Monday, Sept. 08, 2003
Monday, September 8, 2003 - Week 2 begins, posted at 9:35 a.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com I worked Friday night after school, all day Saturday, then pulled a 13-hour shift yesterday at the restaurant, and now it's Monday and I'm feeling a bit exhausted. And I'm heading back to the restaurant today after school. This keeping of two jobs will certainly begin to wear me down, but hopefully I'll eventually get into a schedule that will help me better anticipate how many hours I'll work over there.Luckily, the work is not unpleasant and is actually getting sort of fun. I enjoy working the Sunday jazz brunch, as there's a live band and everyone seems very cheerful on Sunday mornings for jazz. The money has not been very good yet - I worked all day on Saturday to what amounted to $4/hour ($32 in tips over 8 hours), not including the pittance of an hourly wage they give me (less than $2) - but everyone assures me that it will pick up significantly as the weather cools. Yesterday, after working an 8-hour shift at the restaurant, I worked another 5 hours over at the Ukrainian Festival, where my restaurant had a booth. Selling pierogies, holushi, and saurkraut & kielbasa was a lot of fun, especially since I was able to sneak off in between the two shifts and have a quick beer with Renee at Crabby Dick's. The $5/hr under the table wages that I got paid there were pretty pitiful, but at least that was $25 in my pocket that I didn't have before. That's what I keep telling myself. Even if the pay sucks, at least it's money that I didn't have before.
I'm back at school today, and luckily it's milestone day - all of English I is taking a reading and writing milestone that was already planned for today from the summer. There is no additional planning that I have to do beyond giving the test, and my usual word-of-the-day (today's "morose") and review exercises.
The Internet is blatantly slow here at school - so slow that I cannot even check my e-mail over at hotmail. I was able to open up my account and see that it was at "account size critical" and 100% full, as I have no way to check it over the weekends, and can see that I have a few e-mails that I would really like to read, but I click on them and nothing happens. It really sucks. I am just shocked that something as simple as the Internet is not available at a high school. I know this is an urban school and all, but this is sort of ridiculous. I type this entry in microsoft word, with the hopes that diaryland will work more quickly than hotmail and I might be able to add this entry. I think I'm going to have to get the Internet at home again, because I'm struggling without it. Plus, I think I'm spending just about as much on gas driving out to the public libraries to get on the Internet as I was on the $34/month it costs to have DSL. Although I am thinking about getting it through Comcast, which currently has a $19.95/month for the first six months deal. We'll see. It's extremely frustrating for me not to have it, and since I use it so much for my work, I feel like it's a justifiable acquisition - especially as I begin teaching Romeo & Juliet, The Odyssey, and A Lesson Before Dying, three books I've never taught before.