job searching makes deanna something something

I've been spending the majority of this week actually getting things done in the job search, but yet, I don't feel comfortable writing about a lot of it in LJ. With any luck I will have two interviews next week, in downtown Seattle. Without luck it'll end up being whenever I get back from Japan, if the companies still have openings then. Shrug. And I worked on some things that will probably not pan out, though in some cases they were good exercises for me to do.

One annoying thing this week is that I haven't done a lot of walking since Monday and Tuesday. On Thursday I guess I did some in that I went downtown and hung out with damienroc in the afternoon. We were supposed to walk to Cap Hill, but since it suddenly started hailing and pouring rain, we ended up going to Soup Daddy, and took his brother's dog for a walk a little, but it wasn't anywhere near the walking workout we might have gotten, alas. Soup Daddy had my old favorite, the Popeye Special (cream of mushroom with spinach) but apparently they are between bread suppliers and so I couldn't get a bread bowl, whoops. Either way, it was good to catch up with Jeff and just hang out for a while, it had been like 4 years since I last saw him.

But Wednesday I did no walking after all -- spent the daytime doing job search things, and then Carl called me and I ended up coming out to Ballard to hang out, and we went to Taste of India. And even then Carl threw some algorithms questions at me and made my head hurt too.

And Thursday, after all the excitement downtown, I headed back eastwards, stole Mike's car out of the garage at MS, and met up with Django and Dave and we got dinner at Cheesequake.

Friday, well, that was today. Problem is I woke up a little too late, like 11am, and I had a puzzle to finish writing as well as another phone screen to do, and also had to give Mike a ride to work after lunch, and I woke up with a stomachache and my quadriceps hurting for some reason (I really dunno why, may be a posture thing) so when I finally had a free hour around 4pm, I decided not to go for a walk after all.

So, I feel kinda crappy for the lack of walking, but at least I got out of the house a decent amount and feel like I accomplished some things this week... I guess we'll see, though. This job search has been one long string of running over various rainbows without actually finding any pots of gold at the end yet.

And I still haven't decided when to come back from my upcoming trip to Japan -- I just know I need to be back in the US before it's time to head off to Spring Carnival, is all :)

Wow

I just received a package in the mail full of cards from my 7th-graders. They have a chapter late in their textbook called "Letter to the UK", where I guess they're supposed to write letters to a foreign English-speaking country, so one teacher had an idea that they should write letters to me while I was in the US instead.

It's pretty amazing, really. The only downside is I feel kind of bad because I wonder if this assignment is meant for them to get penpals in another country? I never heard any of the students last year having penpals, though, so who knows, but maybe I ended up selfishly short-circuiting that. On the other hand a lot of their letters were clearly things like "Did you watch any baseball yet? Do you know about Yuki Saitoh? He is very popular." and other things that are for me, like "Did you use the gift we gave you? I have the photo of us in my room!" from a set of girls who gave me some hair ties before I left. And another girl told me about giving chocolates to a particular boy in the school on Valentine's day :) So it was good that they could write to me. But it loses the penpal aspect of the letter where a lot of them wrote "Do you like music? I like AKB48. They are very cute" or whatever. And a lot of the kids made these really nice cards with stickers and cartoons and purikura photos and whatever on them.

Eh, I dunno. I'm glad I have something to remember them by. I feel bad that several of them say "Please come back and teach us again!", too.

Also, the teachers included a DVD of the chorus competition in there! That was really nice of them too :)