the girl has a postcode

Yes, ladies and gents who may or may not read this - i have a post code now. I found a place to live out my time in London-town in the Marylebone area. It's big, it's a shared house, it's not a hostel. Essentially those were my criteria - minus the "it's big" bit. I didn't necessarily care that the room was large, but that's a perk, to be certain.

The reason I was able to come across such good news is because I had some other good news pass my way about a month ago. I have a job, working in a primary school as the music teacher. The way it is working out is that I am covering for a woman who is on her maternity leave. The school is up in Harrow, and from my former position, I was commuting about an hour each way to and from Notting Hill. I'm quite pleased to say that now, my travel time has been cut down by about half an hour. That will make everything much easier on my system, I'm sure. The school is great, and my schedule has me teaching music solid all day long on tuesdays and thursdays, then monday/wednesday/friday I float amongst the classes covering various prep times, illness absences, and absences due to course attendances.

Things are definitely looking up from where they were not too long ago.

I am going home to Canada in 7 days to spend 14 days rushing around seeing people and doing things over the Christmas holidays. I get to be home for exactly 14 days, then back to London, back to working, back to living in a beautiful flat.

Since I only have 7 days left here, 5 of which are going to be spent working, I need to do some Christmas shopping this afternoon so I can bring back gifts that are, hopefully, pleasingly British for all the people on my list. I have about 4 hours to do this in. Can she do it? That question will be answered by dinner tonight, for tomorrow I move all of my things out of this ruddy hostel and into a real place.

It's exciting, folks. Hopefully the next blog entry won't be so far in the future like this one was from the last one (thanksgiving....wow....where has time gone?)