Oye Como Va El Ritmo Del Rio!

What, like, people are READING this stuff? Oh, shit, I guess I better be more careful about what I write. Well, at least the only people reading are the GREATEST ones in the world!

Yes, it's tough at the moment, but we might make it. We're staying in Memphis, which is about an hour from where I'll be teaching. I have an old friend living there. She's Spanish, living with her friend and her boyfriend, so the house is a great place to practice listening skills again, maybe some speaking, eventually.

This is okay for now, and I plan to commute for inservice, but I can't do that when school starts and it's a lot of gas. School starts on the 18th, so I hope to stay in a crappy hotel until Sept. 1. I'll be paid from ETS sometime in the 3rd week of August--the check has to be forwarded here to a p.o. box. Then the first pay from school is August 31. So it will be by the skin of my teeth that I'm able to afford the crappy hotel for a couple of weeks, if I can. The hotel is full now of coal plant workers just like everything else in town. There's a town house opening up Sept. 1 and I'm supposed to have the first crack at that. So, the crappy hotel is overpriced, of course. There are only two hotels in town, too--the crappy one and the just slightly less crappy one.

But today I'm in Memphis, baby! I can't wait unitl I can come back and go to Beal St. and Graceland! Wearing my CCR tape out, too. I took my boy to a children's museum today. It was a lot of fun and I had to drag him out of there. Frederico has set up his Guitar Hero game now, and my boy is trying to Beat It. (Yes, with the newly flooded airways, my boy has become a fan of The Gloved One.)

I'm excited and nervous. There are too many things to be done and no way to do them at the moment. I wish they would let me see the classroom already and give me a list of names, at least, of my students.

Oh, and I got to speak a little Mandarin today at the museum. That was cool. Messes with my brain, though, to try to code swich. I actually still have better Mandarin than Spanish, I think, or maybe it's all this Castillian I'm getting when I was just getting used to the the 'Rican. (My boy just said, "Whoo-hoo, I rock!")

I think I like being here so much at the moment because I don't have to be an American. That seem out of left field? Well, it's not. I've been so homesick for Taiwan these days. I'm burned out on the American thing. I get to be a Spaniard for a few days. Esta bien!

One more thing--another school district called to offer me a position as ESL co-ordinator for the entire district, a new position they've just created, on just my resume and transcripts, no face-to-face interview! I'm too far into this one to back out now, and that one actually pays less anyay, but, um, I'm the shizzle, y'all!

I guess this is a bit scattered, so Oye como va el ritmo!