A Chronicle of my Changing Times.

Catching up...

Wow – It’s been a while since I posted last.  I’ve had it on my mind just about every day, but this has been one of the craziest months I’ve seen since getting to .  Besides getting back from vacation, (something that still needs to be detailed), I’ve also traveled a bit (both forced and for pleasure).  This is the end of the semester (tomorrow) and grades have been crazy – especially for someone who’s never done this before and also for a lazy person like me who hates to grade papers yet insists on giving out a lot of homework and projects.

I’ve started up an English club and had decent turnout for the first meeting.  It was weird because almost everyone in attendance are friends of mine who happen to know English at varying levels.  Having 7 people show for the first meeting was rather encouraging.  Plus there are 4 more who are definitely interested but were unable to make it two weeks ago.  Thursday is the second meeting and I hope to have even more people show.

10 days ago I traveled to Sofia and then Sandanski for the weekend.  There was a fund raiser for Camp GLOW (girls leadership camp run by PCV’s in the summer) at a bar called Murphy’s in Sofia on Friday night.  I can’t express how much I enjoyed the evening seeing a lot of friends from around the country, dancing, and imbibing with other Americans.  I also won my first ever raffle – an American style chili kit which didn’t last 24 hours.  In Sandanski, I met up with my friend Jen who has been having a bit of a rough go of it lately.  Just this past couple of days she ended up changing sites and already seems to be happier.  I also got to hang out with her sitemate Emily a bit and enjoyed getting to know her better.

I headed back to Haskovo just as a cold front moved into dropping temperatures into the single digits for daily highs.  What should have been a 5-6 hr trip back from Sandanski turned into a 9+ hr trip due to the cold and snow.  I wasn’t even back in Haskovo when I got a call that school had been cancelled for the week due to the cold temperatures.  I was all excited about this until I get back to my apartment in the schools boardinghouse to find it emptying out.  Now this is rather normal, it empties out every weekend and over vacations and summers.  The problem this time was that with the students leaving it meant the heat would be turned off to the building.  And because the heat was turned off they had to turn off the water lest the pipes freeze and break.  All of a sudden I was faced with a unheated apartment without water.

So I called a friend of mine in Pazardjik and headed there for a few days since she had water.  I think my space heaters might have kept my apartment warmer than hers was – but she had an abundance of that precious H2O and I honestly like flushing my toilets, taking showers and doing the occasional brushing of teeth.

Once back in Haskovo again I was assailed with Na Gosti’s and invitations to go out with friends since I hadn’t been around for over a week.  Of course I couldn’t turn them down.  And then… BAM – I realized it was the end of the semester and I had to do things like grade things and put marks in the Dnevnik (official student record).  Yeah, those are all due tomorrow and I still have a bunch of grading to do.

Next week I head to Stara Zagora for a week long conference on Project Design and Management.  Basically that means I learn how to organize my secondary projects and write grants to find funding for them.  It should be useful although most of my projects don’t require external funding – I’ve somehow been lucky in that respect since searching for money and such is a huge pain.  The only project that remotely might need funding is the baseball team I hope to start locally.  Luckily for me Major League Baseball has already awarded a grant to PC and specifically to as one of 4-5 countries to promote the growth of the sport worldwide.  I just need to learn how to write a grant to show the sustainability of the project.  I get the feeling that’s easier said than done.

Well, that’s about all for now.  I honestly need to get to those papers.  I did upload a number of pictures to my Yahoo photos section from the holiday trip.  Check them out… 

Posted by: mjmarble at January 31, 2006 22:51 | link | comments

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