Everyone keeps asking me if I'm working. No, I'm not. I've spent A LOT of time looking, but am not optimistic anything will pan out at this point. I'd say 90% of the job postings I find require you to be fluent in Chinese, which I'm not. My Chinese right now is useless vocab I'm learning through Rosetta Stone and "hello," "how much," "thank you" and "goodbye." Plus, the vacations I would have through these jobs would not line up at all with Aaron's and he gets about 5 weeks off during the school year. Since one of the things we'd like to do is travel, it does put a damper on things. I also don't have a work visa and most of the jobs I'm looking at want you to already have that. I had an interview for a teaching position at a University that went well. The downside is it would be a 2 hour commute each way on top of an 8 hour work day, for the equivalent of $1000 a month. I said no.
So I'd like to tutor and in the meantime I'm doing a lot of adventurous cooking - coconut chicken curry, stocks, fried chicken - so if you have any suggestions let me know, but we don't have an oven - only a small toaster oven. I'm going to start taking Chinese classes on a regular basis. I'm looking into various schools right now, a lot of them offer a first lesson/demo free option, so I'm going to shop around before I commit to anything. I go grocery shopping (which is at least a 1 1/2 hour trip) a few times a week, I look for jobs online, try to post things to the blog and am wanting to improve my photography skills. I'm taking violin - the principal at Aaron's school teaches violin. All I have to do is buy a violin ($40) and show up to the middle school class along with 2 of the other teachers who have decided to crash it as well. So that's pretty much it. So that's my life right now.
Though financially I'm sure it's frustrating, it sounds like a pretty good life to me!
ReplyDeleteAs for cooking, do you have a crock pot or something like that? Jamie and I have been doing a lot of crock pot recipes recently, so I could share some. You could probably cook most of them in a large pot on a stove top (let them simmer all day) if you don't have a crock pot. My recipes would be vegetarian, but in a lot of cases you could just add some chicken or something.
I saw in Aaron's other post he can't find a checker set, maybe you could get in touch with your arts and crafts side and make one? I know my aunt made my dad a chess set and it was pretty neat (she made molds and used plaster of Paris, I think, then she painted and fired those pieces in a pearl white and a pearl black, and the board was a mosaic of light and dark squares of wood, held together with glue in a mitred frame, then it was lightly stained).