Into the Fire

Last of the Christmas cocktails. . .

Hey fellas,

The Holidays are over, and everyone's gone back to work.

Hooray.

We held onto Christmas as long as we possibly could - we kept the tree up through the New Year, watching Christmas specials, drinking the leftover Christmas cocktails, and jammin' out to Holiday jams until it became weird.

Then came the most depressing time of the year:  boxing up all that Christmas crap until next Thanksgiving.  Or Halloween.  We'll see.

These last two weeks have been a blur, as both kids and adults struggle to get back used to the usual grind.  I think I had the hardest out of the whole clan, seeing how I was out of work for a solid two-week stretch, but I got my ol' teachin' legs back pretty quickly.

As the second half of the school year kicks into gear, we've had a whole slew of new developments fall into our laps. . .

First off, Yours Truly and a few of my esteemed associates from work have been laboring tirelessly on a career 'Plan B,' so to speak.  I can't go into full details yet, but hopefully within the next two months I'll be able to divulge more.  Basically, we realized our creativity was becoming dangerously stagnate at our place of work, and that our livelihoods were suffering as a result.  So, fearing the drudgery of the next twenty or thirty years, we put our heads together and came up with a bold venture that, surprisingly enough, is coming together very rapidly.

Stay tuned.


In other news, Alayna's got a new choir routine she's been actively practicing these last couple weeks. . . and it's horrible.  Any kid song is fully-capable of driving a man to suicide when played on 'repeat' three or four times - back to back - and this new song of hers that she's been practicing is definitely no exception.  Her concert isn't until February, which means we have another month of listening to 'I Love Bugs.'

Thank. Jebus.

Anyway, one huge development - for me, at any rate - is my nomination as Group Leader for an upcoming EF tour to Italy (Milan, Venice, Florence, Assisi, Rome and Pompeii) in March.  Check it out the tour itinerary here if interested.

This more or less fell in my lap, too, so I'm a little stressed as I scramble to start taking over leadership responsibilities with two months before departure.

Basically what happened was that myself and two other teachers began planning this trip out back in May of 2012, but one of the other teachers was the group leader - I was just offering support.  EF Tours is an educational travel agency that I've used in the past to visit Mexico (back in 1998), and they're awesome.  Anyway, we were sorta lazy over the summer and really didn't begin advertising our trip to Italy to parents and students until the beginning of the school year.

The problem with the trip, for most people, was the price per traveler - nearly $2400 per students and $2700 per adult.  Needless to say, only eight people ended up signing up for the trip, despite hundreds of interested persons that had turned out for those early meetings.  EF pays the way for a chaperone if six spots are secured, so basically myself and the other teacher figured we weren't going, and the original group leader continued planning out her trip.

Fast forward four months to present day.

I was approached by this group leader last week, and she mentioned that, due to health concerns, she was unable to lead the group to Italy.  The second-in-line teacher also couldn't make the trip, so, by process of elimination - and sheer luck - Yours Truly is able to travel to Italy for practically nothing.  Sure, I have to pay $130 for a new passport (my old government-issued passport from the Peace Corps is useless), and I have to save up about $500 - $600 for traveling expenses, souvenirs, and lunches (EF pays for breakfasts and dinner, but lunches they expect you to buy yourself).

Not that I'm complaining.

So, for the next two months, I'm going to have my hands full of travel-planning, Plan B-collaborating, lesson-planning, house-maintenance'ing, and child-raising.

Back to the Grind, 2013.

Let's do this.

- Brian