After 5 years of complaining, our owner very surprisingly bit the bullet and paid nearly 1 years rent to have construction workers repair our roof. They have fixed the top level and will be building a new awning that will cover the entire bottom level. The downside is it's a metal roof, so it'll be noisy when it rains, but the upside is it won't leak and it will cover our entire front yard (rather than just the driveway half as before). It should be done this week, which means it'll be done some time next week.
I'm still playing catch up with classes we cancelled during our time in the US, plus a day I cancelled because I was vomiting from a virus. That should be finished this week. I am happy to say we've had a steady stream of students come in and register, and if we keep the current students, we'll be over 120 again, which was about what we ended 2016 with.
I will go on Monday evening to confirm a part time job at a local primary school. I will teach once a week, being paid by a "rich alumni who see the value of communicative English". They initially wanted me to teach about 18 hours of classes, at a good pay rate (one that would have amounted to as much as Angela and I made combined at our first full time job here), but I knew that was impossible. I initially turned the job down, but upon further discussion, agreed to 3 hours once a week. It gets my foot in the door, but I'm yet to see if it's a door I want to put my foot in.
I have spent four days in a row going to the hospital to get forms and papers. The doctor care that Titus got earned a B, the nursing a C, the facilities a D, the food got an A from Angela, but the billing and records gets a BIG FAT F-. Rules, rules, rules. They can't give me copies of any blood tests (I did snap pictures of some during the stay to pass to Titus' normal doctor), they can't give me a simple summary of the visit for insurance (unless I want to pay US$30 and wait 4 weeks!), they can only hand-write a normal receipt, no detailed bill, my initial emergency room visit only has a payment receipt with no details on what the payment was for, and the list goes on. Normally for international claims, I submit 1 cover letter, 1 claim form, 1 bill and 1 receipt - about 4-5 pages depending. This is by far my longest claim yet - 17 pages! The kicker I think it the 4 pages of payment vouchers because the emergency room department can't hand write receipts, they just add up vouchers to make the total amount (like buying stamps for a large package). We definitely appreciate our normal hospital more now... Check out the submission (I hope it's enough):
And I repaired both of our dryers (changed a Capacitor, belt, sensor and the heating element). The dryers are 7 and 5 years old, and they break every 6 months. Fixing them is cheap and they consume minimal electricity, so I'll keep fixing them till spare parts aren't available. I now keep stock of the main spare parts that break so I don't have to wait for shipping :) So far, I think maybe I've.spent half the cost of a new dryer, not bad actually, especially since this dryer was pretty cheap for here and a new one would cost 1.5x what it did before. The oldest one was working at half capacity, but now it seems good as new.