Labor Day

I've been out of work for over a year. No worries. I had some money saved up and plenty of credit to weather the storms. Lisa sold a few houses and we've managed to stay on top of our bills. We came through all this OK. Sure I could have picked up some crappy job at Target or washing dishes but I knew if I did that I wouldn't be able to focus on getting a job that does more then leave us just slightly in the hole every month. That's not to say we haven't had some lean months but things could be much worse. In fact, if I didn't get a job this month I would have had to go back into the food service industry. During all this Lisa has been supremely patient and for that I love her.

Keep this next detail in mind while I change gears for a moment. Lisa sold a house to the tenant living in our basement. The good tenant that we liked not the lieing ass bastard level 2 sex offender in our other apartment. Luck smiles upon us, we immediately found a single middle aged woman with no pets who doesn't smoke to move in right away. The perfect tenant.

Yes, for my so-called regular readers who missed all those postings I've got a job now. I'm teaching 3 courses at the regional high school for a couple small seacoast towns north of Boston. I'll be teaching Chemistry, Physics and a freshman level course called IPED "Introduction to Physics and Engineering Design". Chemistry is a no brainer for me. Physics shouldn't be a challenge but I'm not certified for it and so need to take the MTEL ASAP but I am a little rusty on the minutiae. IPED worries me. It's a new course being written on the fly by another teacher and The Museum Of Science. It's still experimental and may not always work. I pray for a common prep time with the other teacher. (Who by the way is awesome, I'm really going to learn a lot from her, probably more so then from my official mentor. My mentor is also a great educator and has been really cool so far but I won't be working as closely with him. Especially when school starts.)

I'll tell the story of how I got hired in a later posting, the important thing to know is that I was hired about a week before school started. This is really a story about hard work. I have 3 lesson plans to do. 180 days of lesson plans for 3 subjects. 540 lesson plans. Thankfully they're not all due on the first day but I do have to be close hauled along the line when the starting cannon fires. This has been the busiest week of my life.

Since there's not enough stress in my life we decided to add a little more. Remember that apartment in the basement. It's got a little problem with mold. Smelly mold. The last tenant didn't complain because he thought it was from his dog. Lisa's grandfather never noticed the smell because he smokes cigars and your sense of smell burns out with age. I can't stand it. I can smell it 3 floors up, especially in the winter time when the furnace kicks on and blows recirculated air all over the house. Last winter we tested the air in the house. It's penicillamide mold and I'm allergic to antibiotics, especially penicillin. Nuno doesn't smell it so it's not a problem. He even said at one point "If you don't like how the house smells you can move." This was the only time we've ever argued and if it wasn't Lisa's birthday I would have walked out and never looked back. You don't want to call my bluff, ever and I will call yours. Lisa managed to smooth things over the next day and Tom did admit that he didn't mean to blurt it out. Still I was already packing.

A couple days ago the new tenant called him to ask about the condition of the apartment. She asked if we were able to get the smell out and said she didn't want to move in if we don't. Now there's money on the line. Nuno sprang into action, apologized for not wanting to clean up the house and called a carpet company. Then he asked us to paint before the new carpets get installed.

Let's recap. I've been out of work for over a year. The apartment was empty for the last two weeks. We've been asking him to take care of the smell for a while now. I got a job that requires an assload of prep time. Now Lisa's grandfather wants to fix the apartment and since he's 85 and light maintenance is how we pay our rent Lisa and I have to pull out the old carpet and paint an 800 square foot apartment. I don't have any free time (I shouldn't be writing this.) We just finished painting. How many lesson plans have I written? None. Thankfully I still have 41 hours before school starts.

This is my last long posting for a really long while. I come up for air sometime at the end of June. I'll try to squeeze a few short ones in. Especially on what I like to call "Big Traffic Wednesdays".


And a post script to the story, because Nana was so sick for so long and on continuous oxygen Nuno smokes his cigars outside or in his Cadillac driving somewhere. But the cigars kill his sense of taste and smell pretty thoroughly. He's also going deaf. We can make all the noise we want to without bothering him but he doesn't understand why everyone is always shouting at him because he can hear the TV just fine. (These ones go to 11.) So there's deafness & blindness but what's it called when you can't taste or smell anymore? It's scary how quickly he's slipping into old age. In June you would have thought he was in his early 70's but since the hospital and the gout attack he's aged tremendously. He's still got his moments but they're shorter each day.