May & June 2014

Well, it’s definitely winter – highs of 12 (and even then it didn’t get that high) and lows of 3 along with driving winds and constant rain.  It’s been great weather for staying inside reading books, watching movies, studying and open fires……or in my case aircon.

It’s been a very busy couple of months but not in the getting out and about busy but the “been completing my TESOL (Teach English to Speakers of Others Languages) course” busy.  With a 12 month timeframe for completion, it was very diligently worked on for the first four subjects, being that they were all online quizzes certainly helped.  When it got to the part where assignments were actually required to be handed in…well….it all fell apart and got pushed aside for a month….or seven!!  After a quick check in mid-April (the 20^th to be precise) it became glaringly obvious that a good deal of work was going to have to be done to reach the 80 days left to finish (or 14 July) deadline.  Pondering this piece of information for a couple of days reduced it to 78 and then the realization set in that there were 14 assignments, 6 hours of Practice Teaching, several lesson plans to do and that three assignments couldn’t be completed until the Prac Teaching had been done.  A sense of urgency took over.

Now being an under achiever…not….there were serious amounts of pressure put on myself, organizing the Prac Teaching was crucial  and finding a teacher at TAFE that was willing to help out on short notice was brilliant but finding out she was also really nice and very helpful was an incredible bonus.  Needless to say, passing the Practice Teaching with flying colours was quite a confidence boost and handing in the last batch of assignments on 8 July was an incredible relief.  Receiving confirmation the following day that it was all signed off was awesome.  Woohoo, yeehaa, happy happy joy joy, amazeballs and all that.

My ‘To Do’ list whiteboard has, for the last 12 months, had TESOL Course at the top of it and can now….finally….be removed.  Having said that, there is still the need to put together my resume which is quite different from a standard CV and it would be incredibly beneficial to do some volunteering to get more practice.

Ideally I’d love to get a job in Eastern Europe although South America is a possibility and at a push Malaysia or Indonesia but not having a degree is very limiting, as it’s a requirement for many countries.   Having tickets to Cirque de Soleil in June next year is a good incentive to hang around for a while and will start looking around then.

So apart from studying there really hasn’t been much happening in my world for the last couple of months although a few movies made it onto the agenda.

Banff Mountain Film Festival – if you’ve never been to the festival, it  is a selection of short films on various extreme sports.  Having been to the festival three times before, this was definitely the best one with a really good range of different sports and they were all entertaining.  It didn’t take too much coercion to get Dad along and he loved it.  Banff in Brisbane is pretty much only attended by the die-hard extreme sports people so it was really surprising to see such a broad selection of ages and fitness levels including lots of kids.  One of the films was about a couple of guys who took their mountain bikes to the top of a mountain and rode down it.  The two young boys in front of me were just about jumping out of their seats and the parents must have been wondering what on earth possessed them to bring the kids to an extreme sports film.  It wasn’t even the sort of mountain you’d think about hiking up, let alone riding down.

Grand Budapest Hotel – it’s pretty bizarre and left me with a bit of a “well that was different” kind of feeling however thinking about it over the course of the day it actually got funnier after the fact.

The Trip to Italy – alas this one was just plain strange.  Trying to work out if it was a story or a kind of doco had me confused for much of the movie and when it ended was left wondering what the hell the point was. There were ‘characters’ that came in and it felt like we were supposed to know who they were and I didn’t. Admittedly, these guys are brilliant at their impersonations but there were a couple of times I didn’t know who they were impersonating (and of course they went on for ages), so its humour was totally lost on me.  They spent a bit of looking around the ruins of Pompeii which, while interesting,  confirmed that my decision not to go there was correct as it didn’t interest me but so many people have told me that it was one of the must see places and they had me doubting myself, which is never a good thing.

Until next month…..

The mind replays what the heart can’t delete.