March 19, 2010
The Longest Blog
So,
Writing a blog seems to be a challenge for me. It isn’t as though nothing happens in my life. I am constantly in action, bombarded by decisions that must happen now, in motion and choosing the next path in my life. At each stage I tell myself that it can only get a little less dizzying, a little less busy. Somehow I imagine that at some point I will be able to catch up to myself, but I am beginning to realize that it just isn’t going to happen. All of my friends and family are now on facebook, something I worry about with all the worldwide firings that have occurred over facebook postings for teachers, and I barely ever use MySpace either. I do tweet, but I use it for professional postings and not so much in the personal realm. Having sat down and discussed with my husband and later my mother, some of the ongoing activities that have completely filled my time, I realized that it was about time for me to blog. To at least write this stuff down before it becomes completely unreal.
This summer my husband got back on the Atkins diet. He has lost a huge amount of weight and is still going strong and I am proud of the work he is doing. I joined him (except that I have all the fruit and veggies I want, I just don’t eat processed sugar foods or common breads. I eat some cereals and I have diabetic whole grain breads and the occasional Arabic bread with hummus on special occasions. I also have been using my wii fit and the DDR mats my hubby and kids got me for Christmas. In fact I use the DDR mats on a bi-weekly basis with a friend. One hour each time, and occasionally on my own in between times. With all of this activity I have fully lost about 33 lbs. However, I am a sugar addict and continue to crave something fierce. Breaking with Pepsi was pretty hard, but I was able to do it pretty quickly. It was the straight sugars that I had trouble with. The first two weeks on the diet I was horrible to be around. The kids and hubby had to stay as far away from me as possible while I worked though the withdrawal symptoms. Since that time I still have the occasional hard hit of cravings but 33lbs is enough to make me think twice. I have 10lbs left to go to hit my ideal (this is the amount my doctor in the states said prior to our leaving to travel abroad not some inflated number but the top end of the range the doctor had given me for my height and age.
While I like the loss of weight, and all the compliments I get when people realize how it has made me look taller and healthier, it is still hard to deal with as the office tends to be one of those places where people are always bringing in cakes to share and breads, croissants, and the local greasy breads and sweets. Chocolates are always making the rounds. It was hard to say no to, but I was serious about making my goal and now that I am almost there it continues to be hard to continue because I am an emotional eater so as the stress grows it becomes even harder to avoid eating my crutch foods, which are primarily sugar treats. Anyone who has known me for any amount of time knows that I will sit and munch on candy that five year olds would turn away from for being too sweet. Popcorn and cranberry juice are my other crutches. I can have the sugar free cranberry juice and I can do small bowls of hot air popcorn because they are lighter in sugars than you might think, but I have to be careful which makes it even harder. As stress grows so does my desire to sit on my duff and munch. So instead I have been doing DDR (dance dance revolution, we have 3 disks of different dancing games) and going for walks and other more active reactions. But it still is difficult to do. Anyway, on to why I have been stressed.
I am going to start with saying that I tried for a promotion and was turned down. Through no fault of my own, as it has since been explained to me, I made myself so very valuable to the school that I currently work for that they couldn’t afford to lose me to a position that would remove me from being a faculty member. The position, a coordinator of a Independent learning centre, would have put me in a position to assist students and provide PD to teachers while limiting my classroom interactions. The director at that time viewed me as “the most flexible teacher on staff” basically stating that I could teach anything and thus placing me in the position to teach anything she wanted taught. This was alright for me at first as I was appreciating the complimentary attitude that came with it. However, when I found out that my application was flat out stopped instead of allowing me to make it to the interview process.
There was really not much I could do at that point.
One of my darling sons decided that he wanted to know what would happen if he lit a small pile of paper on fire. He did this while at school. He piled the papers up in the cement stairwell and lit them on fire with a set of matches he had been given in science class for lighting the Bunsen burner. This little incident was compounded by the fact that the fire was next to the intake ventilator for the schools computer servers. He was suspended from school. When asked why he did it his reply was “if I had lit it in the field it might have started a wild fire and gotten out of control. The building is cement and wouldn’t burn down, I was trying to be safe.” Yes, my son is a trouble maker. Too smart, and too idle at the same time.
Then my other darling son was playing a game during lunch and a girl started to give him a hard time, telling him that his father is fat and several other nasty rude statements. She got into his face and he walked away. But instead of letting it go he came back and just got himself worked up, so when she got close to him again he pushed her. He didn’t punch, didn’t kick, just pushed her. But that was enough, of course. He sprained her leg and was suspended for using violence in the school. It was on campus suspension. Of course the girl was also given detention for her part in it. While serving detention, my son made a bad judgment call. A rather large woman who worked in the office came in to turn on the A/C while he was sitting in detention and my smart but silly son says “fat stores heat” in his off handed factual way. He says things like this all the time and I don’t honestly think he meant to be mean. The office worker was immediately affronted by his statement and made a formal complaint to the principal. So he was sent home to stay for an additional day for his treatment of the office worker. If he has one more “formal incident” he will be expelled from the school, which happens to be the only acceptable school in town. Not a nice situation to be in.
This rather down feeling event was barely preceded by my darling husband getting in trouble with the law in the UAE. I can only tell this story from my point of view, so that is how I am going to explain it. I was at work, just finished my teaching for the day and I got back to my desk to receive a phone call. This call was to inform me that I needed to come and see the head of community relations immediately. She explained that the police had called and wanted me to go to the police station, saying something about it not being my fault and that it had involved my “blue Chevy and a man”. So I promptly called my husband and told him to get the car washed (I meant hose it down as it was covered in mud from the recent rains) and to come pick me up as soon as possible so we could go to the station. An hour later we drove to the police station to find that he was being accused of flipping some A$$hole Emirati the bird while driving the kids to school in the morning.
Normally, I would believe this to be entirely possible, but he doesn’t do that in front of the kids because they will tattle on him and I would bitch him out for it. Flipping someone the bird in the UAE is punishable by deportation. So I am of course flipping out. I have no intention of putting up with it at all. The police officer begins to pressure my hubby into saying he did it and I gave him “the look” and said No! as clearly as I possibly could. Not that I think he would have said he did, but I wanted there to be no misunderstanding, I was not going to allow him to incriminate himself or to admit to anything without at least a lawyer present. The police officer actually drew him into the hall so he would be out of my sight but he still refused to admit any guilt, thank goodness. Had he admitted guilt he would have been arrested, fined, and had to spend up to 60 days in jail. This would have been followed by a civil suit from the Emirati for 50,000 AED. About $ 18,000. Having refused to say he did it, it fell to a judge to decide guilt or innocence. There were no witnesses above the age of consent, (my kids were present at the time and they say that daddy said something totally inappropriate to the guy because he was driving like an A$$ but that he did NOT flip the bird… and I believe them). So I contacted the consulate and then arranged a lawyer. This cost me my “trip home” savings. Well, the lawyer and the court costs did. So now I am upset over money.
The judge was a fair man. He told my husband to apologize for his attitude and for escalating the situation, and then he told the other man to apologize for his reckless driving. If either had refused he would have placed the maximum possible punishments on both, but since my husband did NOT admit to doing anything he could not b sued for the civil action, thank goodness. Since it has finally been dismissed I can breathe a sigh of relief. However, the money that was involved is too much to lose for a lesson in keeping your hands on the wheel and keeping your temper when driving. Ridiculous.
So while all this was going on I was worried that we would be deported from the country. This would have been the worst possible scenario, and it would have been preceded by his jail sentence and we would have had to stay until he could pay the fine which means all of my funds would have been required to go to the judgment.
This court issue was going on while I got an email from TESOL Arabia. My proposal for presenting has been accepted. They gave me the date and time. I had to prepare everything to be ready for that event as well. This is the first “real” presentation that I have had to give. Everything else I have done has been in the form of workshops, which are really popular but are still not “real”. I prepared a presentation on Will’s final project for his masters, an activity that he created that I used in my class which bombed horribly because it wasn’t applied in the right manner and was not based on the extensive reading that I had intended it to be… We had used a novel instead of a graded reader, so it failed in that sense. Everything else worked fabulously. And it was so full of useful information that I wanted to share it. I presented on it last week at the conference to a hugely supportive and excited crowd. It was a very popular presentation, but for some reason I walked away feeling like I had done really poorly. Usually when I attend these conferences I feel really good about them but this time I felt like I had failed. This is really bad for me because with all of the other stress that loaded itself on me recently, I am basically hitting the burn out wall.
But back to the chronological events. I had to prepare the presentation. In addition, I am the editor of the local TESOL Arabia chapter’s newsletter. I take every job I do very seriously and with good reason. People all around the world read my newsletter; some have even quoted some of the research in other papers. While it is not a peer reviewed journal, it is a resource that people use. It is called the RAK Report (and you can find it on the TESOL Arabia website if you’re interested) and while I haven’t been the editor for long, I have people who are high up in the organization who know my name and reputation from this event and my other contributions. My name is getting known in a good way. I was trying to do something new with the latest issue, a side by side article presentation that had slightly different views on a topic. It was challenging to do, finding two writers willing to try something new, and to get it all together. When the news broke that Christine Coombe, who is heavy in TESOL Arabia and important to our small community of teachers, was voted the new President of TESOL Inc, I had to scramble to get the coverage of these events into the newsletter as well. I couldn’t release the issue without covering it, but it was too fast (day before the release) to write myself. So I was able to grab two pre-written articles, one an official release the other a newspaper interview attributed to the original newspaper, and slam them into the issue. This put my little newsletter to a massive 27 pages, which is huge to be honest. I also had to find the photographs to put into the issue and at the last minute had to change the comic that I had in it (there was a glass that resembled wine a little too much, a forbidden topic here) so out it went and in went a new comic. It is not as easy as it may sound. If anyone knows a comic artist who is interested in writing comic panels for a newsletter that talk about education issues, pass them my way and I will be happy to have them featured on a regular basis.
In addition to this (yes, I am not finished yet) the new semester had started. I was informed that half (or very nearly half) of the students we had expected had failed the final exam and were not going to be in the intake, so therefore my position as a business teacher in semester 1 was no longer available to me. So would I please teach foundations computers? The thing is, I don’t mind teaching computers to foundations students, but having 100 students at any given time makes it really flippen hard to remember their names. And in order to show them that I care about them I really need to know their names. I have tried and tried but I just can’t do more than 40 at a time. Do you realize how many students a teacher has at any given time? Or just how many lives we effect? They say that if you have 10 people remember you for their life, you are a lucky person. A teacher has thousands of people remember them, the good and the bad, and I am sorry but that is a heck of a lot of pressure to put on someone. And if a teacher forgets a student’s name, that student hurts for it. So it really is an important little thing. But I accepted my fate stoically. I met the students and started the semester caring about the students and making a huge effort to learn names. Three weeks in I am informed that they need me to pull out of teaching computers because they have a business and English class that they need taught for a special group of students. These are truly special students. Every one of them has failed in the past. They need to pass this “last chance” class or they are out of college.
In the UAE, especially in the most rural areas, a girl’s life is rather restricted. They are only the first generation of students; their parents are not educated or are rarely educated. This is the generation that matters to the next most because if they choose to embrace education then their children will have a chance to rule the world, as they say. Or rather, to rule their world. The girls have two options in this existence. To go to college and get a job which will give them something else to do and give them a chance to help their families, to broaden their existence. Or to get married and have kids. Well, in either case they are expected to get married and have kids, but having an education will give them the opportunity to do a little more than just stay home and watch the kids. That is their only option if they don’t go to college. If they drop out of college they have only that option of going home to have kids. I am not talking about areas you hear about normally. A girl in Dubai has a far greater spread of options. But a girl in the rural districts has a Bedouin father and if they attend my college they are most likely the daughter of the second or third wife. They have no choices and no options available to them. This is like the trailer park life. If they don’t find their escape, they are trapped in the trailer park for life (a really good metaphor I think). So my entire class of students is on their last chance.
If you are not a teacher, you will not likely understand the amount of pressure that put me under from the start. My director basically has told all of the teachers that they are responsible for seeing as many students pass as possible and then handed me a class of students who are already struggling and may not make it at all, with the directive that I have to help them to pass. These girls are not stupid. They are battered and broken from all their failures and left only partially motivated. I had to spend my first week building up their esteem and trying to get them focused on the idea that they are here for an opportunity and not at the end of their lives. Now that I have done that I have to get them to do what is necessary to achieve the grades that they need. However, as they say, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. I can’t make them do the homework or do the work they need to in order to pass. I can try everything I can think of, but that doesn’t mean that they will actually pass. I am positive that I can help these girls pass the business course. It is simply a matter of getting them to understand the concepts that they need to know to pass the exams. No offense to content teachers, but content is easier than English. The English is a different matter entirely. I have to get them to expand their vocabulary, learn to read for specific information from an unfamiliar reading, write 200-250 word essays without truly understanding the global concepts because there is always a chance that the global concept is something they have never been introduced to before. There is only so much a teacher can do. I have extensive vocabulary flash cards and activities for them, I spend time writing essays with them, I have them reading graded readers with all kinds of guidance from me, we do listening activities, grammar activities, etc ad nauseum, and still they struggle. It has gotten to the point that I have started to invite other teachers in to the class for team teaching and swapped lessons to make sure that I am hitting every learning type and everything that I can possibly do. I have put students into counseling for motivation and even for internet addiction. I am pulling my hair out trying to do everything I can because I actually care about what happens to these students.
There is a heck of a lot of pressure on these students and on my. Two days ago one of my students (who happens to be pregnant) passed out in class. Not a small faint but a full out gone, on the floor, dead to the world faint. This occurred twenty minutes before my semester observation.
I was invited to participate in the “arts and heritage day” at the college, as every teacher is. I was suppose to arrange a few famous female Emirati directors. I had found one of the most famous, got her to agree to come, arranged for her films, and then at the last minute (a week before the event) her films were screened by the assistant director and several other Emirati. At each stage everyone who had seen the films said yes. After all, they are by Emirati for Emirati. But the assistant director said no. Now to be fair, the films are fabulous and dark. The first is about child sexual abuse, but the filming is masterful and nothing is ever shown or even directly suggested. I think it is a fab film. The second was about a young Emirati girl who disobeys all of society’s rules to sneak out and meet a boy. This is a radical idea and the film shows how dangerous and bad that decision is with a huge build up of tension and great filming. I think both films are worth watching. But they were censored by the AD. So we cancelled the film portion of the day. I had no intention of pulling out my hair to get someone else in. Why bother if we can be vetoed by one person after being okayed by others.
However, every teacher is expected to participate in this particular event. So I had also arranged to be in the “Morris dancing”. If you are wondering what that is, you will either have to wait for the video, or look at “Cotswold Morris dancing” on YouTube. That is what I did. I hit someone else with a big stick and danced like a crazy person wearing bells. It was a huge hit with the students and all the Europeans went nuts for it; mostly because it is a British dance done by drunks for drunks in most cases. Neither we nor our audience were drunk but for some reason they loved it. We had to do encores at every other hour for four different times and locations.
In addition, I was asked to sing a song with the “College Band”. This is a small band of musicians who invited me to sing after hearing my rendition of “Big Spender” at the pantomime this year. I played an asexual Chinese courtier until faced with a big bowl of diamonds, wherein I broke out singing big spender. There is a copy of it (though not from the night of the event, which I am told was incredible to behold) on my MySpace page that you can hear. Eventually I will put up the song with the video. In it, you see me pull my hair down from the very tight bun that I wore all night. Hair that comes down from a bun swings down in large waves or loose curls, which looks fabulous. So of course there were a lot of cat calls. But in addition, I have a surprising depth to my voice which I didn’t have until I started to mature as a woman. It comes out strong enough that I don’t need a microphone and it seems to rock people to their core to hear me sing that way. I have had enough people come to tell me that it was good that I finally started to believe them. So when I was invited to sing with the band it wasn’t such a surprise. The pianist requested that I sing a specific song that I had never tried before. You may have heard it, “I don’t know why” as sung by Norah Jones. I am not saying that I sound like her. I don’t. But I do sing it well. Well enough that the new director of the college asked me for a “private concert in his office” and he wasn’t flirting with me. I will eventually post the video of that as well. I also was asked to read a few of my favorite poems (or ones that I had written) to the audience, which I did. I didn’t read my own, I chose a couple from my friend Bruce Feld and one by Wordsworth, all about traveling making me miss home. Very appropriate for my predominately expatriate audience I think. This day was ended with three very fast events. I played my first concert on piano, or my first recital as it were. It was nice to play for an audience; even if I needed to play for 30 minutes and my main song was only 4 minutes long. I really spent time fiddling around. They were a nice audience to put up with it. This was followed by my class (all classes were expected to participate in some way) putting on a fashion show for adults and then a fashion show with children. I was in the fashion show for adults, but only to help the students get the adults onto the stage and the catwalk. With the children’s fashion show, my daughter wore a traditional Japanese kimono which one of our Japanese friends tied the obi for and put in a hair decoration and then very nicely gave her the shoes to wear. It was all very nice of her. My daughter had the appropriate socks and handbag to go with it, so she had the full outfit. She won first prize. That was fun for her. My oldest boy wore traditional Emirati gear, which was nice and my youngest wore traditional Japanese men’s clothes… a hapi coat with the matching shorts and sandals. This event was closely followed by an event that I had planned, the local gymnastics group performing outside. It was an awesome presentation, and the kids involved did beautifully, but there was almost no audience because it was already 3pm and nobody wanted to be there anymore. This day was a huge, long, and involved event and I don’t want to do it again!
I am also in the process of taking the first Leadership and Management course online being offered by TESOL Arabia, so I have readings and coursework that I am trying to keep up with. This isn’t actually a difficulty for me, beyond the fact that my work laptop decided to commit seppuku on my desk two days ago and had to be taken to ITS for a full reformatting. Lucky for me I always keep all of my work on my external hard drive but that doesn’t make spending an entire day and a half away from my laptop when I am suppose to be teaching with technology. Worse yet, even after all that effort, the computer is still completely wonky. It takes a full 30 minutes to start up, so I have to get to work at least 30 minutes early if I want to do anything at all. And since all work communications are done through outlook, if I can’t get it to work soon, I am going to have to take it back to ITS and bug them till they get it to work properly. Especially since I have NO programs on it and nothing extra running. It is the standard work laptop with nothing else on it so there is absolutely no reason why it wouldn’t work.
I am also waiting patiently to hear back from the scholarship committee about my PhD. I have been accepted for a PhD in Educational Technology and applied for a full scholarship. I was suppose to hear back from them in “4-6 weeks”. I was patient. Their website then changed to say “7-14 weeks”, so I waited patiently. 14 weeks passed, so I called and was told that yes they have my application and the decision will be made at the end of March. I will hear back from them in May. This one at least I have stopped worrying about, there is simply nothing I can do about it.
On top of all of this I have had a little bit of stress involving my darling hubby. He finally graduated with his MEd and is so impatient to start working that he has started panicking because he didn’t get the job he wanted at the library. He was a shue-in but for the fact that someone wanted their best friend in the position and wasta matters. Wasta, like guanxi, like nepotism, is a powerful thing in this part of the world. So he didn’t get the job. And with the court case hitting us as hard as it did, he has been obsessing about finding a job. So much so, that he has put unintentional pressure on me to use my wasta to get him in to see the college director and in to interviews at the conference that I was presenting at. He didn’t intend to put any onus on me, but it was still yet one more little thing for me to be concerned with.
Last week I was called into the director’s office for a meeting. This is not something I enjoy, in fact every time I have ever been called into a director’s office it has been a bad thing so I was thinking to myself and I am sure it was clearly written on my face… “Oh f*ck, what have I done now.” The person who came to get me was the head of HR, so I am thinking that we are gone, that I have been fired and this little adventure is over. He invites me in to have a seat and says to me “you are only teaching 15 hours, would you like to teach more?” My immediate response (with the oh F still in my head) “ sure, that would be fine with me.” I think he was rather startled by that response and it put him into a different approach mode. He says to me “you applied for the ILC coordinator position last semester. I don’t know why your application was stopped, but it was and without any notes or anything. Would you still be interested in that position?” In my mind I am going…” but they told me it was lost… not stopped” but I say “yes I am.” He explains that the current coordinator is leaving and they need an interim person until the position can be advertised. There is no guarantee that the position will be mine after the position is advertised, but he says “as long as you apply I will make sure you get an interview this time.” So I say “thank you, I would be happy to.” So on top of my 15 hours of teaching a week (usually I teach 20-25 so it is a lighter load than usual if it weren’t for their particular situation as I explained earlier) I am also taking over a position that is a full time job but that I am supposed to fit in for “5 hours a week”. This is a supervisors position, so I will have to monitor the actions of three Emirati staff members in addition to trying to complete the other duties that are involved. This is of course the job that I wanted previously and still want bad enough that I am willing to put up with the crap being overloaded on my shoulders for the next ten weeks for the opportunity just to interview for the position.
I am such a total nob.
I was then told that I have to keep it a secret until the news breaks that the former supervisor is leaving. She needed to inform her staff and needed the time to help them adjust. But not two days later someone else stops me in the hall to congratulate me for the position. I was kind of in shock…
“How did you find out?” “Oh, it was announced by our supervisor in our team meeting.” So of course I had to run to tell my own supervisor before she hears it on the grapevine, worried that no one had bothered to inform her, which is the position of the director, not me. But of course no one had told her and if I hadn’t, she never would have known. It is a pain in the neck and I shouldn’t have needed to be the one to inform her.
The same day I get an email from my sister and mother that my grandmother is in the hospital. Her blood pressure has been fluctuating up and down for the past few weeks. It shoots up really high and it takes a bit to go down, but they don’t know why it goes up. She is on medication and she is doing okay right now, but they still don’t know why it keeps doing it. So of course I am worried about her while all of this is going on.
I get home from work and my daughter informs me that she is going to be starring in a play at school and she needs a costume. She goes with her dad and buys me a sewing machine and she informs me that she is going to be a great white shark. So I have to go out at night to the tailor district to buy clothe to make my daughters costume. I have never made a costume before, and I am sure my mother remembers what it was like to make a costume without a pattern. She made me an awesome ET costume the year that ET came out. I have never forgotten the effort she put into it, so of course I felt that I couldn’t let my little girl down. So I bought the clothe and some buttons for eyes, bought an old cheap pillow to stuff in the head and the tail to keep it firm and sewed up the costume for my little girl. And she loved it and was wonderful in it. She was not supposed to be the star of the show, but she stole the stage every time she came on. Her acting, not the costume, though it was really good. I will try to post some out take videos on my YouTube site, and one or two scenes here on MySpace if I can.
I think my biggest issue is that people keep talking about how amazing I am. How I can do anything and I am always so in control, so organized, so good at what I am doing. I have a few people who realize that I am having difficulties and they are wonderful and supportive. I have one person who keeps stopping by to remind me that she is there to help, though she is in a different department and does completely different things. But she is aware of what teacher burn out is and knows that I am a prime candidate for completely flaming out. I appreciate her so much it is hard to put into words.
I went to the finance department about two days ago to get money back for paying for going to the TESOL conference and the head of the department stopped to chat with me. He told me that I had a fabulous voice and asked me when I was going to leave this job to sing professionally. He wasn’t joking. In fact when I tried to brush it off and just say thanks he reiterated it and said that he hadn’t heard anything that good in a long time and thought that I should seriously consider putting down 8-10 songs as a repertoire and hit Dubai. I told him that I appreciated the compliment but that I am just a teacher. He just shook his head and said it was a real shame, that I should be doing something more with my voice. Said something like “you have a voice like one of those jazz singers, those lounge acts from the 40s, and you would be truly fabulous if you did it.”
And then of course there was yesterday. Yesterday I was teaching my students with that stupid computer acting up and between classes I get a phone call from my husband. He sounds like he is about to cry, probably because he was. My dog, the one we got this summer, an 11 year old wonder dog named Rufus, had gotten out of the yard (he is an indoor dog and we only let him out for a short time because he prefers the indoors) and run into the busy road and been hit by a car. It was quick and he was killed instantly, his neck snapped and his rib cage was shattered but otherwise he looked like he was sleeping peacefully. I know this because my darling husband went out to the road, gathered him up and then buried him in the sand hills behind our home. This was an hour before he had to leave for Dubai for a job interview. So he showered off and got dressed and went to Dubai. In Dubai he went to the interview, which in all reality was a casting call for a commercial.
Actually, I need to start this part from the previous Friday. I was suppose to go to my writers group but my honey had been invited to try out for a part in a commercial and asked me nicely if I would go with him. So I did. I rode with him to Dubai and he went in to read for the part. He then came out and dragged me in, telling me I needed to try out too. I told him no repeatedly, as I am not interested in being in a commercial, and my contract says quite clearly that I am not permitted to do outside work within the UAE. It is meant to say no teaching work, but the wording is clear enough to mean any work. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I went in and did the screen test. They had me “read” for a silent part. They had me do two takes and then we left. I got a call back the next day. I thanked them for the offer but told them that I couldn’t possibly and then hung up. On Wednesday night at about Midnight, my hubby gets a “text back” asking him to come the next day at 2. Thursday arrives and he is getting ready when he gets a phone call from a neighbor who had just noticed our dog at the side of the road. That is when he went out and found the poor dog dead and had to bury him. So then he cleans up and goes to Dubai for the meeting with the client. While he is in the room with the “beautiful people” he chats and gets to know a bunch of the “professional” models and a man who does regular voiceovers in Farsi. He actually wowed most of them, made friends, exchanged numbers and had a good time. He then went in to meet the client, enjoyed his reading, and was given a Blackberry 9000 for his time. He gave one of the models (a flight attendant no less) a lift home and then came home to tell me all about it, giving me the phone as a gift because he had gotten a new one for Christmas and I was in need of a new one. You see, my phone (which is awesome anyway but this new one is nice too) had decided to have a meltdown. The battery stopped taking a charge and started to slowly expand. It swelled to twice its usual size. We tried to get it replaced, but no place in the UAE seems to have that kind of battery, so I have been phoneless for the past 4 weeks.
If it isn’t one thing it’s another.
So all in all what I have been trying to say is that, while I haven’t been blogging, I probably should have been. My life is just so full of everything that I just don’t feel like I have time for anything anymore. But I am finally starting to get a handle on things, I think because I finally realize that I am overloaded and that I can ask for help. Plus I talked to my husband and unloaded a whole bunch, which was followed by a phone call to my mother which always makes me feel better. So thanks mom, thanks my hubby, I feel much better now.
Now, I have to go check on my online class in Leadership. I hope I remember to blog again soon.
Take care of yourself and each other. Life is too short to be fretting about the small stuff, and even too short to sweat the big stuff either. It is about time to just have fun. To let this life really show you what it means to enjoy living. It is time for me to stop stressing and just let it flow. All things come to fruition in the end.
And I still plan to come back to the U.S. in August for a short visit with the family. It is time for all of us to visit home. Besides, I want to go get my hair cut with my mother.
All my love to you.
