Had a vacation; got a job.
Jun. 25th, 2011 05:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ateolfThe trip to St. Martin/Sint Maarten was fun. I'll try to cram everything important and thrillingly exciting I can remember into here. On a few occassions I took the liberty of jotting down a few notes, but not the whole time. So we wake up early and junk last Saturday and took and taxi and got to the airport and all that. The flight in was mostly pretty uneventful. We had packed along some Kwik Check for lunch--always a great plan. Our flight was delayed from Charlotte two hours. We actually arrived at the same time as Mary Beth's parents and ran into 'em at the baggage claim. That was convenient. Anyway, we all huddle into the shuttle bus for the car rental place (very tightly packed into this thing). Well, everyone notices when we drive past where the rental place is right next to the airport. I figured they probably have another location or something. We arrive into "town" (this is a small fuckin' island, so it's pretty much next to the airport too, like two minutes or something) and stop at a different company's dealership. Our driver gets out and argues confusedly with the people there shortly. Everyone notices also that not only does the bus have the name of the correct car rental company on it, but the uniform this guy's wearing does too. So after a few minutes he gets back in and we turn back around to the place we'd passed before. That's all, just an anecdote I felt worth relating. Our hotel had a pretty incredible view. It was facing inland, but had a great view of the town and mountains and a bit of water: the lagoon. Also, right across the street from our hotel is an Indian restaurant. Mary Beth's parents wanted to stay in the first night so we hopped over to experience the Caribbean take on Indian food. We'd gotten excited over conch curry which was on the menu, but then they didn't actually have. The same went for a dish with a pineapple sauce. Anyway, in spite of these disappointments, the food was really good. I had some goat. A little later into our trip, our Indian encounter felt a little less special as we realized Indian restaurants are all over the fuckin' island. In fact, we shortly discovered one two buildings over from the one we went to. Also another with the same name and presmably owner as the one we went to (Anand) in the 'big" town of Philipsburg. Also, there was this really good grocery store around the corner from our hotel: super-convenient and had some good stuff. There I discovered some staples of the trip. This amazing grapefruit soda called Ting and the best ginger beer I've had: Old Jamaica (it's very spicy like good ginger beer is, but at the same time it has the smoothness of cream soda). And it goes by two different names, if you get it in the bottle instead of can, for some reason it's called "Old Jamaican."
Okay so then there was Sunday. Mary Beth and I took a drive up to this town called Grand Case where all the good restaurants she'd read about happened to be. It was up on the French side (we stayed on the Dutch side which is the touristy side). It was also a chance just to drive about and see and get a feel for the island. As I said, it's small, and there's just about one road you need to worry about. Of course, there are some other streets here and there (some barely qualifying as streets), but you can get by as just thinking in terms of one circle going around the island. Though when you do need to worry about those other roads, there's plenty room to worry as they can be difficult to find or at least identify as roads. So we're driving around and we get to Grand Case and get out and just start walking. I was wearing my flip-flop/sandles and they were fine for a while, but towards the end of our extensive walking my feet got a bit torn up (they're still a bit scabbed in places, but mostly healed). There was a live band playing that we walked past who was playing what seemed like a krautrock version of "Stand by Me." That was the only live "live music" we heard, I think. For the most part the places had dedicated guys singing karaoke to canned Caribbean-ized versions of American Radio songs. The two places Mary Beth most wanted to go were closed for June. The third one had just closed for the day when we walked up to it. After walking up and down the road we settled on the touristy place that was, you know, open. They had one of these karaoke dudes I was just mentioning. Anyway, I wasn't expecting much but it ended up being really good. They also sent us chasing a long list of stuff that was on the menu that they didn't have, but we got some grilled fish and plantains (which they first told us they didn't have but then came back and said they had 'em again) and stuffed eggplant and johnnycakes! I also ended up getting homemade banana ice cream. And the "kitchen" was just a few tables put up over to the side (oh yeah, and just about everything on the island is open-air) and it had a very home-kitchen kinda feel. When we left we ended up driving around the whole island. We'd actually ended up on the other side without realizing it because it's such a short hop across. And every day but the last one we ended up doing a complete circle of the island. Back at the hotel we took a quick jump down to the beach and had a little dip, we were just there on Simpson Bay. At night we had a little walk across the drawbridge and found a bubble tea place and had some (don't think I'd had honey before).
Monday was a big day. We did a crazy string of beach hopping. We started off going to Maho Beach, which is right next to the airport. This beach is pretty small, and it's right at the end of the landing strip and the planes lane right over it. You can find lots of videos of planes landing there online. People apparently like to stand and have the jets from the big planes blow 'em back into the water or something. We weren't there for any huge planes, but a few smaller and a medium-sized one landed while we were there. I thought it would be kinda lame and touristy, but it was actually a really nice beach. The water is wonderful there and we had a good time. Next we tried to go to Mullet Bay, but missed the turn (as it's not marked). We knew we missed it, but figured since we're on an island and just about the whole shore is beaches, we could stop and find the next beach over. This landed us in Cupecoy. We quickly ran across a couple small wooden signs pointing to a path to a beach. You know, shaped like arrows and saying "beach." One said something about a "beach bar" as well. So we follow this path down and get to this tiny little beach and no one's there. No sign of a beach bar at all (not that I was there for the beach bar, but it's weird that sign was up since it wasn't). I had thoughts of Looney Toons, and following a sequence of signs all ending up at a little box propped up by a stick tied to a string, "is the beach in there?" But we ran into no traps. On the contrary, this was the best part of the trip (for me)! We had this entire beach to ourselves (even if it was small, it was well big enough for us!). The water was awesome, it was a little steep going down in so we had the best waves of our trip. Mary Beth was nervous at first and didn't wanna go in. She followed me after a little while. We were getting pummelled by the waves and tossed all around and it was a fuckin' blast. I suspect I still may have just a little sand in my ear from that beach. I know there's a regular beach at Cupecoy, but we lucked out in finding this little one. At one point the waves knocked me into her and we were all flailing around and that was our From Here to Eternity moment. When we'd had our fill of that beach we continued up to Baie Rouge. This was a bigger beach with proper beach bars, and while not as awesome, it was a really good beach. The scenery was amazing and the water was nice too. Oh, and I'll mention that St. Martin is like Europe in that all the beaches are topless as a norm (not mandantory, of course, but the option is there) so I saw some boobs. After that we went up to Friar's Bay. It was similar to Baie Rouge but not as good. It was probably my least favorite beach of the island not counting the one by our hotel. Then we went off the beaten path for Grande Cayes. This beach was on the northeastern corner of the island. You have to do a bit of intricate driving to get to it. We didn't end up swimming there. We probably could have but it's very rocky and we didn't. It was one of the more beautiful parts of the island. From what I see later, Petite Cayes would have been the way to go (we should have walked past the garbage dump on the north side of the beach and found the hiking trail and made it over there). It's supposed to be awesome and secluded and worth finding, which is what I was looking for, but oh well. It was still awesome. We walked up the whole beach and while we were there this dude drove up, climbed a bit into the hill behind the beach (which are stunningly beatufiul, by the way) and proceeded to paraglide. This is the part of the island the tradewinds hit and I guess he used the hill/mountains behind him to shoot way the fuck into the air. We watched that for a while. At one point he started dropping and spinning around but continued about. He was eventually joined by another. Anyway, then it was time to head back.Traffic gets pretty bad and backed up along that road during rush hour, but we learned that coming from the "other" side of the island is a great way around that. During all this beach hopping I got sunburned to hell. I used suncreen, but I guess I didn't keep applying enough.
Tuesday we returned to Grand Case to go to that restaurant that was closed the other day. This time we got there too early, but we killed some time and then proceeded to have a fancy lunch. The rhubarb and banana napoleon was amazing. After that we hit Orient Bay, although the place we were heading for was on the opposite end of the beach from where we parked, but we had a hike over to Club Orient which is the nude beach part of the beach. We got naked and swam and I'm sure I looked ridiculous with my expanses of pasty white and lobster red. At night we watched the lights from our balcony.
Wednesday was my last full day on the island. We had wanted to do more beaches, but the soreness of my skin was telling me that was a bad idea (at least my weiner didn't get burned too!) Mary Beth ended up getting sick as well. We took a tour of the island's "cities." We walked around Marigot. Not a whole lot to see, but we stopped in the library. It actually had a good selection and was better than I expected for a small, developing part of the world (most of the stuff was in French, of course). Then we took a journey inland to Loterie Farm (which we thought was the same as the butterfly farm, but isn't). Anyway, they have these zip cord things that seem awesome, but we just hiked the trail. You get up into the mountain and the view is incredible (and we only took the short 1-hour hike that didn't even go all the way up). Well, we went all the way up in the car afterwards. I thought I'd see where the road went continuing in the other direction. Now, you get to this place following a narrow cracked-to-hell little thing of a road and then it continues up up up into the mountain. I thought we could get to the other side of the island this way but I was wrong (the reason is seeing signs for the butterfly farm right there on the other side of the island, so I thought it'd go through, but of course, hey, we weren't at the butterfly farm!) So it was twisty and steep and Mary Beth was kinda freaking out but I thought it was fun driving it. We ended up driving to the viewpoint we didn't hike to and it was like, holy shit, you can see the whole fucking island from up there (this is up Pic Paradis, the tallest mountain on the island) and then we went up even a little farther! Well, it ended up just going into some driveways so we turned back around. Going down one grade was just like a rollercoaster. That was probably my second favorite part of the trip but Mary Beth hated it. So we get back out and then go back down to the other city: Philipsburg. For the most part it's just a prop stage for when the cruise ships come in. We walked around. It's on an isthmus between the sea and a lake and is about like a mile or something long if that (probably less than that) and three blocks wide. At this point we were hungry and all these beach bars had stopped serving food, but we followed our eyes to the trail of grill smoke and once again ate at the place that was open! This time we got to have grilled conch! (We'd finally gotten conch fritters before that, but this was the whole slab of the thing). The island is definately its own place that works in its own way and pace (similar, I imagine, to how much of the third world works). I got to really enjoy driving around the island. Dudes on scooters drive like crazy, but you get used to it. Traffic is less regulated and formal, but it's made up for with glances and intuition and "feel" or something.
Then came Thursday when I had to go back home. The guy who shuttled me to the airport asked if I was Irish. I had figured he'd based it on the reddish hue of my pale skin, but he'd made his guess based on my green shoes. Anyway, not too much to say until I get to my "layover" in Charlotte. Oh, how I hate this fucking airport now. Customs was a nightmare. Not because of any hassles, I just spent forever and for fucking ever standing in lines. There were a few things to keep me entertained. First was the line-nazi lady going into customs. Anyway who tried to take any sort of shortcut through the over-long maze of rope-divider-thingies (no matter how trivial) was severely reprimanded. The guy in front of me started to duck under one (not skipping anybody, there were several twists of empty space) and she yelled out "uh uh, you can't do that." Then later, a group of people coming in from the direction on the opposite side of this maze's entrance, went under to get at the end of the line and she came over, undid the rope-thingies and made 'em all get out and walk back around to get in line again. Then at the end of the line was an over-enthusiastic Chinese man as a traffic director, telling everybody which line to get into. He was a nice contrast to the dour mood brought about by the previous character in our Personae Dramatis. He seemed to love his job, which is quite an accomplishment! He'd seem to think really hard and then get very excited when he pointed you to the line to get in. So you clear customs, then you have to pick up your luggage and take it to the next room to check it back in again. Then you get out of that international shit and you have to go back through security to get to the fucking terminals. It doesn't fucking end. I had over an hour and a half between when my plane landed and the boarding time for my flight. I made it to my gate right at the scheduled boarding time to the minute. Then it was just a skip and I was back home! A package was waiting for me containing one of the awesomest shirts ever: okay, it says "milhaus" and it has a picture parodying that Bauhaus logo of a dude's head, but instead representing (you gussed it) Milhouse Van Houten! (I had ordered this like a month ago. The dude who designed it just makes and sells 'em himself. He was out of my size but said he'd make some more in two weeks or so. Ended up being longer but well worth it!)
On my way to the gym yesterday morning, I had a breakfast/lunch (brunch?) consisting of the newish sunshine burget at Huey's. Then I worked out. I was afraid after a week of NOT that I would have regressed, but I didn't seem to. It felt like I picked right back up where I'd left off, which is a good thing. A little later I went to Kwik Check and ordered a whole Big Muff (that's a muffaletta with double meat and cheese) and ended up eating the whole damned thing! I guess my muscles need to grow and shit. I went driving around to some pawn shops, but didn't get nothin'. I did happen up Dustin driving in the street trying to get over into my lane and we had a brief mid-road chat. Then I got another shirt in the mail! "Arcade Expressionism" from Threadless. It's like a screenshot from Donkey Kong done in abstract expressionistic style. It is also awesome. It also took over a month to get to me. The first shipment just never arrived but they sent me another. I spent most of yesterday evening working on recording a song. It's not finished yet. Also learned a valuable lesson about the new Tascam machine. You've gotta expressly SAVE shit or it won't, you know, stay on the hard drive. That thing Dustin and I worked on last week was unfortunately lost. While I was gone a school tried to get in touch with me setting up interviews on Thursday. Well, I wasn't around but called 'em on Friday and it turns out it went to Mr. MacDonnel (sic?) who I worked with at Melrose last year.
So today was the surplus fair that I left my vacation early for. There weren't very many people there (but from what I understand all English and social studies teachers were told not to come since there were so few positions they would be taken care of separately). Anyway I talked to a few schools. The guy from Central remembered me, but he said he'd talked to Mr. McClain who kindly told him all about the all the problems I'd had with discipline. Not quite the glowing recommendation and the guy really seemed to want nothing to do with hiring me. Oh well. I also talked to Kingsbury and it seemed to be very promising. Surprisingly, the guy was most interested in my computer science degree and was talking about a computer science class he wanted and all this stuff and wanted to do a follow-up interview. That was unexpected and would have been an interesting direction to teach, but when I got back to him he had already hired someone else and seemed surprised and said he'd heard I'd already signed with another school myself. I hadn't, but oh well. Then I talked with the other high school hiring math teachers: Whitehaven. My interview didn't go very well at all and I fumbled a good bit, but they told me they had someone else to interview and to stick around. So I stuck around (it was pretty late by then, they were scheduling interviews so I had to wait over an hour before I even talked to 'em). After they'd talked to a few more people I went over and they called out to me and said I had the fucking job! I'm very positive I owe it all to Mr. Booth who the guy talked to on the phone. He apparently had glowing things to say about me so I owe that man big! (I'm thankful he was the one they called.) And here's the awesomeness: I'm supposed to be teaching geometry! Not only is this the more fun subject of geometry, but their order is different (they go algebra 1, algebra 2, THEN geometry) so I think I should mostly be getting 11th graders. I think. Any way you look at it, it's pretty sweet. And if I hadn't gone to the surplus fair, I know I would have gotten stuck with either middle school or the school where kids go after committing felonies. But I didn't even have to go back to the second session where they just dole out what's left over as I was sure I would! It's nice knowing where I'm gonna work in a little over a month!
So after that bit of excitement I went to Game Stop and bought The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (for the 3DS of course). It came out when we were out of town so naturally I didn't preorder it, but now I've got it like the nerd I am.
Okay so then there was Sunday. Mary Beth and I took a drive up to this town called Grand Case where all the good restaurants she'd read about happened to be. It was up on the French side (we stayed on the Dutch side which is the touristy side). It was also a chance just to drive about and see and get a feel for the island. As I said, it's small, and there's just about one road you need to worry about. Of course, there are some other streets here and there (some barely qualifying as streets), but you can get by as just thinking in terms of one circle going around the island. Though when you do need to worry about those other roads, there's plenty room to worry as they can be difficult to find or at least identify as roads. So we're driving around and we get to Grand Case and get out and just start walking. I was wearing my flip-flop/sandles and they were fine for a while, but towards the end of our extensive walking my feet got a bit torn up (they're still a bit scabbed in places, but mostly healed). There was a live band playing that we walked past who was playing what seemed like a krautrock version of "Stand by Me." That was the only live "live music" we heard, I think. For the most part the places had dedicated guys singing karaoke to canned Caribbean-ized versions of American Radio songs. The two places Mary Beth most wanted to go were closed for June. The third one had just closed for the day when we walked up to it. After walking up and down the road we settled on the touristy place that was, you know, open. They had one of these karaoke dudes I was just mentioning. Anyway, I wasn't expecting much but it ended up being really good. They also sent us chasing a long list of stuff that was on the menu that they didn't have, but we got some grilled fish and plantains (which they first told us they didn't have but then came back and said they had 'em again) and stuffed eggplant and johnnycakes! I also ended up getting homemade banana ice cream. And the "kitchen" was just a few tables put up over to the side (oh yeah, and just about everything on the island is open-air) and it had a very home-kitchen kinda feel. When we left we ended up driving around the whole island. We'd actually ended up on the other side without realizing it because it's such a short hop across. And every day but the last one we ended up doing a complete circle of the island. Back at the hotel we took a quick jump down to the beach and had a little dip, we were just there on Simpson Bay. At night we had a little walk across the drawbridge and found a bubble tea place and had some (don't think I'd had honey before).
Monday was a big day. We did a crazy string of beach hopping. We started off going to Maho Beach, which is right next to the airport. This beach is pretty small, and it's right at the end of the landing strip and the planes lane right over it. You can find lots of videos of planes landing there online. People apparently like to stand and have the jets from the big planes blow 'em back into the water or something. We weren't there for any huge planes, but a few smaller and a medium-sized one landed while we were there. I thought it would be kinda lame and touristy, but it was actually a really nice beach. The water is wonderful there and we had a good time. Next we tried to go to Mullet Bay, but missed the turn (as it's not marked). We knew we missed it, but figured since we're on an island and just about the whole shore is beaches, we could stop and find the next beach over. This landed us in Cupecoy. We quickly ran across a couple small wooden signs pointing to a path to a beach. You know, shaped like arrows and saying "beach." One said something about a "beach bar" as well. So we follow this path down and get to this tiny little beach and no one's there. No sign of a beach bar at all (not that I was there for the beach bar, but it's weird that sign was up since it wasn't). I had thoughts of Looney Toons, and following a sequence of signs all ending up at a little box propped up by a stick tied to a string, "is the beach in there?" But we ran into no traps. On the contrary, this was the best part of the trip (for me)! We had this entire beach to ourselves (even if it was small, it was well big enough for us!). The water was awesome, it was a little steep going down in so we had the best waves of our trip. Mary Beth was nervous at first and didn't wanna go in. She followed me after a little while. We were getting pummelled by the waves and tossed all around and it was a fuckin' blast. I suspect I still may have just a little sand in my ear from that beach. I know there's a regular beach at Cupecoy, but we lucked out in finding this little one. At one point the waves knocked me into her and we were all flailing around and that was our From Here to Eternity moment. When we'd had our fill of that beach we continued up to Baie Rouge. This was a bigger beach with proper beach bars, and while not as awesome, it was a really good beach. The scenery was amazing and the water was nice too. Oh, and I'll mention that St. Martin is like Europe in that all the beaches are topless as a norm (not mandantory, of course, but the option is there) so I saw some boobs. After that we went up to Friar's Bay. It was similar to Baie Rouge but not as good. It was probably my least favorite beach of the island not counting the one by our hotel. Then we went off the beaten path for Grande Cayes. This beach was on the northeastern corner of the island. You have to do a bit of intricate driving to get to it. We didn't end up swimming there. We probably could have but it's very rocky and we didn't. It was one of the more beautiful parts of the island. From what I see later, Petite Cayes would have been the way to go (we should have walked past the garbage dump on the north side of the beach and found the hiking trail and made it over there). It's supposed to be awesome and secluded and worth finding, which is what I was looking for, but oh well. It was still awesome. We walked up the whole beach and while we were there this dude drove up, climbed a bit into the hill behind the beach (which are stunningly beatufiul, by the way) and proceeded to paraglide. This is the part of the island the tradewinds hit and I guess he used the hill/mountains behind him to shoot way the fuck into the air. We watched that for a while. At one point he started dropping and spinning around but continued about. He was eventually joined by another. Anyway, then it was time to head back.Traffic gets pretty bad and backed up along that road during rush hour, but we learned that coming from the "other" side of the island is a great way around that. During all this beach hopping I got sunburned to hell. I used suncreen, but I guess I didn't keep applying enough.
Tuesday we returned to Grand Case to go to that restaurant that was closed the other day. This time we got there too early, but we killed some time and then proceeded to have a fancy lunch. The rhubarb and banana napoleon was amazing. After that we hit Orient Bay, although the place we were heading for was on the opposite end of the beach from where we parked, but we had a hike over to Club Orient which is the nude beach part of the beach. We got naked and swam and I'm sure I looked ridiculous with my expanses of pasty white and lobster red. At night we watched the lights from our balcony.
Wednesday was my last full day on the island. We had wanted to do more beaches, but the soreness of my skin was telling me that was a bad idea (at least my weiner didn't get burned too!) Mary Beth ended up getting sick as well. We took a tour of the island's "cities." We walked around Marigot. Not a whole lot to see, but we stopped in the library. It actually had a good selection and was better than I expected for a small, developing part of the world (most of the stuff was in French, of course). Then we took a journey inland to Loterie Farm (which we thought was the same as the butterfly farm, but isn't). Anyway, they have these zip cord things that seem awesome, but we just hiked the trail. You get up into the mountain and the view is incredible (and we only took the short 1-hour hike that didn't even go all the way up). Well, we went all the way up in the car afterwards. I thought I'd see where the road went continuing in the other direction. Now, you get to this place following a narrow cracked-to-hell little thing of a road and then it continues up up up into the mountain. I thought we could get to the other side of the island this way but I was wrong (the reason is seeing signs for the butterfly farm right there on the other side of the island, so I thought it'd go through, but of course, hey, we weren't at the butterfly farm!) So it was twisty and steep and Mary Beth was kinda freaking out but I thought it was fun driving it. We ended up driving to the viewpoint we didn't hike to and it was like, holy shit, you can see the whole fucking island from up there (this is up Pic Paradis, the tallest mountain on the island) and then we went up even a little farther! Well, it ended up just going into some driveways so we turned back around. Going down one grade was just like a rollercoaster. That was probably my second favorite part of the trip but Mary Beth hated it. So we get back out and then go back down to the other city: Philipsburg. For the most part it's just a prop stage for when the cruise ships come in. We walked around. It's on an isthmus between the sea and a lake and is about like a mile or something long if that (probably less than that) and three blocks wide. At this point we were hungry and all these beach bars had stopped serving food, but we followed our eyes to the trail of grill smoke and once again ate at the place that was open! This time we got to have grilled conch! (We'd finally gotten conch fritters before that, but this was the whole slab of the thing). The island is definately its own place that works in its own way and pace (similar, I imagine, to how much of the third world works). I got to really enjoy driving around the island. Dudes on scooters drive like crazy, but you get used to it. Traffic is less regulated and formal, but it's made up for with glances and intuition and "feel" or something.
Then came Thursday when I had to go back home. The guy who shuttled me to the airport asked if I was Irish. I had figured he'd based it on the reddish hue of my pale skin, but he'd made his guess based on my green shoes. Anyway, not too much to say until I get to my "layover" in Charlotte. Oh, how I hate this fucking airport now. Customs was a nightmare. Not because of any hassles, I just spent forever and for fucking ever standing in lines. There were a few things to keep me entertained. First was the line-nazi lady going into customs. Anyway who tried to take any sort of shortcut through the over-long maze of rope-divider-thingies (no matter how trivial) was severely reprimanded. The guy in front of me started to duck under one (not skipping anybody, there were several twists of empty space) and she yelled out "uh uh, you can't do that." Then later, a group of people coming in from the direction on the opposite side of this maze's entrance, went under to get at the end of the line and she came over, undid the rope-thingies and made 'em all get out and walk back around to get in line again. Then at the end of the line was an over-enthusiastic Chinese man as a traffic director, telling everybody which line to get into. He was a nice contrast to the dour mood brought about by the previous character in our Personae Dramatis. He seemed to love his job, which is quite an accomplishment! He'd seem to think really hard and then get very excited when he pointed you to the line to get in. So you clear customs, then you have to pick up your luggage and take it to the next room to check it back in again. Then you get out of that international shit and you have to go back through security to get to the fucking terminals. It doesn't fucking end. I had over an hour and a half between when my plane landed and the boarding time for my flight. I made it to my gate right at the scheduled boarding time to the minute. Then it was just a skip and I was back home! A package was waiting for me containing one of the awesomest shirts ever: okay, it says "milhaus" and it has a picture parodying that Bauhaus logo of a dude's head, but instead representing (you gussed it) Milhouse Van Houten! (I had ordered this like a month ago. The dude who designed it just makes and sells 'em himself. He was out of my size but said he'd make some more in two weeks or so. Ended up being longer but well worth it!)
On my way to the gym yesterday morning, I had a breakfast/lunch (brunch?) consisting of the newish sunshine burget at Huey's. Then I worked out. I was afraid after a week of NOT that I would have regressed, but I didn't seem to. It felt like I picked right back up where I'd left off, which is a good thing. A little later I went to Kwik Check and ordered a whole Big Muff (that's a muffaletta with double meat and cheese) and ended up eating the whole damned thing! I guess my muscles need to grow and shit. I went driving around to some pawn shops, but didn't get nothin'. I did happen up Dustin driving in the street trying to get over into my lane and we had a brief mid-road chat. Then I got another shirt in the mail! "Arcade Expressionism" from Threadless. It's like a screenshot from Donkey Kong done in abstract expressionistic style. It is also awesome. It also took over a month to get to me. The first shipment just never arrived but they sent me another. I spent most of yesterday evening working on recording a song. It's not finished yet. Also learned a valuable lesson about the new Tascam machine. You've gotta expressly SAVE shit or it won't, you know, stay on the hard drive. That thing Dustin and I worked on last week was unfortunately lost. While I was gone a school tried to get in touch with me setting up interviews on Thursday. Well, I wasn't around but called 'em on Friday and it turns out it went to Mr. MacDonnel (sic?) who I worked with at Melrose last year.
So today was the surplus fair that I left my vacation early for. There weren't very many people there (but from what I understand all English and social studies teachers were told not to come since there were so few positions they would be taken care of separately). Anyway I talked to a few schools. The guy from Central remembered me, but he said he'd talked to Mr. McClain who kindly told him all about the all the problems I'd had with discipline. Not quite the glowing recommendation and the guy really seemed to want nothing to do with hiring me. Oh well. I also talked to Kingsbury and it seemed to be very promising. Surprisingly, the guy was most interested in my computer science degree and was talking about a computer science class he wanted and all this stuff and wanted to do a follow-up interview. That was unexpected and would have been an interesting direction to teach, but when I got back to him he had already hired someone else and seemed surprised and said he'd heard I'd already signed with another school myself. I hadn't, but oh well. Then I talked with the other high school hiring math teachers: Whitehaven. My interview didn't go very well at all and I fumbled a good bit, but they told me they had someone else to interview and to stick around. So I stuck around (it was pretty late by then, they were scheduling interviews so I had to wait over an hour before I even talked to 'em). After they'd talked to a few more people I went over and they called out to me and said I had the fucking job! I'm very positive I owe it all to Mr. Booth who the guy talked to on the phone. He apparently had glowing things to say about me so I owe that man big! (I'm thankful he was the one they called.) And here's the awesomeness: I'm supposed to be teaching geometry! Not only is this the more fun subject of geometry, but their order is different (they go algebra 1, algebra 2, THEN geometry) so I think I should mostly be getting 11th graders. I think. Any way you look at it, it's pretty sweet. And if I hadn't gone to the surplus fair, I know I would have gotten stuck with either middle school or the school where kids go after committing felonies. But I didn't even have to go back to the second session where they just dole out what's left over as I was sure I would! It's nice knowing where I'm gonna work in a little over a month!
So after that bit of excitement I went to Game Stop and bought The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (for the 3DS of course). It came out when we were out of town so naturally I didn't preorder it, but now I've got it like the nerd I am.
