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| Here's a niche job for ya. |
Funny to have done this teaching thing for so long that the rhythms of the quarter are permanently imprinted on my brain and my sense of self: tomorrow I get the first batch of papers to mark, and my life will change as it always does when I these little bundles of love stack up like a string of aircraft waiting to land at O'Hare International. I'm having my students write a progress report on their internships, with the fictitious audience being the director of Quarter Abroad and the director of the Internships and Career Center back home--a nice two-fer, since I want to get a status report from everyone
anyway, so why not have it count? I put in a couple of late nights organizing the last chunks of the readers I have pit together, and creating primitive class websites with cobbled-together schedules that reflect the maze of weird alterations due to field trips or holidays or other deviations from routine (the coming two weeks will be the set schedule, bracketed by oddities that make syllabus planning a nightmare: students want to know what they'll be doing, and will ream you for being unorganized if you don't commit--but if you commit and then announce changes then you get reamed for being unorganized as well!), but there are still lots of little bits of administrivia like filing dates for seniors graduating in December that a certain type of student wants to frame as somehow my problem!
On the domestic side, we did eventually get the eedjits at The Apartment Service to get us another actual full set of keys, so I didn't have to try my next options of taping over or grind off the "do not duplicate" admonition that had discouraged the last timid locksmith / key-grinder. Amelie also seems to have convinced the stand-in for our now-vacationing agent that we will be reimbursed for the cheapo knives, cheese grater, garlic press, and other essentials that were missing from the
sogenannte Boutique Apartment. Sort of nickel and dime given the ridiculous cost of housing in this part of Synny, but I suppose it's the gesture that counts. I'm afraid I am already resigned to the fact that this is completely funny-money, that we will survive no matter what the outlay is, and we should not get too anal-retentive about relatively inconsequential amounts.
Alex is whistling the tune to
Pirates of the Caribbean in the
next room as he plays on the iPod Touch (sans wifi) and Amelie is off on
a well-earned walkabout to the ferry and thence to the Botanical
Gardens with its fine view of the Opera House and the harbour. For a
kid with no volume control, this apartment living may be a struggle (for
us, not for Alex). Tomorrow we discover whether the local high school
will or will not accept a visiting Yank with Learning Issues and
generally good humor, or whether we will be doing a kluged-together
home-school and tutor thing for the next seven weeks. So far at least
the pre-Algebra review that Alex and I have been doing together most
mornings has gone better than it ever did back home, and he has actually
done more writing on his own proto blog (highly encouraged by his
teachers back in Berkeley) in the last week than we have seen him write
in multiple months. Of course, Alex has deftly hacked the TV to receive
ten times as many channels as I could coax out of it in my desultory
way (actually only looking at the six on-air channels was bad enough),
and we have had to lobotomize the TV once already by taking an essential
cord away because of surly behavior. At least we were able to do this
in good Kaiser parent-group fashion, not by threatening consequences or
anything, but by having the TV disabled the day after the outburst, with
Alex understanding what had happened and why....
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| With Julie near Curl Curl Beach |
As advertised, the climate here is so variable it makes your head spin. Yesterday after a hot and muggy Friday the weather turned cloudy-misty again, last night we had window-rattling winds and thunder and lightning, and today it is gorgeous--though I need to knuckle down and mark some journal entries before tomorrow, the first of our big Mondays stacked with classes. Yesterday we met our Berkeley friend Julie again in the beachy suburb of Manly, and with her daughter (whose space Alex probably dropped into when he transferred to public schools five years ago and Julie's family moved here) we had lunch, did a long coast walk & talk, and then had coffee in a town several beaches farther North.
As I've remarked before, I am totally chuffed at the ways this city has preserved beach access, sometimes with headlands cut across by trails, but usually one can walk above waterline but below houses. After pretty decent Thai food in a restaurant along the not-nearly-as-crowded-as-on-a-sunny-day pedestrian mall, we ambled off through the wind and mist, up Manly Beach, North Steyne Beach, Freshwater Beach, Curl Curl Beach, and up to Dee Why, probably 10 km of pleasant walking later. Along the way Julie and Lulu helped orient us to the school situation, and Alex alternated between shyness about the possibility to hostility to acceptance and almost enthusiasm and then began the cycle again. Then after a welcome coffee / pastry at a cafe (and I will take some pictures of the gorgeous foamed-milk art that seems to be more common here--if you're going to pay $4 for a small latte you may as well get a beautiful leaf-or-heart-shaped design tattooed artistically into your drink), we we bused back across the Spit and home in the deepening twilight. I should add that last night the clocks changed, so we will have slightly darker mornings (yes! no more 5 AM birdsong waking us?) and longer evenings (yes!).
Now to attack some journal-commenting and see if I can get Alex to do a little reading.
