happy happy

Steph wandered back to work yesterday, where he caught up with his colleagues and set his schedule for this school year. Since he's continuing with his specialization certification, he'll be doing the three weeks in school/three weeks out of town thing for most of the school year, so he also met his teaching partner, who will command his classes while he's out of town. The funny thing is that the only students who come to school on Monday are the 6ème level (these are the students leaving école primaire and this is their first year at collège) and they are scheduled to have two students in 6ème this year. One of these are from the enormous family of former gypsies who live two villages over and barely tolerate school only drop out on their 16th birthdays, so he expects to have only one student on Monday. Three teachers for one student, all day long. At least he's easing back into the school year.

Since it's back to school, that also means there are two important anniversaries happening. Thursday marked my two year anniversary of landing in France and today marks the two year anniversary of Dispatches From France. The really funny (that's funny-odd, not funny-haha) thing is that here I am, two years in France, my French still sucks, I still don't have a job, I've lost my mother and my father is dying, and I'm the happiest I can recall being since I've moved here, because I can finally see myself doing something that I enjoy and can make a living from. I must really need to have my head examined. (Obviously I'm not jumping over the moon about my father's illness, but this project goes a long way in helping take my mind off something I can do little about that is happening on another continent.)

I celebrated the anniversary of this blog by waking up in excruciating pain at the very unwelcome hour of 7:45am. It seems everytime the weather changes (or I leave the window open overnight) I wake up with the area around one of the vertebrae in my upper back swollen, which sends out pain from my neck to my shoulder blades. Unfortunately, I don't have any muscle relaxers on hand, so I'll just have to make Steph rub some icy-hot concoction onto it (which helps for about ten minutes) and wait two or three days for the swelling to go down. I know this pain is temporary but I'd do just about anything for a Valium right about now!