Rejection

In the last week, I have been rejected from two different teaching jobs. I was not even selected for an interview for either of these jobs, which was really disappointing. Granted, I do not have teaching certification (they call it 'registration' here), because I am waiting on my criminal background check from the FBI in the United States (which was mailed from Oz in early September and according to the FBI will still take another 3-4 weeks to process!), so I'm sure that is not helping matters. As I reflected on my situation I realized that I have NEVER been rejected from a job or school related application, so I'm sure that could be one reason why this is so hard for me. Salisbury was my number one choice for undergrad, UNC for grad school, Riverside for my first job, and Mt. Carmel for my second job. Looking back, it seems I have been very fortunate in the past, and clearly it will be different this time around. With my degrees, experience, and recommendations from former employers I expected to be a very competitive candidate for teaching jobs, but it seems that my American education and work experience might not interest the principals in Australia.

On the plus side, I'm really enjoying my temp job. The first week was a bit rough...getting used to working 9-5 and not being able to be outside while working made me realize why I enjoy being an athletic trainer. I'm working for a non-profit and was even invited to their Annual General Meeting last week, which made me feel like I'm really part of their "team". The people I work with are fantastic and they have created a variety of tasks for me to work on in order to prevent boredom, which is much appreciated! I am biking to work now as well and I'm learning to LOVE it. On warm days it's a little annoying to be sweating when I walk into the office but not sitting in traffic or waiting for the late tram makes up for it. 

Another exciting highlight of this week was buying tickets to head to Sydney for the weekend in a few weeks. This was a birthday surprise from Erik and I'm super excited to see the sights of Sydney!! It will be my first visit to an Aussie beach too, since we are a bit far from the coast here in Melbourne. We are also still debating our Christmas destination. We were pretty set on Thailand, but with the crazy flooding in Bangkok we have yet to pull the trigger to buy our tickets. Bali is an option but it's rainy season there, and we haven't ruled out just flying to one of Thailand's islands, most likely Koh Samui, and saving Bangkok for another time. Malaysia and Fiji are on our list as well, as we can get there relatively inexpensively from Oz.

The only picture I have to share this week is our bargain produce from a trip to the Footscray Market yesterday. A 10 lb bag of potatoes for $3, apples for $1.49/kg (that's $0.67/lb!), and zucchini for $0.99/kg ($0.45/lb!) were the highlights. $19.15 for all of these yummy fruits and veggies!

Of course the expense of other foods over here compensates for the wonderfully cheap produce. We were going to make a trip to the USA Foods store today, which is a least a 2 hour round trip adventure from our house, but the weather did not cooperate. Fortunately our parents have helped in that regard, as we received lots of goodies from the States last week including Crisco (finally proper cookie baking can commence!), Franks hot sauce & Ranch dressing packets (so that I can actually make a REAL buffalo chicken dip), Nestle semi-sweet chocolate chips, peanut butter M&M's, and a bag of my favorite chocolates in miniature form. After learning how much they've paid to ship things over though, I think we'll sacrifice the long trip to the store or even pay to have things shipped from the store this time around. If we had known that shipping would be so expensive and that some of our favorite foods would be so hard to find, I think we would have put a LOT more food in our container. :)