Sometimes, dear reader, things happen unexpectedly. They can be so pervasive
that they affect every facet of life. At least, in the short term. Such was the
case with me this week. The week started out well enough with me doing all of
my routine things for The English Center like my two-star leads that I contact
on a Monday and then contact again by telephone on a Friday. I am also fully in
the swing of things with taking over projects for them, at least in the short
term. They include a project to re-patriot people into mainstream society after
being trafficked or having been sex workers. Which I think is a really worthy
endeavor. I was able to give Odhran a private lesson on Tuesday as well as an
in-person pronunciation lesson. And I even gave Isabelle her weekly lesson that
evening. On Wednesday, I headed over to The English Center to do admin work
with them and to teach Sanne, for our penultimate lesson. That evening I was
struck down by an insidious cold that I’ve either had for three weeks and it’s
just reared its ugly head again or this was yet another, separate cold. Either
way, it was ridiculous because the rest of the week was quite difficult.
Thursday and Friday are typically fairly light days because I don’t really
teach. Instead, I have other things going on. This week it would’ve been a
mortgage broker consultation for Jasper and I to talk to them about purchasing
a house. Luckily or unlikely, I’m not sure which guy flaked out and got the
time wrong. He thought we were meeting at 11 and we thought we were meeting at
10:30. We were ready to go at 10:30, but then Jasper had to go to work so they
wouldn’t have been time to wait the half hour until 11 am.
What I noticed, dear reader is that by Thursday I wasn’t really firing on
all cylinders and I was making stupid mistakes. Like the fact that I sent an
email to someone with the wrong name and no subject. I don’t typically make
those mistakes and realized that because I wasn’t feeling at all well, and I
wasn’t as cognisant as I could be, I wasn’t as efficient as I could be either.
As a result, I actually pulled everything off of my schedule that wasn’t online
and kind of put myself to bed. except that I really didn’t. I kept doing online
work as much as I could until one of my colleagues told me that I needed to
slow down and take a break. It’s just as well that my schedule is about to get
much lighter with the completion of both Carlien’s and Senna’s lessons. Neither
of them is going to renew. Which is fine. what is not so fine is that my
student Marco is once again on hiatus for the month of November because he is
also ill. His immune system is very badly rundown after a virus that activated
the symptoms of his chronic illness. I sent him a revised schedule, telling him
that he didn’t need to lose all of the lessons, but rather that we would
suspend them and I would add them to the end of a package that would take us
into March 2023. He hasn’t responded as of this writing, but I am assuming that
that is what he wants to do. I also had to give him a revised DC schedule
because by the time we are ready to begin, I will have to give him a few
lessons in the US and because I already have some commitments I had to figure
out when I was available.
But, dear reader, there was another reason that I had to really be careful
with my health over the weekend. I hosted a friendsgiving on Saturday and did
not want to get anyone sick, but also did not want to get even sicker. it was a
very small intimate Friendsgiving we were only about nine people and so were
able to sit at my table, which was great. The previous Thanksgiving had been in
a Dutch circle style where we all sat on a big circle and atet on our laps. I
have to say that I really like having a sit-down situation but my
850-square-foot apartment doesn’t have a lot of space to be able to do that. So
I had to turn my living room into a dining room. Still, it was a rousing
success, and we did not have any leftovers, which is always a good thing.
While I did not get any writing done this week, I did poke my head in virtually
to the meeting just to say hi and make sure that new people were being noticed.
I also poked my head in very briefly on the discord meeting on Sunday. The
upside to not having Marco on Fridays is that I can actually go out for drinks
on Thursdays now.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As
always, there’s more to come
S
Inkreadable 