Welcome to 2015!

Happy New Year to everyone! I hope that all of you enjoyed the holiday celebrations and rang in 2015 in whatever way you wanted.

The past two months have been rather crazy, as the holidays often are. B and I spent Christmas in the US with my family, which was lovely after we actually got there - there are no direct flights to anywhere in North Carolina, so the trip usually takes between 14-16 hours because of connections. This time, between cancelled and rerouted flights, it took us close to 38 hours before we made it to my parents' house. Needless to say, I was a mess by the time we got there. Luckily, B is wonderful and called the airline to insist that since we lost a day, we should be able to push our flight back by a day (which they did). So we were still able to spend 6 days shopping for things I can't get here visiting with family.

My family also decided, around mid-November, to do 'creative' gifts, as several people's budgets are tight. For me, of course, that meant crocheting something for everyone. So in the space of about 2 months, I finished two baby blankets and cranked out five scarves/cowls - a personal record, and one of the cowls was even for me (!), so for the first time I am actually wearing one of my own creations (usually knowing that I need to give projects away is the only way I can motivate myself to finish them). Unfortunately in my haste to gift things, I failed to get pictures of several of them.

I can only hope that my productivity streak continues, but it's unlikely to throughout 2015. That's because (drum roll...) at the end of February, I am increasing my teaching hours! I will add a biology course and 2 math classes to my 2 current biology courses at the high school. I am super excited and slightly nervous. I have been teaching for only about 6 weeks and so far, I love it. The students are great (mostly - they are teenagers), and the other teachers have been amazing as well - encouraging, open, and patient. All of which I much appreciate. While I may know biology and have years of experience teaching teenagers in some capacity, this is my first time as an 'official' teacher. Perhaps not coincidentally, the part where I feel the most in the weeds is assigning grades (the first of which are due next week - no pressure!). The Swiss system is quite different from the American one that I know, but it is additionally complicated for me because I am assigning points via the British system. Basically, there are a lot of countries' education systems involved and I'm still learning to balance them.

My 2-year anniversary in Switzerland is fast approaching - two weeks! The new year has already got me feeling introspective and reflective, but I'm sure I'll get over it. Meanwhile, I'm hoping that among my increased hours I will find time to get back into German lessons, as the language continues to be the one aspect of my life here that I am seriously dissatisfied with. I'm not sure it's a 'resolution' as much as 'I live here so this needs to happen' idea.

I hope to post crochet pictures soon, as well as share some of the many stories that have emerged from my new job. Meanwhile, best wishes to all of you in 2015! Love to all my family and friends throughout the world - hope to see many of you this year!

Job begins in 3...2...

I can't remember whether I've written previously about my job sitch (that stands for 'situation' in douche. I'll refrain from further use of such dialect). Perhaps partly because I still carry around some baggage about not 'using' my PhD - even after almost 2 years, I get many well-meaning people whose first reaction is "Biomedical research Ph.D.? But you could get any job you wanted here - there are so many universities and pharma companies!"
Yes, thank you, but likely I do not know you well enough to go into my decision to walk away from research science, so I will just nod vaguely instead. This isn't awkward at all.

I haven't written about my job(s) because...well, I'm not sure. A myriad of things, I suppose. I felt that I didn't yet have a 'career.' None of the various jobs I do requires significant enough time investment to feel I can lay claim to the job title(s). But neither does hausfrau sit well with me, so I just don't talk about it at all. Thanks to B's job, I can choose to work, a position I've never been in and - frankly - never been close with anyone who has. I have strange feelings of guilt, privilege, and amazement pretty much daily.
Friends and family probably think I'm spending all my days lounging on a glacier, admiring the Alps, sipping tea and crocheting (if that ever becomes a paying job somehow, I am ON IT). Meanwhile, the more realistic picture is that I am doing laundry, cleaning, running errands, and working with whatever bits and pieces, job-wise, I could find.

When I left the US in early 2013, I was editing scientific manuscripts for a company in the US. I loved the job, but the pay rate, while lovely for some extra spending cash (in USD, of course), didn't go far in Switzerland. Then I joined a Writer's Group in Zurich and somehow was hired to write an Expat Guidebook for an online relocation company (still working on it, going well), a job that I was SUPER excited to get (Look, Ma, I'm a real-live writer!), but it's temporary and I have no real qualifications (got it through sheer dumb luck), so that didn't feel like a 'real' job either. Or at least one that I could point to as a career in any way.

Teaching English is often the default of trailing spouses, so when such a job fell into my lap in the spring of 2014, I shrugged it off as 'not really news.' Yes, one of my classes is teaching ESL research scientists to improve their communication (so my hiring was actually due to my Ph.D. background), but my other classes are general English conversation, and besides I'm only teaching 3 classes/week, although I do spend some time every week grappling with lesson plans. Again, I felt that my lack of qualifications somehow prevented me from claiming credit for the job.

(After typing all this, I realize I may have some weird issues. But those are not the focus, at least in this post).

So I am super excited to announce that next month I will be starting yet another job (don't worry, I've dropped the manuscript editing and a significant volunteer time commitment to make room. I do like to sleep). It's 30%, so another part-time endeavor, but it's an open-end contract (i.e., permanent) and feels career-like. It's my first job in Switzerland that involves colleagues, structure, etc - even a few benefits. I'm a big ol' mixture of nerves and excitement. As of next week, I will be a high school biology teacher at a private school here in Zurich. The school uses the British system (my German is nowhere near good enough to teach in), but the majority of students are, in fact, Swiss. I can't allow the students to speak Swiss German during class/lecture, but I'm looking forward to being in a work environment in which I can at least hear the local language regularly.

I am grateful for such a chance - I came here with teaching in mind as a possibility, but it turned out that most international schools have a large talent pool to select from (so many expats in Zurich!), so they can require such minor things as, oh, a teaching certification. I actually applied to this school last fall to cover maternity leave (their ad said that a teaching certification was "preferred," but I had every other qualification they listed). I was called in for an interview, gave a sample lesson, met people, the whole deal. At the end, I was disappointed not to get the job - everybody was super nice, the vice-principal said that it was unusual to have two such qualified candidates, he felt I was a 'natural' at teaching, etc. I tried to be flattered that I had come so close, but I was pretty disappointed - being natural is not something I can put on my CV, unfortunately, and I knew I had few possibilities elsewhere.

So imagine my surprise when the school called three weeks ago to ask if I was still interested in a position. Turns out they weren't just blowing smoke! I jumped at the chance. I love teaching high schoolers (strangely enough, since I hated being one), and I'm excited to finally take on a job that combines two of my interests.

I'm interested to hear others' thoughts. Am I crazy? Do you sometimes feel that part-time or side jobs don't 'count' somehow or is that just me being neurotic?
When/if you found a job locally, did you feel it better connected you to the community? If you are a trailing spouse/expat/hausfrau, did you find other benefits/drawbacks in having a job?

A belated happy new year!

The problem with not updating a blog in almost three months is that choosing a specific topic upon return becomes increasingly difficult. So I've decided to skip that decision and instead compose a random list of items that will be sure to reflect that current scattered state of my mind.

1. Top of the list: I finally submitted my US driver's license to be switched over to a Swiss one! Woo, celebrate. Ok, fine - it's not that exciting, but lemme explain. This has been hanging over my head for almost a year now (see point 3, below), and if the conversion isn't done within a year of entering Switzerland, then it's no good and I'd have to take all sorts of classes and driving lessons that would cost several thousand Swiss francs. So with some encouragement from a fellow American who waited until the last day to switch hers over, I got it in just under the wire (a semi-interesting note: I wouldn't have wanted to do it before last August. Although I've had a license since I was 16, my most recent renewal was in August of 2011, and Switzerland requires that a foreign license be at least 2 years old, otherwise they make you take driving classes. It never really occurred to me previously, but US licenses don't say anywhere on them that they are renewals. Discuss. Or not.)

2. I got a job! A WRITING job, even! (Should I have led with this, which is indisputably bigger news? Possibly, but I've actually been meaning to change my driver's license over for longer than I've been job hunting). I officially started on Monday - my assignment is to write an e-book guide to Zurich for www.expat-living.info. I'm super stoked and only slightly overwhelmed that I need to be an expert on the culture that I still feel such a stranger to myself.

3. As per item #1, the one year anniversary of my arrival in Switzerland looms very near. I arrived on the morning of January 15, 2013 - fresh-faced and prepared exhausted and terrified. I'd defended my dissertation five weeks previously and extricated myself from experiments in lab only 7 days before, which is when I started packing. I had left several boxes/items with friends in the hopes that they would have time to donate them somewhere worthy, and was lucky that I could leave the majority of my furnishings behind for the new tenants (my former dogsitters, lovely people). I spoke approximately three words of German and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I plan to do a more detailed post on this next week, but to summarize - moving is hard, culture shock is real, Switzerland is beautiful, and my husband is amazing. I'm grateful that I've had this experience, and I feel that every day continues to shape me in fundamental ways.

4. I did not hit my 50,000 word count goal for National Novel Writing Month back in November, unfortunately - a serious bout of food poisoning and two weeks of traveling around the US visiting with friends and family conspired against me. I did, however, finish with over 40,000 words and - for the first time ever -  plotlines that involved actual conflict/resolution, a milestone that I often trip over (I love designing worlds and characters, but have problems with conflict - a problem that goes beyond writing ;). Luckily, B has no such issues and helped me come up with several wonderful characters and entanglements that pushed the story forward).

5. Crafting got away from me the last few months, but I whipped up a shawl a couple weeks ago and am now working on a hat and possibly matching armwarmers to match. I'm not sure how much I actually like the shawl - I used this pattern with some modifications (I did a shell around the border instead of picot - mainly because I couldn't figure out the picot instructions. Lrn2utube, I know). I chose a relatively simple pattern, since the variegated yarn I had was quite loud, color-wise. Unfortunately, to my eye, it still didn't really work. So then you may ask why am I making a hat and armwarmers to match? Because I bought the largest ball of yarn known to man (not really, that's somewhere in Kansas) - 500 grams (over a pound - and keep in mind, yarn does not weigh much). Below is a picture of the ball after I finished the shawl. Lesson learned - humongous yarn balls are fun, but be triple sure you like the colors before buying.

I deliberately included a salt shaker because it was what was on the table for size comparison. Unfortunately I got the camera angle wrong - the ball is actually taller than the salt shaker.

I can't get over the fact that the middle portion looks like a 1970's granny square from hell. I'm trying to convince myself that the colors might work better for a hat.

6. I haven't made new year's resolutions for years, but my linguistic frustration has managed to channel itself into something productive; I am on a 10 day streak for German on DuoLingo and yesterday was able to field a few unexpected questions from various service people (exciting ones such as "Would you like the dressing mixed in?" and "On the Louis XIV, you want only shrimp?"). Baby steps, people, baby steps.

Speaking of small victories, this happened last week:

A sight I never thought I'd see.

Guys, it's AMERICAN FOOTBALL! ON TV HERE! Yes, I whipped out my camera as witness to this. As most of you know, I'm a pretty big pro football fan (as one must be in order to maintain fandom of the Detroit Lions), and I'd been following games online all season. Little did I know that our basic cable package (purchased only because it was free with the highest speed internet available, top priority for B) includes a channel called US Sports 1. I stumbled across it randomly while flipping channels - they were playing a college bowl game, not a typical sight on Swiss television. So I've managed to see every playoff game so far - the time difference makes this a challenge, but I was grateful to see that they replay them the following day at a more reasonable hour. The only catch? The commentary is in German. It's quite surreal. I log game watching as language practice.

I have so many pictures from a backlog of recipes, trips (Munich, Milan, Rome, the US) and holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's), but I wasn't able to access my iPhoto library for a few months when it got too big for my old MacBook Pro. Now I have a beautiful new MacBook Air (yay for Christmas!), so with the help of an external hard drive, I'm slowly starting to sort through them. I'll leave you with my favorite picture of a trip to Milan back in September with my parents and B. It's my mother in contemplation of the unfinished Rondanini Pieta by Michelangelo: