of the same on Friday night for the other classes. Woo.
I don’t know - I really like the kids, but the job is such crap. For reasons I’m not ready to go into here, work/my manager managed to royally piss me off today, and I had today off! I’m not sure who I’m more pissed at, really - my manager for enforcing such needlessly frustrating rules and regulations or myself for still not having done anything to change my situation despite repeated declarations to do so. I spent so much of today in a blue funk, and I think maybe it’s because I’m avoiding the change I know needs to happen. So, yeah. I guess I’m telling you all that I need to kick my butt into high gear and get the ball rolling. And then, I’m going to step up to the plate, stand and deliver, and think outside the box.
Did I forget any pep-talk clichés in that last sentence? I don’t think so - which means the ball’s in my court now, huh?
So, my throat hurts (on both sides now - yippee!), and I think maybe I’m getting still sick. Oh, right. This is the status quo. How could I have forgotten?
Stupid insane work schedule. Stupid rain all the ding dang time. Stupid air pollution.
I got to play my favorite game in class today. It’s a dumb one, really, but the students always enjoy it, and it’s easy.
It’s pictionary with language patterns in the questioning - you draw part of something (two time, since we’re learning Are they nouns? Yes (No), they are (not) nouns.) and they ask “Are they blah blah blah?” Nod or shake, and the whole class answers. Then you let then kids take turns drawing. Woo! So not-innovative! So easy to stand to the side and not have to think much! And yet, the class was pretty clearly enjoying themselves. Of course, they were having so much fun they forgot they were in English class, and the Chinese slipped in, but then again, it’s a very small class that I don’t teach regularly (actually, no NST is regularly scheduled for their class), and I think their usual teacher lets them get away with more than she probably should. Little buggers. The four who slipped up got double spelling words - 10x each instead of 5x. That’s usually a pretty harsh gig, but today they only had one stinking word - no. Not such an awful fate today, huh?
Just watched the first miniseries episode of Battlestar Galactica. It was good.
We’ve got the complete miniseries as well as seasons one and two, with season three on the way.
I think I’m set for my knitting tv for a while.
Speaking of knitting, I’m through row 85. The main charted section has 101 rows, so 16 more rows there. Then there’s the end chart, which is 12 rows, only two of which involve any lace stitches, so it should go very quickly. I’m guestimating I’ll be finished with the knitting tomorrow. The last 16 rows of the main section should take about two hour-long tv shows, minus commercial breaks, so, about 1.5 hours, plus another hour, let’s say, for the last one. So, only 2.5 hours of knitting to get the sucker done.
All that’s left then is blocking the scarf. That should be interesting, as I’ve never blocked anything before. Also? I don’t have any straight pins to block it with. I guess I’ll figure that out soon enough, right?
So, yeah. It’s Tuesday. My plan day. We have kindy in the morning, and then I don’t have a class until 4:30, so I use the time in between to plan my bushiban classes for the rest of the week, and do any grading or other paperwork I can. So, I planned, graded, and edited a script before class. Then there was class, of course, and after I stayed there and wrote communication books (on a Tuesday! so freakin’ early!), so that I’ll have time to write “Teacher’s Words of Wisdom” tomorrow. We’ve been told that we can type them (”you can write them onna tha computer, make them all the same”), but I’m afraid it’ll still take some time. I’ve got some “free time” that’s not really free between classes tomorrow afternoon, so I’m hoping to crank them out then. Wish me luck, I guess.
In non-work related news, I finished another 9 rows on my scarf - woo! I’m up to row 40, so only 60-ish rows to go! That means that if I can do about 10 rows a night for the next six nights, I’ll be finished knitting in less than a week! Or, more realistically, if I can do about 10 rows a night every few nights here and there for the next few weeks, I’ll be finished knitting it before the end of February! Woo! Go me!