Bueno, it´s been quite a while since I have written in here, mostly because I have been travelling a lot less this year than in the past few. However, I am on summer vacation now! During vacation I will be going to take a nice journey and should be writing more often again (although I will have limited internet access, so I might not write immediately, but will probably blog about it after the journey has completed).
On a related note, all year we thought we had a laundry chute, but had blocked it off so the cats wouldn´t accidentally fall into it. However, this past week, I dropped a sponge in to see where it goes, and it did not seem to fall anywhere. This just adds to the long list of weird things in the house such as a doorbell in the kitchen that seems to ring in the basement. The hole in the basement, large closets and the “caves” in Emily´s room and my room, hooks on the stairs, indoor wind chimes, the “poop-swastika or poopstika” the light switch on the stairs that shuts off the hot water heater, the TV that is heard best outside the room its in, many light switches that don´t seem to turn anything on, the random chords in the cabinet and, of course, the fact that we´ve never seen a key for the front door.
That said, I wanted to reflect a little bit on the highlights of the 2011-2012 school year.
First off, I moved back to the US. Many of my friends and family were thrilled by this. I was not. However it has been a decent year, and financially it has been far more rewarding than living in Costa Rica or working part time in Spain. I movemd to Lebanon, NH, which for those of you who don´t know is the town next to Hanover (or should I say Dartmouth, because Dartmouth College is half the town and owns most of the rest). I started the Spanish programme at two schools in Vermont. At Thetford Elementary School I teach Spanish K-6, and at the Newton School I teach Spanish 5-8. I had my reservations about teaching Spanish as a foreign language. I really didn´t think it was what I wanted to be doing, but it turns out I really enjoy it! So, I´ve signed on for a second year! First time since college I´ll be staying at the same job for two years! So that´ll bring my total to 5 schools (and one language academy) in 5 years. So, still not the best average, but at least it´s moving the right direction. It turns out at work I have one co-worker, Sarah Zack, who I had several classes with at UVM. I also work with AnMari Kicza, who taught at the CEC/Cloud Forest School in Costa Rica six years before me! What a small world it is.
Anyway, I moved into a house with three roommates: Emily, Amena and Nate. Nate didn´t stay very long (thankfully) and a guy named Kyle moved in. The four of us hung out a lot and would spend most of our free time together. In September we had an issue where the upstairs shower was leaking into the downstairs shower. Even though my room was upstairs, I always showered downstairs because the upstairs shower head was only about five-feet four-inches off the ground, making it impossible for me to wash my hair unless I kneeled on the floor. So, one day after noticing the leak, I was about to shower downstairs when my roommate asked me if I wanted to get groceries, so I decided that was a priority. When we returned less than an hour later, the ceiling from the downstairs shower had fallen onto the floor. For a few days the downstairs bathroom was unusable. However, we shouldn´t have been using the upstairs shower either, because the floor underneath was basically mush, you could easily stick your finger through it. When the landlords (in India) finally authorized work to be done (five or six weeks later) they had to remove the shower, and along with it most of the insulation on that side of the wall, and the walls between the bathroom and my room and my closet. From my bed I could see the toilet upstairs, the toilet downstairs and into the shower downstairs! It made for a very interesting week, especially with Kyle having just moved in. Some highlights from the week include me yelling to Kyle late at night (jokingly) “Don´t pee in my bedroom” Anyway, after about a week of making sure I wasn´t in my room and awake if someone was in the bathroom, and having toilets basically set up like bunk-beds where you could hear the other person in the other bathroom, it got fixed and we got a new shower that was tall enough for me!
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| View from my bedroom |
On a related note, all year we thought we had a laundry chute, but had blocked it off so the cats wouldn´t accidentally fall into it. However, this past week, I dropped a sponge in to see where it goes, and it did not seem to fall anywhere. This just adds to the long list of weird things in the house such as a doorbell in the kitchen that seems to ring in the basement. The hole in the basement, large closets and the “caves” in Emily´s room and my room, hooks on the stairs, indoor wind chimes, the “poop-swastika or poopstika” the light switch on the stairs that shuts off the hot water heater, the TV that is heard best outside the room its in, many light switches that don´t seem to turn anything on, the random chords in the cabinet and, of course, the fact that we´ve never seen a key for the front door.
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| Simon (left) and Roxy (right) |
As previously mentioned, we (technically Emily) got 2 cats, Simon and Roxy (aka Profe Simone and Profe Foxxy, according to one co-worker). They are adorable little kittens, but I won´t go into the cutesy cat stories now, although they are a lot of fun.
I started my master´s degree with Jones International University, an online school based in Colorado. I would prefer not to take courses online, because I learn more socially, and I am still not sold on the credibility of an online degree, but they offer the courses I need to get a full-fledged license to teach Spanish in Vermont, so I´ve taken the first course and I have nine courses left. I believe I will finish no later than December 2013.
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