November 23
Lest you think my lack of posting here has been because I've forgotten about all you folks back home, rest assured that is simply not the case.
There has been a perfect storm of events that has led to my online absence, the biggest of which is that the internet in China SUCKS! I cannot
begin to explain the frusteration involved in trying to open emails and Facebook and even skype has been regularly dropping calls. Things seem
to be improving, but I had a solid two weeks where I could not even open an email. So that's excuse number one. Excuse number two is that I've
been a bit busy at school. Lame excuse I know, I even hate that I'm using it as one, but it's true. There's nothing major happening, we had
Parent-Teacher last week which went well, and we have the Christmas Open House coming up in three weeks, so obviously there's been
some extra work to be done for those events. Plus two weeks ago was our big track & field sports competition, which is an all-day event and
all the staff have to help out. I've also reached that point in the year where all my detailed lesson plans I did in the summer have run out
and now I need to start doing more planning for my day to day classes. Oh, and I found out that the other computer teacher is leaving after Christmas
so that means my teaching load will likely change and I'll take on new classes and give my elementary classes to the new teacher. Which is fine, but
again just means a bit more planning and prepping, and I'm trying to write up some formal curriculum documents for our computer program and now that
deadline has been bumbed up from the end of the year to Christmas, at least for the courses the new teacher will be teaching, so yeah, are you getting the
gist? I'm not stressed, and hallelujah for that! : ) But I am busy. I'm usually at school from 8 to 5 these days and then I come home and teach piano
for a few hours on Mondays and Wednesdays, go to yoga on Tuesdays, I'm considering pilates class on Thursdays and that's my week. The weekends have been
more low key the past few weeks, as we're all kind of feeling exhausted from school. We went to Hong Kong a few weeks ago which was a nice get away.
But really nothing super exciting is happening, and that's been my third reason for not writing, I honestly didn't know what to say.
But now that my internet seems to be running better and I've resolved to work a little bit on the weekends so I'm on top of my planning, there shouldn't
be such a lot hiatus from updates. Oh here's some exciting news I just thought of, I bought some new furniture for my apartment! Two IKEA armchairs and I
also got some really nice bedding. I'll update my apartment pictures so you can it all there.
Alrighty, that's it for now. I'm off to school to plan my week!