It’s that time of year again

Ok so this is going to be another of those frustrating non-blogs where I have very little to report.The thing is,having put in my early retirement application and had no answer back yet I am still in limbo. Are we moving to the central area? Who knows.Are we going to China as planned? I bloody well hope so. I have signed the contract (although apparently that doesn’t mean a whole lot) and started all the paperwork.I have been in constant touch with the wonderful folks on Raoul’s (and that means you Becky,and you Barry and Renee!) and I wish I could say we were sitting on our suitcases right now.

Meanwhile… I have found a lot of websites for teaching EFL online,some of which look pretty promising. I have started working on the following: edufire,languagespirit,englishcafe and myenglishclub. However, Myngle want to interview me again and that will be this week.The other weird Irish one,ebamma put me off a bit as they wanted me to commit to a minimum number of hours a week,which I don’t really want to do right now.I think there are a whole bunch more of those things out there but have not investigated them yet.

Next week is ETAI conference which is always fun,as I will catch up with old friends, and MAYBE it will be my last conference…who knows.

On a personal note, it has been fun going to various things such as the new Jane Eyre movie (excellent) and the Festival of Lights  downtown (okay) and next month we are going to Paul Simon,which hopefully will be wonderful.Might go to some stuff at the Jerusalem Film Festival also. Have got more into the swing of twitter,although I am still something of a sporadic user. Linkedin looks to me to be on the whole far more useful for professional contacts and such.

I will leave you with some pictures from the Festival which are fairly crappy as they are only from my lousy Nokia.

Long time no blog (again)

Well everyone hello and welcome to the frozen blog.Thing is the blog is really reflecting my life right now which is completely in limbo.Whilst on the surface of things the school year has dashed by and it is suddenly June 13th,ergo one week before the end of this academic year,for me, time has stood still. The reason for this is that I have handed in my forms for early retirement. And now I am in Limbo till I get a reply. I can’t plan anything at all till I know if I am staying or going. This is,as you can imagine dear reader, a proverbial pain in the fundament.I am reliably informed that I “should” know by the end of June (or is it July?) But as this is the Middle East, where manana is peanuts, it could just as well be by the end of August or even September. Sorry if I sound a tad peaky,it’s just VERY VERY frustrating.

In other news, I am extremely happy with my lovely little new friend Kindle, who arrived only  4 days after I had ordered him from the very wonderful Amazon. To date I have around 500 items on him waiting my perusal, and I think that we have now got used to each other.

In other news, we have decided not to go to Mr Zimmerman’s concert in Ramat Gan due to previous disappointment, but we will go to Mr Paul Simon with the hope that he will pretend to be at least 20 years in the past and not perform only stuff from the latest album which did not impress me immensely.

Enough bitching for today, I don’t like my own tone in this blog,so hopefully I will leave Limbo soon and ascend to the Promised Land of retirement.

Me and Winnie The Pooh

Just messing around with different tools now to learn how to modify my posts. There seem to be lots of different tools around, including google docs (try it later) , and something called odiogo recommended to me by David from classroom web2.0, which he says enables you to try text to speech in your blog. I will try that later, as soon we are going to eat, and then go to a movie!