All change

The painting's taking a back seat again as other matters come to the fore. I have an increase in TEFL work, and am dealing with a subsequent increase in travel time and lesson planning. Bizarrely I find myself scheduled to teach on six days a week for the next five weeks (Saturday being my day off). It's actually one lesson a day, except Monday which will be two, and the total amount of hours isn't great but of course each day is impacted and broken up.

Some of the lessons are late morning, some late afternoon, some early evening and I'll need to get my head around the new routines quickly. For instance a round trip to one of the neighbouring villages for a one and a half hour lesson can still eat four to five hours of my day if I don't swap buses efficiently. I need to work the timetables to my advantage but of course it's not always possible. At least I don't have to get from one village to another on the same morning or evening.

If I had enough cash I'd buy myself a scooter, but it's not an option right now.

Of course, this work is important. The injection of cash will be a life saver for me. Even so, the frustrating part is that the workload arrives right at the time I was putting together a plan to run some art classes. I feel these classes can be a much more enjoyable, and yes lucrative way for me to make a living out here and I'm anxious to start the ball rolling before I lose my nerve.

Here are a couple of photos from the two art classes I ran last week.

The top picture shows the students on day one while the second picture shows the finished paintings from our trip out into Granada.

Anyway, for now I'll have to content myself with backgrounding all the logistics of how I'm going to run these courses. I can work on gathering more of the hardware I'll need, nail down a price structure, and think up how I'm going to lay out and then distribute my advertising flyers.

So it's all change again. It seems to be the way of things for me out here.