There’s a lot to talk about here at Inkreadable, dear reader, as you may have guessed from the title. It’s been a good week in terms of planning as I was able to plan through Sunday of this week. That meant that over the weekend I could spend a Saturday relaxing and then Sunday got back into planning but planning for the week of the 22nd. It’s been a little bit fraught in terms of planning because I now have a private client that I see almost every day in fact it’s a 7-hour-a-week commitment from them. I managed to get the Polish client in Den Haag to commit to an hour a day online Monday through Wednesday and Friday. We will meet in person on a Thursday. She also got me a second client on a Thursday to come to her office. That is certainly well worth it as they are paying for my travel and my rate of 55 euros an hour. The other client is a beginner but I have not yet tested her or talked to her to be able to get a sense of where she is. And Evelina was not sure herself. Yesterday I asked Evelina if she would give me her friend’s email and I sent her a proposal. I also had my last lesson of the current package with Shinwei and he renewed it with me.
But commuting out for the in-company is not all it’s cracked up to be. There hasn’t been a week in the last two that there hasn’t been some problem. Aside from the tea spilling incident, all of my issues have been transport-related. Luckily none of them have been learning issues. Last week, I managed to get a ride to the station because one of my students lives that way and has said that I will get a ride with her to the extent that she is in the class. But once I got to the station the fun began. I tapped myself into the platform. Only to see a Phalanx of police officers rushing by me. Going the opposite direction, coming down the stairs was an employee of the train company who physically turned me around physically to get me out of the station. Fortunately, I have enough Dutch to understand that and he explained as well that there was a man with a knife upstairs on the platform. We were told that we needed to exit the station and that we needed to go across the street as well. With no idea how long it would take for me to get home I gave a call to Jasper to let him know that I had no idea what time I was going to be there. It ended up only being about 10 minutes of waiting and then we were told we could go back up. I still got home at about 8:15 which would have been the time that I had gotten home anyway. But, man, never a dull moment in Lelystad. Well, until yesterday. Yesterday, at last, was uneventful.
I have been spending some time on my website over the last few weeks. What I’m trying to do is get enough content on my website so that the words for English lesson, English teacher, and business English are prominent and then I have engaged a translator to translate my whole website into Dutch. Once that happens I am going to run a campaign to see if I can get a bit more business of my own. Right now what I focus on is business English and general English for adults and children. I’m also going to try and do some lessons on the go for both adults and children where we go to a museum or an attraction and we learn vocabulary words that are appropriate for that attraction. I’m not sure if it will work but my English teacher buddies have assured me that that’s a great idea. If only I could get the people who host my website to get on the ball and change my rates so that I can start advertising that would be key. One of the ongoing explorations is to find out if I can get the most current post of my blog to post to the website and update it automatically each week. Theoretically, it should be possible but Jasper and I were not able to figure out how to do that over the weekend. It is enough that I have started fixing the SEO content issues for my website. But it is a job and it is quite difficult because that is not my strong suit.
This week saw one of the biggest attendances of the book club in recent months. We were 13 people in total and that may not sound like a big number, but we sit at a rectangular table. There is a second rectangular table there that we sometimes can use but it’s often taken by another group. This week that was indeed the case. But as we got bigger my enterprising group managed to connect the two tables by adding a round table in between them and we slowly started encroaching on the other group. And while it wasn’t a rager in the Animal House sense, we did get quite a bit of work done and we got some interest from our neighbors at the table which is always nice. My own non-writing streak continues as I seem to be using my writer’s group just to plan my lessons but it’s a small price to pay to be able to enjoy the weekend a bit more.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.