Wednesday, December 03, 2008

New challenges

For those of you who didn't know, we lost Robert in January. He was born in the early hours of January 6 (very premature) and died in the afternoon of January 8. He is buried here in town. My wife thinks about him fairly often. She would like another baby, though we're trying to wait until we move before trying for another.

Also in January, I passed off the responsibility as English Coordinator to someone else (the new native-speaking teacher), so now I'm just a regular teacher with a few extra responsibilities, basically helping when she needs it. My wife and I have been planning to leave here for a long time, but we keep postponing the date. However, if I can finally get her papers worked out and sent, etc., we should finally be leaving this summer. Now that we've been married two years, the permanent residency won't be provisional.

In the Academy, we've more or less removed ourselves from high school, etc., again, because it was a lot of work and wasn't really the direction we want to go, especially since the high school will be separating from the university at some point. We've been wanting to make a Bachelor's degree for some time, but haven't been able to. That is still in the plans, but for now we're trying to make a "tecnica" (like some kind of vocational certification), which is similar but shorter and less work. Then we'll take what we've done for the tecnica and use it to make a Bachelor's. At least that's our plan, though the administration doesn't seem to want a Bachelor's in English right now. I speak as if I'm going to be here, even though the plan is for us to leave, and I know that. Either way, I'll be interested in the wellbeing of the academy, I'd say.

Right now we're in finals week (starting tomorrow, technically), so I'm rather stressed. I'm also stressed because we're supposed to have the tecnica ready by the time we leave for vacation. I decided to blog to try to relax a little.

Classes end next week, but here, vacation is only 2 weeks per year, not whenever there are no classes. I've accumulated a little more (with days off I didn't take, etc., and days left over from last year). We've decided to start our vacation around the 22nd, and we'll be back to work on Jan. 12.

BTW, my mother- and father-in-law came from Peru in August. They were here until October, when they went to visit my wife's aunt and uncle near Monterrey. They were going to be there for a month, but were convinced to stay until the new year. My wife really wanted to spend Christmas with them, so we decided to fly up there for Christmas and come back on Jan. 2, so it looks like we'll be in northern Mexico for Christmas. Actually, we decided that since it is so close to the border, I should cross and buy a new computer while we're there. Hopefully I can also get the title to my car. I have the title transfer papers, which are technically enough, but I really would prefer to have the actual title. My in-laws will be flying back with us, and will stay until around February, it looks like. At first, I didn't think I'd be comfortable with them living in our house (cultural issues, I'm sure), but it didn't turn out bothering me much. But then, my in-laws are great people.

I've also been trying to learn German, and I recently found a very cool resource online. Babbel.com is a great place to learn a new language, with interactive activities, the ability to help others, an automatic tracker of the words you've learned with reminders to review periodically, and more! And it is completely free. I also discovered how RSS works and have become a Google Reader addict. I really enjoy several language/linguistics blogs (at the moment mainly on English topics), such as languagelog, languagehat, and Mr. Verb.

Anyway, I've got a lot of work to do, so I'd better get to it. Hello to my friends who read here, especially those from Oregon and Texas.