My daily life here, and whatever else

On weekdays, we set the clock for 6:30. We're still sleeping on the blow-up bed we got when we first got here. It's not bad at all, tends to favor togetherness as we sink into in and end up rolling toward each other. My husband has to get to work at 9:00 and leaves about 8:15 to catch the bus. The bus that goes near his workplace comes about every 30 minutes. I'll take just a moment now to brag about my husband. He get's out of bed and goes to hold my robe for me to put on. He has already set up the coffee maker and the cups. We have shortbread fingers with our coffee, which I prepare and bring to him. Then he has a bowl of cereal with some of a banana and brings me the rest with some vitamins. I stay out of the way while he gets ready for work, usually checking my e-mail. I get a daily list of arts jobs, but so far, most of them seem to be in London, very few near Norwich, and quite a few are volunteer jobs.

I wish I could volunteer. Before things went nutty with Steve's original job, I had begun to network my field by volunteering to make an embroidery piece for a 17th century room in a local museum-house, Strangers Hall. I also had essentially "auditioned" to volunteer as an embroiderer with the Norwich Cathedral embroiderers. Both of these fell by the wayside when I needed to get work, any work. It seems that I'm not meant to volunteer for a while yet. About two weeks ago, I went to a local theater to volunteer a morning a week to work on costuming. The very next day, I got a new student to tutor who wanted me to tutor in the morning. I had thought that I could spare one morning a week for the networking benefits, but I need the student and her fees more, so that volunteer thing had to be put aside.

Anyhow, after Steve leaves, I do the dishes and take up any other household tasks that need done. One morning a week, I go to the grocery store. I take a wheeled carry-on bag down with me to wait for the bus, take the bus to the store, do the shopping (We love trying the different butters and cheeses and other things that are new to us, and we try to find substitutes for the things we miss from home, like A-1 sauce, russet potato chips, bacon [called streaky bacon here;just plain bacon is more like ham]), load the groceries back into the cart, load up the carry-on with as much as I can, haul it back to the bus stop, ride the bus back, and climb the hill up to our place. The sidewalks on our street are very rough, and green. Sometimes I think back to our first day in the UK when I asked what kind of tree those were along the road, the ones with green trunks and branches. They were the same kinds we have in the US. They just had so much moss on them that thier trunks and branches looked green. Well, that's why our sidewalks are green, and the moss is why they are rough. I put the grocery store groceries away, make any calls that need made, and head for town, by bus again.

There are usually a few errands to be run in town as well, some things we buy at Norwich's absolutely wonderful outdoor market. I go out of my way to buy from the vendors there because I believe it's worth it, even if you pay more, to patronize locals. A bank run. Something the Poundsaver has good prices on. Something needed from Boots, which is almost a generic word for pharmacy here, even though there are other drug stores. Something to be delivered or picked up from one of the galleries selling my work. A meeting with a friend. I only really have one here so far. Getting around by bus and having such an intense schedule makes it harder and making friends is not one of my best skills, though the ones I make seem to last.

Then I go to the Norwich School of Art and Design and work on my project for as much time as I have before I need to leave at 1:00 to go and eat lunch and be at the bus stop to go to work at 2:00. I miss pizza by the slice, which I had every day in New York. Here, I often have a Pret (a-Manger) sandwich or a distinctly Brit snack like a pasty or a "steak bake", a pastry stuffed with some meat-vegetable combination. I think it will take a long time for it not to grate on me to have to pay more for my sandwich if I intend to sit inside and eat it rather than carrying it away. It's cool enough that I pretty much always prefer to sit inside these days, though it's not as cold as New York. We still haven't had a freeze here.

By about 2:00, I'm at the bus stop, and I'm usually at work around 2:15. Employers don't seem so clock-bound here. Originally my job was set up for 2:30 until 6:30, but I soon found out that if I didn't leave before 6:30, I;d miss the last bus for an hour. They didn't bat an eye when I told them I need to work 2:15 until 6:15 instead. Almost everybody else leaves at 4:30 or 5:00, and then I'm by myself. I'm doing data entry for a school, getting paid peanuts, and I am not happy. It's mind-deadening for me. All the job advice writings tell you to take the job you have and find a way to apply your strongest skills to it. I'd like to know how you are supposed to do that with this kind of job. I finally managed to do an element of that on Friday, writing down the method I had developed for doing a routine rechecking of the database after getting frustrated by everyone doing it differently and by the basic fact that you either trust your data base data or you don't. Hiring people to go along behind your database checking on it basically negates the whole reason for having it in the first place. It was supposed to save labor, I assume, and you aren't going to get valid results if everyone does it differently, either. I used to be known for my experimental protocols, the set of instructions for an assay or a technique. I put in all the details that made it work and why. Writing instructions is something I'm really good at, though I'm not formally trained in it, and formal qualifications seem to count for everything here, at least until I manage to network.

I leave at 6:15, walk about a half mile into the center of town and catch a bus home. I get home a little after 7:00. By the time we have made and eaten dinner, there may be an hour or so to blog, work on a new jewellery piece, prepare for a tutoring session, or - and here's the hard part - apply for a job that suits my skills more closely.

I run out of energy before I get around to doing the type of thing that might lead to a better way to put together an income. At the moment, with the part-time job, three hours tutoring (walking or taking the bus to and from their homes), and selling some jewellery that I make in galleries, I manage about what the full-time job paid and manage to put in less than 10 hours per week at the school of art.