One thing I promised myself when I restarted this foreign service quest was that I would try to live my life normally, as if my dream job would never materialize. The process is such a long one, especially if you are blocked at any of the stops along the way, and there are so many stops: the test, the QEP, the oral assessment, the background check, and then the register. Even if you sail through each one, the process will still take a year or more to complete. So, I'm trying hard not to make decisions based on the possibility that I'll enter the foreign service one day and everything will change.
And that explains why we're currently in the process of buying a house. To be honest, buying a house right now is crazy even when you take the foreign service out of the equation. We just moved back to Dallas about three months ago, and we're in a one-year lease at our current place. I haven't even received a full paycheck yet, and we're still paying off the debts we accumulated from living in the Rio Grande Valley without steady work for several months, and then the cost of moving up here. The timing couldn't be worse, really, but Michael spends so much time on real estate websites that I guess it was inevitable that we should buy something at the first opportunity.
In short, we decided to find an income property because it allows us to buy in an area we otherwise wouldn't be able to afford, while also making a lot of sense for us financially. After looking at a few places, our agent, who's the partner of one of Michael's friends from high school, showed us a place that never even made it on the market before we snatched it up: a duplex with two 3-bed, 2-bath units in Winnetka Heights, a nationally-registered historic district in Oak Cliff. Oak Cliff is an area just south of downtown that's been undergoing tremendous changes over the past few years, and it's actually the area where we lived when we first moved to Dallas together. We've always wanted to buy there, and I feel like this property is going to be a fantastic investment. And since the bottom unit is already being rented out, it's generating enough income to cover the bulk of the monthly mortgage payments.
We've had to borrow a lot of money from my parents to cover the down payment, and we're definitely going to be scraping by for a while, especially if our current landlord refuses to let us sublet or we have difficulty finding a willing sublet-er. Things could be rough until next July. In the long run, though, I think we're going to be much better off after making this purchase than we were before. Even if I manage to make it into the foreign service in the next couple of years, this property can pay for itself while we're abroad. In fact, it could even generate some extra income for us, especially if Oak Cliff continues to develop the way it has been for the past few years.
Our closing date is October 31st, and according to the rules of the FHA loan, we have 60 days after that to occupy the premises, which means we'll be moving again sometime in November or December. Things have calmed down somewhat at work, and the holiday season is full of time off for teachers, so I think we'll be able to manage this transition without going crazy.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Saturday, September 7, 2013
So Busy
I haven't been this busy since graduate school, and it's been a difficult adjustment. I've been waking up at 4:30 or 5:00 every morning to get to the school early enough to make copies, plan lessons, and take care of the dozens of e-mails and administrative demands before my classes start. I leave work around 4:00, which is great, but I just come home to cook dinner and do more lesson planning until bedtime, which has tended toward 8:30 or 9:00 lately. The past two weeks have felt like two months!
As a result, I've had to cut some things out of my life. The first to go was the gym, not so much because I couldn't find an hour to work out a few times a week, but because I'm supposed to be eating a lot and couldn't find the time to cook all the additional food. I've also stopped studying Spanish at home (and I quit my conversation class for other reasons), although I feel like this is mitigated a bit since I have to speak Spanish at work every day. I have some really low beginner ESL students, so I often have to translate for them, and it's made me much more confident about my Spanish than anything else since my last trip to Guatemala. I've also been reading some of the Spanish-language books from my classroom's literacy cart during our independent reading time. It isn't much, but I've learned a few new words here and there. I've also picked up a little more French out of necessity, since I have some students from the Congo and Senegal who are still very new to English.
I expect the workload to increase in the next few weeks because I'm going to be the school's LPAC (Language Proficiency Assessment Committee) chair, which everyone says is very time-consuming. I'm not sure where the time will come from, but I'll find a way to make it work.
In spite of the crazy workload, though, I have to say that I love my job. More specifically, I love my students, and the reason I'm working so hard is because I don't want to let them down. Currently, I have kids from the Congo, Nepal, Egypt, Sudan, Senegal, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, Ghana, Ethiopia, Korea, Iraq, and Pakistan, and they're all just awesome. I love learning about their families and cultural traditions, and I love teaching them new words and new ways to use language. It feels good to be useful. And I'm also hoping that this kind of international exposure will help me with my foreign service application, of course!
On that front, I'm still plodding through the recommended reading list. My long commute means more time for "reading" thanks to audiobooks, and I finished Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking last week. I thought it was interesting and can see how it would be useful on the job (any job, really), but it doesn't interest me as much as the book about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire that I'm reading every night before bed on my Kindle (also from the reading list). World history has always been my thing.
After Blink, I started listening to The Instant Economist, which is a basic introduction to economics. My college economics course was very a long time ago, and it was also a terrible class where I learned nothing. I took it at a rural extension of a small-town central Texas community college while I was still in high school, and the only economics professor they could find was a farmer with a heart of gold who didn't seem to have a clue what he was doing. I made an "A" in the class, and to this day I can't tell you one thing that he taught us about economics. Nice guy, bad teacher.
I've been wanting to learn about the subject for a while now, but I've had a lot of trouble finding books that didn't have a major ideological slant. Personally, I believe in a strong free market for most goods and services, with the exception of a few basic necessities, such as health care and utilities. I think mixed economies do the best job of balancing public and private interests. And I feel like my views are very practical and centrist, but most of the popular primer books on economics out there were rabidly libertarian, and Ayn Rand makes me want to throw up, so...they weren't an option. The Instant Economist aims to be more level-headed, though, and while I can't say I agree with everything it says 100%, most of the arguments seem reasonable and are viewed objectively from multiple perspectives. A lot of the information also isn't new to me, so I guess I either learned something in that college economics course or have just absorbed the information through reading the news.
I haven't given up on my goals, and my current job is satisfying, so I'd say things are going quite well right now. I just have to keep going!
As a result, I've had to cut some things out of my life. The first to go was the gym, not so much because I couldn't find an hour to work out a few times a week, but because I'm supposed to be eating a lot and couldn't find the time to cook all the additional food. I've also stopped studying Spanish at home (and I quit my conversation class for other reasons), although I feel like this is mitigated a bit since I have to speak Spanish at work every day. I have some really low beginner ESL students, so I often have to translate for them, and it's made me much more confident about my Spanish than anything else since my last trip to Guatemala. I've also been reading some of the Spanish-language books from my classroom's literacy cart during our independent reading time. It isn't much, but I've learned a few new words here and there. I've also picked up a little more French out of necessity, since I have some students from the Congo and Senegal who are still very new to English.
I expect the workload to increase in the next few weeks because I'm going to be the school's LPAC (Language Proficiency Assessment Committee) chair, which everyone says is very time-consuming. I'm not sure where the time will come from, but I'll find a way to make it work.
In spite of the crazy workload, though, I have to say that I love my job. More specifically, I love my students, and the reason I'm working so hard is because I don't want to let them down. Currently, I have kids from the Congo, Nepal, Egypt, Sudan, Senegal, Honduras, Mexico, El Salvador, Ghana, Ethiopia, Korea, Iraq, and Pakistan, and they're all just awesome. I love learning about their families and cultural traditions, and I love teaching them new words and new ways to use language. It feels good to be useful. And I'm also hoping that this kind of international exposure will help me with my foreign service application, of course!
On that front, I'm still plodding through the recommended reading list. My long commute means more time for "reading" thanks to audiobooks, and I finished Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking last week. I thought it was interesting and can see how it would be useful on the job (any job, really), but it doesn't interest me as much as the book about the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire that I'm reading every night before bed on my Kindle (also from the reading list). World history has always been my thing.
After Blink, I started listening to The Instant Economist, which is a basic introduction to economics. My college economics course was very a long time ago, and it was also a terrible class where I learned nothing. I took it at a rural extension of a small-town central Texas community college while I was still in high school, and the only economics professor they could find was a farmer with a heart of gold who didn't seem to have a clue what he was doing. I made an "A" in the class, and to this day I can't tell you one thing that he taught us about economics. Nice guy, bad teacher.
I've been wanting to learn about the subject for a while now, but I've had a lot of trouble finding books that didn't have a major ideological slant. Personally, I believe in a strong free market for most goods and services, with the exception of a few basic necessities, such as health care and utilities. I think mixed economies do the best job of balancing public and private interests. And I feel like my views are very practical and centrist, but most of the popular primer books on economics out there were rabidly libertarian, and Ayn Rand makes me want to throw up, so...they weren't an option. The Instant Economist aims to be more level-headed, though, and while I can't say I agree with everything it says 100%, most of the arguments seem reasonable and are viewed objectively from multiple perspectives. A lot of the information also isn't new to me, so I guess I either learned something in that college economics course or have just absorbed the information through reading the news.
I haven't given up on my goals, and my current job is satisfying, so I'd say things are going quite well right now. I just have to keep going!
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