Job application central this week... for D, at least. This whole endeavor has managed to bring out her deepest insecurities from hiding, and so she has not exactly been pleasant company. Every day she's spent writing, revising, posting, reading, trying to put together packages of cover letter, c.v., statement of teaching philosophy, sample syllabi, proposed syllabi, research proposal, statement of research interest, and writing sample so that each package manages to present her best qualities in exactly the combination that each of the nine schools are looking for. Oh, and then she has to explain succinctly how to reach her by telephone, should it be necessary.
Dear readers, you may be wondering if you will ever see new photos from our travels around the sunny land of Oz, since the features section of the Great Australian Adventure blog is now three months behind. Believe me when I tell you that putting together job applications has, unfortunately, precluded all other activity-- even dealing with the photographs of our travels. I hope, I dearly hope, that by this time next week I will be done with applications and once more turn to maintaining the more interesting sections of our Oz webpage.
Moving on... it is spring break here in Oz-- all the unis are off for the week, and classes are suspended Monday through Monday. Monday 3 October is Australian Labour Day and the last day of spring break.1 We decided, perhaps rashly, that since we've been working so very hard, and since it is spring break and all, that we could take a few hours this afternoon to visit the Powerhouse Museum near Darling Harbour. This is something we've been meaning to do since... well, since we bought annual memberships there in February. We have not yet managed to go.2 Today seemed as good a day as any.
To get there I had to wander through our old neighborhood, which is much closer to the city and which I had not been through in a few months. With our departure in sight,3 the sight of the Sydney skyline right in may face (not pretty in the distance like it is from our apartment now) made me realize how much I'm going to miss it. I can't speak for Chad, but I do honestly like this city-- I just wish it weren't so far away from everything else that I like.
The Museum itself we had mixed reactions to. Lots of cool stuff, pretty presentations, but not as much information as we would have liked. Then, too, what information there was was not organized very clearly. Our standards are high, I'm afraid-- we are of a generation who expects not only that a business will have a web page, but that it will be attractive and user-friendly. We expect not only that a database contains the information we need, but that it will be "intuitive" to locate it. We expect not only that our teachers/books/articles know their subject, but that they present it in a way that is compelling, engaging, easy-to-understand.
So, every museum or dispaly that we've visited in Australia this year has been subjected to the high standards4 of Chad & D. Some of them have measured up...
I'm sorry-- the past week has turned my expat brain to mush. I have spent so much time trying to be articulate in my applications that I seem to have lost the ability to be articulate anywhere else. Next week-- we'll keep our fingers crossed for new photos and better-rested bloggers.
;)
- D
-----
NOTES
1We are not sure how Labour Day is celebrated here, but we know that at least this much is similar to our Labor Day back home: everything will be closed that Monday.
2We used to live five minutes' walk from the Powerhouse and so we thought we would go back often. But, after we saw the Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy special exhibit (for which we bought the memberships), we never went back to see the main part of the museum.
3"finally in sight" we might be tempted to say, as there have been times when this ten months has seemed interminable and our homesickness unbearable... and, though I am going to wax nostalgic in the next few sentences, if the truth be told, we really are still very much looking forward to going home
4Some might say "harsh expectations"...
Back to the GAA page!