I love my apartment. I love it. It's so safe and big and I love it. Totally no regrets on choosing to live alone until I get married. Zero. I love Andrew and I can't wait until we share this apartment but this is the first time in my whole life I've had my own bathroom. Enough said. Also I can keep it pretty tidy all by myself. I don't spend a ton of time here but I do only work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday so I have time to do some cleaning. Also, I don't get sad about Andrew not living here yet because between the two of us I'm the only one with cable/internet so he basically comes here after work and I get to be all domestic and cook dinner. It's nice to eat dinner together at a table, not an island in the kitchen, not a couch, a table. Feels so civilized.
Anyways, so during this long weekend I'm working really hard to get the apartment more fixed up. I'll post more pics when I get it how I want it. Today I got my desk and printer set up in the spare bedroom and the new bookcases are up and the books are in so it's looking more put together. Also, I put down a rug in there so that helps with the put-togetherness of the room. We have done a decent job of moving a lot of the boxes out of the dining room so I'm hoping to have all of that have a permanent home by Tuesday.
Since my last post I've officially started my job. I like it so far! Out of 4 days (three of which were shortened) I've only had one day where I felt defeated when I got home so for the first weekish not too bad! Yeah so here's the deal with my job, I'm part time (56%) and I work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and I go between three different schools. Here's my schedule (abbreviated):
Tuesday:
8:45-9:15 Roosevelt Kindergarten
9:15-9:45 Roosevelt Kindergarten
10:00-10:30 Lincoln First Grade (I think I'm def at Lincoln)
10:30-11:00 Lincoln Kindergarten (I think, may be first grade)
11:15-11:45 Washington 4th Grade
12:30-1 Washington First
1:00-1:30 Washington Second
1:30-2 Washington Kindergarten
2-2:30 Washington 3rd grade
2:30-3 Washington Fifth Grade
Wednesday and Thursday
8:45-9:15 Roosevelt Kindergarten
9:15-9:45 Roosevelt Kindergarten
10:05-10:35 Washington Fourth
11:00-11:30 Lincoln Kindergarten
12:30-1 Washington First
1:00-1:30 Washington Second
1:30-2 Washington Kindergarten
2-2:30 Washington 3rd grade
2:30-3 Washington Fifth Grade
So I have very VERY short travel times between schools so I'm working on my efficiency of getting my stuff to my car and planning my escape from the classes. It's impacted a little bit how I run things in my classroom. I only have my own classroom at Washington so at Roosevelt on Tuesday and Thursday I use the music room but on Wednesday I use the computer lab except when there is testing then we are in the gym on the stage (which I did this Wednesday and was not bad). At Lincoln I get to use the music room all of the days. So for example, I choose not to use chairs in my room. I like it, my principal likes it (big decider) and it just works out but in the room at Roosevelt the teacher always has chairs set up and I don't want to leave her room with it all set weird and I don't have time to reset up her chairs so at Roosevelt we use chairs. I actually kind of like it because it gives me a chance to try out chairs vs. no chairs and compare/contrast so next year (or even in a month or two) if I decide I want to use chairs at Washington I have a reason to want chairs.
Also since I'm only working three days a week I'm doing some subbing. Subs here make a lot more money than in SC so I'm like ok I can rearrange my schedule for that. Also it gives me the opportunity to help out the other music teachers in the district. I've already gotten to sub for high school band and it was really fun!
All of the other music teachers in the district are really nice and I am enjoying working with them. Same for the teachers at my school. We only have like 20 teachers and paras and special ed teachers and stuff at my school due to it being a very small school. I like it though, I get to know all of them very well.
Oh so last week was weird. We got out of school early for heat hahahahaha! I mean it was insanely hot, a lot of the elementary schools in Jamestown don't have central air conditioning. A lot of places in Jamestown don't have central air, including but not limited to my apartment (it's only downfall so far, which according to Andrew and my father who moved in all of my heavy stuff they would probs say the main downfall is that it is upstairs but I feel it's only downfall is the lack of central air). So last week school was out each day at 1pm and due to that I had some teachers forget to bring their kids to music so that happened and I was still exhausted but it was a good practice run of going from school to school. The week before school started on a Thursday and kindergarten hadn't started yet so I basically had a half day since as you can see half my day in Kindergarten. They're sweet at least. And sticky. But some of them give hugs and are cute! I had one girl keep raising her hand to ask me "if we were going to make music" that day. It was sweet. Also they LOVE when I play flute for them, like anything at all. The first day of school was Debussy's birthday so I played some Syrinx and had them listen then we talked about what the music sounded like to them. Some of them said it reminded them of the woods and so I told them some of the story of Syrinx (a very G rated version of Syrinx). Most of them couldn't wrap their brain around the whole half goat/half man thing. I tried to relate it to Mr. Tumnus (I know not the same, close enough) but then I learned which of my kids had all of the Chronicles of Narnia which was quite a few of them. I originally started off playing afternoon of a fawn but in each class someone said something about death and people dying and I didn't feel like crossing that bridge on the first day... rookie mistake...
I'm still looking for some flute students, hopefully when school has been in for a few more weeks it'll be better. Andrew and I are both auditioning on Wednesday to be on the sub list for the Bismarck-Mandan Symphony Orchestra (BMSO) so hopefully we'll get called some for that!
We'll that's plenty for now! Happy Labor Day weekend!
