I’m back to my new normal, dear readers. My post-cataract surgery new normal that is. The laser surgery was a success. At least for now. I am too much of cynic to think that there won’t be issues in the future. After all, I have the empirical evidence to prove it. But for now, my left eye is my reading eye and my right eye sees distance. I have hit the sweet spot with leading with both eyes if I can maintain a specific distance from my Kindle. The surgery itself was quite easy. The young doctor who did the surgery was alternately a bit annoying and a bit amusing. I think, dear reader, he was all of 12 years old. Of course, I exaggerate a bit but he couldn’t have been more than 25. He spoke impeccable English and when I complimented him on his English his response was “yes but I wish I sounded British, you know like James Bond”. I had to sigh at that. The day of the surgery was a wash and I spent most of it on the couch, andwhile I couldn’t stop myself from using my eyes, I didn’t notice much of a difference until the evening. Then I started noticing changes. I have spent the last week not doing much of anything active. I am giving myself a week to recover and then we’ll head back to the gym tomorrow. There was really no aftercare and there was no patch or anything but they did tell me not to do any strenuous activities for about a week. All in all, I’m happy that I went and got the surgery done despite the anxiety I felt for the week before the surgery.
I resumed my teaching activities as normal from last Wednesday. But my schedule is pretty light. I mean let’s face it. it has been a light schedule for months now. That’s what you want, I’ve been hearing from family. I wouBut it isn’t actually. l’d like a consistent 20-hour-a-week teaching schedule. But unfortunately, that’s just not possible. The pandemic took a bite out of the English language teaching market as I have explained. Ad nauseam, I’m sure. But the week brought another loss. It seems that Lingueo sent an email saying that our profiles will be deactivated for those of us who haven’t been on the platform for some time. I never got that e-mail. I have a friend who wanted to take lessons with me on the platform and registered. He was told that I could not give lessons as I was no longer on the platform. When I called Lingueo to find out why, they told me about the email and I said I had not responded when they sent out the email. I told them that I hadn’t received the email and asked if there was anything we could do. They said no because they don’t have enough work for the teachers on the platform currently but they would put in my file that I am willing and ready to work. I think I’m going to try and harass them about once a month so that they have me on their radar. Still, it is a bit of a blow as I was really looking forward to getting back on that platform. When I realised that I was not going to be able to continue with Lingueo for the moment, I also remembered that Italki was going to deactivate profiles. Yesterday, I sent an email to them to see if I was too late to keep that profile active.
I still have a few clients with English Center, but it only adds up to about 7 hours a week of lessons at the moment. I am always hopeful that there will be more lessons but competing with 30 different teachers makes that difficult. I haven’t seen my private students very much over the last couple of weeks.Xander’s family surprised him with a trip to Paris so I didn’t see him yesterday. That makes 3-weeks that I will not have seen him. It looks like Greek is going to be cut to once a week for the moment, but we have agreed to take it week by week in terms of how that plays out. A little bit of good news is I may be getting a new private student in a couple of weeks’ time.
I’m trying to stay positive and believe that these losses are for the best given that I’m going to the US in 10 days and I will have a lot of stuff to do when I get there. The most pressing of which is getting my furniture out of my apartment which has been rented. That’s a little bit difficult to coordinate from here in the Netherlands.
Writing on Thursday was a breeze post-surgery and I could actually see the computer which was great. The group continues the Sunday online write-ins. I also can’t stop myself at times from being a little smug when discord causes problems. I almost want to want to go haha told you so. Which is very petty of me but nobody’s perfect.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there’s more to come.
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