In which Rachel has a fun day at "work"
I talked to Alena about climbing today (all yesterday and today I was mentally bouncing up and down eager to talk to her, ha, bouldering is my new toy). I told her how I liked the kid's room best, and she says she's already taking her daughter climbing there, and she's climbing around the metro. :D Her daughter is 3.5, she's getting started early, cause Alena says that pretty much everyone around her daughter is a climber. How cute is that? She told me about a climbing competition/film festival at the end of August in a town in north Bohemia. I asked where one would stay for such a thing, and she said most people camp but she (or her family or something) has a cabin nearby, so they stay there. And I'm welcome to stay with them! Awesome! Of course many things can happen between now and August, but I just think it's really cool of her to invite me.
Another shiny thing - on my way to the grocery store I passed a super cheap clothing store which normally I ignore, but today a shirt caught my eye. It's gray with blood-style lettering, and it says "AMPIRES FOM OUTER SPACE". Ha! And then a bunch of random stuff on the bottom, which looks like band names but also random letters. I would totally name a band that. On the one hand, it's clearly about alien vampires. But also, it could be like "empires", except with "ampires" like a guiter amp, so it's like a musical empire...of vampires...IT'S AWESOME IN MY HEAD. Anyways, it was $3, so I splurged. I'm ever so tempted to wear it on Thursday when I go check out the new classes with Jamie cause I bet she'll get a kick out of it, but I probably shouldn't meet my new boss in that...
One of my students is building a house, and sometimes he tells me about some crazy thing he's building into it. He's using some energy saving things and also just some housing tech that I've never heard of. Today I was giggling uncontrollably because he set me off thinking about houses that come alive. His house could totally kill him if it wanted. My favorite is the central vacuuming system. I'm like "Do you mean the air circulation system? Ventilation?" "No, I mean vacuum." So I got the image of the wall turning into a vacuum and just sucking up everything that wasn't nailed down, like his babies. Ha! What it actually is - there are wall plugs in every room that you attach a hose to, and use that as the vacuum, and all the dust and whatever goes into a box in a room and then you empty that once it's full. Crazy future technology! He started to tell me about an automatic lawn mower and I believed him and then he said no, it's just some weird thing he saw in a tech mag that wasn't made yet. So then we were talking about him doing chores around the house and he said he wouldn't do the dishes because they would have a machine for it, what is it called? And I laughed and was like "Oh you crazy guy, there's no such thing as a dishwashing mach...ine...oh right." I was totally thinking he meant like, robot arms coming out of the wall. I have gone insane.
Petr asked if I'd joined "marching arts" yet.
No, no I haven't.
I dropped 2 classes - the convo class I hated, and Pavel who I liked but they took him because nobody wants to go out to Barrandov for one class. I actually asked them not to take him, but oh well, it was going to be difficult to fit him in anyways. I picked up a class at an IT company, she's shy about talking (that first half hour was sooooo slooooow) but seems nice and she's gorgeous. Her mom's a scuba instructor, how cool is that? She likes animals, so amusingly I think I can joint LP with another lesson I just picked up with a kid who likes animals. Jamie's leaving (sadness) and gave me a couple of her classes (outside of Threshold). So now I have an individual with an 11-yr old kid who grew up in Cali and is basically just keeping up her English. I also took her Thursday night classes, which are in Brandys so it ends up being from 1:30-9:00 including travel time. But it makes a lot of money and she says they're great classes, so it's worth a shot. Also, they're cash in hand and I can prob get away with not reporting them on my taxes, rock. I should be picking up some classes with a geology place through Threshold, which I'm actually pretty excited about, but those won't start for a couple weeks. And I'm not sure how many I'll get, so I couldn't gamble on it. Alicia's still having trouble getting classes so she's still not sure if she's leaving or not. :( The problem with Threshold is that they always tell you "we're going to have a lot of new classes in a couple weeks" so you try to leave blocks of your schedule open but then you don't have enough classes while you're waiting, and a couple weeks turns into months or while you weren't looking they gave those blocks to someone else and now you have to wait for the next company to start...this might be true of all TEFL companies though.