Working 9 to 5

I wish! What I would give to just be working 9 to 5...

Greetings all, and welcome to the blog of the Jeni which I am finally going to attempt to update. I'm sorry it's been so long, but I do have very valid reasons! I haven't updated about anything since I came back from the Oz trip, and that's because, since then, life hasn't quite stopped!

In between various trips and travels and celebrations, which I will elaborate on later, the main reason for the lack of bloggage has been the start of the new school year. Which has been super-busy!

The academic year here runs from March to December, so the new semester brought new teachers, new schedules, and new working hours. I've started helping out with some of the evening programmes - remember, my kids are super smart, so in the evening, we have classes for students who want to go to college in the US, and for those studying for the TOEFL exam (test of English as a foreign langauge). As of this week, the school also started a programme for gifted middle school kids from around the province. So I now work 8am-9pm four days a week. My only free day is Friday, which I left open so that I could go away for my weekends.

So, I hope you understand why it's been do difficult to keep up with this! As well as the actual teaching hours, there is so much preparation for the evening programmes, never mind the regular classes. But it's interesting - it challenges me more, I get to teach a greater range of topics, and it's also some extra money, which is desperately needed.

I'm going to talk about what else has been going on in individual blog entries, so that it'll be a bit easier on the eye, and you can read it in smaller chunks. A lot has happened, much has been seen, and many photos have been taken!

Stay tuned, hopefully I'll get it all up this weekend. And at some point, I'll explain this: