Teacher's Sunday

Today was beautiful. Cold, but beautiful.

I woke up at 7.45, after a late evening of preparing pumpkin-based food for a bunch of French people. A 'Cremaillere' (potlach) which went till late last night, in which I was the 'head cook', so to speak, expected to feed the masses equipped only with an internet connection (for recipes) and a pumpkin.

So waking up to face a 17km run with the Running Room - the group which trains for marathons, here in Westmount, west Montreal - was a tall order. But seeing the beautiful sunlight outside, I mustered up the courage.

The group had dressed up for hallowe'en, and people were running in costume, and had brought their own food for a bake sale, raising funds for people to go to marathons later this year. Their unabashed north American costume-wearing bore its fruits; making an idiot of yourself for a good cause is a well-accepted activity here. And so it damn well should be. Of course, the hardcore runners (who ran 25km around a lake) were equipped as per usual, and didn't slow down a whit for all the Hallowe'en shinanigans. Luckily for my left knee (currently taking its revenge on me for my vagaries this morning), I didn't follow them all the way.

Otherwise, I've spent my Sunday preparing for a job interview in a hotel (yes, I'm looking for anything at the moment, and hotel reception is as good as anything), and getting some food ready for the week. A few meals to grab on the way out the door, so I don't starve during the day or blow a fortune on overpriced crappy sandwiches.

The job interview in a glitzy downtown hotel didn't happen after all, and while I was standing outside the door, after the would-be interview, it started to snow. Only very lightly, and barely a couple of minutes, but it's the first snowfall of the year. I couldn't help but laugh out loud. I love snow!

This evening was spent preparing more applications for schools. I'm hoping to start a position in January, and am going all out, applying for 4 to 5 jobs every 2 or 3 days (which gives me time to redraft, contact people, get extra information they need, etc...), on top of preparing the lessons for this week. Three different sessions, preparing adults for the TOEFL examinations, in two different schools. One is a very well recognised university, and the other is a dodgy little language school in town, whose arm I had to twist to get anything like a decent hourly rate from. But better than a kick in the teeth.

I'm balancing a crazy timetable, and have already mixed up a couple of appointments, which is partly behind today's interview mixup. Yes, my talents with timetabling, so well known amongst my friends and family, are being put to the test, to say the least. It's a learning curve; I hope to come out of this a bit more savvy about how to plan my week around train times, maps to find unknown places, making job interviews and appointments on time, preparing my materials without the help of a photocopier in a school copy room...

But I'll be back to schoolteaching soon, people. Armed and ready, you'll see...