Good News!

I got dragged into my school director's office the other day for a little sit-down. Apparently she feels that Ashlee and I use too much electricity in our apartment and, since the school (in conjunction with Ashlee's health department) is responsible for covering our utilities, she would like us to cut back on our energy consumption. Awesome.

Since I had her attention, I took the chance to make a request of my own: I want my own classroom. Actually, I want it to be more of an English room -- a space for me to meet with teachers to lesson-plan and to run extracurricular activities after school. To my surprise, she agreed. So the good news is that I am now in charge of School 4's first-ever English Cabinet!

The room itself is quite small, but it's already furnished with a chalkboard and desks for about 15 students. I'm in the process of pooling resources, but I'm confident that I can get my hands on an extra computer, which will greatly help me in my plan of sharing resources with my counterparts as well as digitizing lesson and curriculum plans. I also put in a request to the local branch of World Vision for a modest donation to help decorate the room. They said they would be happy to help so long as I submit an official proposal. May is looking up for me.

In other news, the weather has been gorgeous for the past week or so. After a series of snow-storms in early April, it has been in the 70s the past few days. The downside is that with this progression to warmer weather, the city has turned off the central heating. Our apartment is still comfortably in the 70s, but we lost our hot water in the shower. Today was our first day of ice-cold showers. It wasn't so nice.

We are officially one-month away from our summer vacation! I cannot tell you how excited we are for our trip back to California. Amazing food, here we come!