written by Shelley
We have now been living in Eastern Washington State in a small college town called Ellensburg for about 5 months. John studied for his degree here and this is where I first came when I met him back in 2005. The weather here is much better than the western part of the state, where it is wet a large per cent of the year, here it is cold and snowy in winter and hot and dry in the summer as we are so much further inland. We have both been doing some substitute teaching in a couple of school districts and I have just started a job housekeeping (cleaning rooms) in a huge resort in the countryside, about 45 minutes from here. The teaching is hard work, as you are in charge of small children (I choose to teach the youngest ones) and every day you go in you have no idea what will await you. You just hope to find coherent notes, lesson plans and possibly a helper in the form of a Spanish speaking assistant as 99% of the kids are Mexican. I love it though but the work is sporadic so I took the other hotel job. I’ve only worked 4 days straight and have to do 2 weeks training then I will work mainly over the weekends when they are busy. The cleaning is much harder physically but pays much less as the responsibility is nowhere near as important as the teaching job. Both jobs have lovely people in them. We’ll see what happens next, but neither have any sense of permanency which is what we need to find.
