Month: March 2004

Well after a couple of days of sunshine it’s now back to clouds and rain. The weekend will be a nice break, and only a couple weeks are left of our daily grind. Feels like it will never get here. What a long year! Well, bon weekend.

Well I’m loving my new job now. It just took a little getting used to. It’s wonderful teaching in an anglophone environment. It makes me so happy- speaking English all day to everyone. I can really talk with the other teachers. What a gift to be able to understand one another perfectly!!! How I missed that. And how I love speaking to Americans- there are only a few of them (students and staff). Because yeah it’s great speaking to a British person but half the time I don’t understand what they’re saying due to the accent. I have to really concentrate to be able to tell what they say. I supervise computer club Wednesday afternoons after school and I have some great kids. We have fun. I sat down during our club after teaching them a lesson and said “I’m tired and hungry.” And this cute little American girl was like “you can have some of my snack.” It’s just the little things like that that I missed- being comfortable with people and being able to express myself perfectly without any thought beforehand. Oh how we will appreciate being home! I told Kyle we’re not allowed to complain about anything for a whole month after we get back to the US! Because we just need to be grateful, relax and let it sink in that we’re home FOR GOOD.

An interesting read on French-American innovation can be found here. Did you know that Airbus is a French company? Also, the French outlook on our presidential election can be seen here. My favorite part: Mrs. Borde said the French see in Mr. Kerry the kind of leader they are more accustomed to. “He is the closest thing that you will have to a French politician, with a certain diplomacy, a certain elegance,” she said. How privileged we are! (note: I am very pro-Kerry but very anti-nonsensical vanity).

Well the luxury of hot water is no longer one that we can lay claim to. It’s been out for almost a week now, and so it’s a real joy to try and take a shower. We will have to call our landlord about this tonight, but unfortunately there are also about five other things broken in the apartment. So it could be a pretty long conversation. Among the highlights: Only one of our electrical outlets currently functions, so we can no longer cook food and be on the internet at the same time. In fact, we can’t do anything having to do with electricity while we cook food. The ceiling is starting to peel in the bathroom, much like what was happening to our wall when we first moved in. The end result of the wall being in this condition was that half of it fell off and the dry paint stained a lot of our clothing. The shower now pumps out about a fraction of the water it should. Instead of shutting off the flow of water to the bathtub, it does about half and half. So if you want to take a shower, you end up about ankle-deep in recycled water. Finally, the vacumm that we “found” downstairs decided to blow up the other night, and, had Sara not seen the large glowing light forming inside, probably would have taken off more than one of my limbs. But we do at least still have the burnt rubber smell to hang onto. There’s nothing the landlord can do about this one, but it might be fun to let him know about it. Well, that’s it for the weekly apartment update. Early bets are being taken for the next catastrophe; so far the heater going out is at 5:1 odds.

The photos of our trip last week to the Musée d’Orsay are now up. You can see them by going to the Photo Albums.

We are both very glad that the weekend is finally here. Sara’s new job has been tiring her out and mine never seems to get any easier, so we are both going to enjoy the rest and time to sleep in. Hopefully the weather will get a little bit better at least. Today it was not only cold but pouring down rain. If that keeps up, it might be a long indoor weekend of online CSPAN viewing for us. Everyone think sun! We are working hard on grad schools for Sara next year. We have some leads that look promising. After I got some good news this week, we are hoping that we can both get through next year without going into too much debt. It’s very exciting even thinking about being home again. Neither of us can wait.

Good news is on the way! It’s still colder than heck here though. This makes our trip to Stockholm look like paradise. Punishing cold it is. Oh well, less than three weeks left of work now. I’m looking forward to doing nothing from April 1 to April 8 when my parents arrive. Nothing includes not going to work. Yeah! Well, like I said, good news to come.

The weather here is absolutely freezing. Especially with my long hair all gone, the wind is a killer. Listening to the warm reports from Oregon, I remember those first days of spring last year in Eugene when the temperature hit 70 degrees. Wish that was happening here! And I hope it lasts the whole spring this time, so we can enjoy it when we are back in May. Last year I remember it rained through June. Oh well, anything warmer than this will be great.

First day of new job today. It feels good to be busy again. Being home 2 days a week was making me start feeling like a bored housewife. It’s fun teaching in English again. Although I’m teaching a groups of students where some speak Spanish, some French, some I don’t know. My question is how do you manage 20 first graders at a time in a computer lab? Especially when only about half can understand English!

Well, we decided to change things around a bit here on kyleandsara.com. First of all, we have incorporated a little journal or weblog (blog to the layperson) for us to put down our thoughts each day (or as often as we can). We think this will be cool for many reasons: to help our friends and family see what we are doing, to force us to keep a record of our experiences, and to have fun with writing. You can see our daily blatherings just by coming to this main page of the site (the address will never change). All of the new blog entries are listed chronologically. You can also go back and look at old entries by going to the “Blog Archives” section on the left side of the page. So now you’ll never miss a second of new kyleandsara.com material, no matter how exciting these stories may get (see the plumbing tale that Sara wrote about below!). All of the old content is still available from the menu on the left side. There’s even some new stuff to look at on that side as well (keep up with our reading if you are bored). You can also comment on any blog entries we make just by clicking on the “comments” link at the end of each entry. Well, we hope you like it here. We’ll keep adding stuff because it’s fun. Thanks for coming by!