Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

The calendars I ordered were supposed to be delivered on Wednesday, but the packaging was damaged, which means it has to be sent to a central location, where the contents will be verified, and then it will be repacked and sent to me. The last time this happened was with an order of cat supplies, and it took long enough that I ordered another bag of cat litter 3 days later, and it arrived several days before the original shipment.

So we will see how long it takes a box containing 4 books to get to a central location, verified, and returned to me. I don't understand why it can't be done locally; it's not that hard to find the packing slip and compare the contents, right? I did find takers for the extra notebooks, though.

I've started at my new gig, and it seems like it'll be a good fit. I haven't actually done any of the work yet; I've been added to the slack and google workspace and project management thing and the airtable, I've been oriented to the workflow and stuff, and I've been assigned a handful of things to edit, which I will look at on Monday. (They're paying me for 10 hours a week or thereabouts, and nobody works on Fridays.)

I should go for a walk or something, because I haven't since Tuesday, but it's still cold out and I'm going to complain and be a big baby about it. (I did YouTube videos Wed and yesterday.) Tomorrow is roller derby, so I'll get plenty of exercise then.

Sunday I'm going to Potsdam for a tour of the plants hibernating in the orangery, which I stumbled across doing research for a short story. It's only 10 Euro, and I have unlimited regional travel, so getting there is free. It's an hour and a half to get there, so I'll probably aim to get there a couple hours before the tour (which is at 2 pm) and walk through the castle park in the horrid grey and maybe rain until it's time for the tour. It'll be starting to get dark after the tour.

I wish I could remember if I already bought a book about Sanssouci; I enjoy having the little histories at my fingertips, and they have better pictures than I'd be able to take. I might have the one about Charlottenburg. (If I do, they're in storage, because I don't see them on my shelf.)

Let's see. I'm officially divorced (since the end of August). I got an upgrade in my office situation, but not because I'm special now that I'm real faculty lol, rather most likely because they had to fit 12 German TAs into 8 desks (plus me), and the extra desk in the instructor office was empty. Not that I'm going to complain; they even got me a name tag for the door.

My teaching load this semester is 10 hours, which I agreed to back in May, because a faculty member was going on medical leave for shoulder surgery this semester and all the classes needed to get shuffled around. The required number of work hours (teaching hours are 3.3 hours/credit hour or so) for a part-time USG employee to be eligible for all benefits (i.e. health insurance) is 30 per week (75%), and I'm currently at 83.something%. 9 credit hours is equivalent to 30 hours/week. My spring offer was 8 credit hours (70ish%), which is, of course, less than 75%, and would make me ineligible for insurance benefits that they pay for (partially, anyway). So I asked the department head if there was any way to get me to 9 hours, even inventing some sort of 1-hour class or others, and he said he'd look into it. (There was no way they would change me from 2 4-hr classes to 3 3-hr ones, because the Real Faculty refuse to teach 4 days a week, and whatever bullshit bullshit permanent employees can get away with.) Then an early Festivus miracle occurred: the faculty member who is currently on medical leave announced she's retiring at the end of this semester, and can I pick up 3 more hours? Which has me teaching 11 hours a week, THREE PREPS, on a schedule that will likely confuse the hell out of me.

1st semester meets MTWR at 9:05/9:30.
4th semester meets MWF at 11:15.
2nd semester meets MTWR at 12:20/12:30.

I'm not going to know if I'm coming or going half the time. But, hey, at least I can afford health insurance and continue to get my medications. And maybe save up enough to pay for COBRA in the months I'm not employed but before I go abroad.

My new roommate is a serious upgrade from the previous one. She is also queer; she studies fashion theory and feminist studies; she is completely social; she's going to roller derby bootcamp. Her cat likes sleeping on my yoga mat (of all the surfaces in the apartment...). She's fannish, and we've talked Stucky and Good Omens and Star Wars. In other words, a normal human being. I was talking about Bitch Planet and decided to get it out to read again (and recced it to her) and she liked it. So, yeah. Serious upgrade in the roommate department.

I did a 10k road skate on Saturday and only fell down (accidentally) once. And I decided, like a genius, not to wear my elbow pads, so of course I fell right on my elbow and scraped it. (My knees, which were padded, took the brunt of the fall.) But I can wear my Star Wars bandaids, so it balances out.

I'm probably going to have to get a part time summer job so I can cover expenses and still have enough for moving. (Fuck, y'all, moving. I am doomed.) I just bought plane tickets to Berlin in May for an apartment- and job-hunting mission. Not sure where I'm going to stay, but I'll worry about that in March. I suppose that if the freelancer visa and teaching a language thing doesn't work out, I could change my mind and get a PhD* (ugh) to get a student visa. Or cross my fingers that I can figure out some sort of writing gig (also covered under freelancing) that pays something useful. Or maybe steady translation work, idk. Something that'll keep a roof over my head and food in my belly.

I'd have more money in the bank if I hadn't had to replace my Mini in July. The harmonic balancer died, and fixing it would have cost as much as the car was worth - and with a 14-year-old car, lord knows what the next thing to break would be. So I sold it to the mechanics and bought a 2016 Fit. Which is infinitely more practical and gets way better gas mileage. And I should be able to sell it for close to what I paid for it (not counting taxes, of course) next year, which means I'll have most of the money back.

*There is some pretty cool research in the Modern German department at Uni Potsdam.

ETA: I might be able to apply for a qualification to work with migrants and refugees based on this. Though I'm not 100% sure where my DaF Grundlagen und Konzepte certificate is.

I got email about a job interview yesterday from a place I sent an application in February and had pretty much given up on. It's part time (probably only 3 hours a week), but it's teaching German, which I need to gain EXP in, so whatever. Also that's about the right amount of time for me, with everything else I'm doing. So it won't, like, be a huge source of money at all, but it might keep us in beer.

The costumes for DragonCon continue apace. We will be spending much of the weekend attaching hardware and straps (I hope; I'd like to get the bulk of the build done this weekend so we aren't up really late finishing Monday & Tuesday.)