Better late than never?

I started this here blog three years ago, when I decided to come to Florence to take a TEFL course and, subsequently, got a job and stayed.  But then, my writing fell by the wayside when I was working and exploring my city and meeting people, etc.  And when I say 'feel by the wayside,' I, of course, mean that I just stopped doing it.  Probably out of sheer laziness or the fact that I thought there were better things I could be doing.  Not my best decision.  Because now, three years later, there's a big hole in the story of what I've been doing.  And I want to tell it, dammit!

This is the sign
for my school!

Tomorrow, I'll start my fourth year(!) of teaching group courses at the American Language Center.  I've been doing private lessons both at and outside of the school, but the three-trimester academic year starts now.  Many of the students that I'll see tomorrow are the same ones that I saw at this time three years ago.  This means that we are continuing a journey together, so to speak, and have watched each other develop and grow: they in their language skills and me in my teaching.  They started in 2009 with yellow beginners' books, and tomorrow, I'll distribute green superior-level ones.  At first, we studied the verbs 'to be' and 'to have' and how to use the present simple.  In this course, we'll talk about conditional sentences, passive voice and all sorts of other new and confusing things. (English is complicated, yo!  A lot of times these students--any students--ask me why something is the way it is, and I won't have an answer.  I hold my hands out, palms up, in front of me, as if to say...'I got nothin'.')  On the whole, though, teaching has been and continues to be very rewarding and, as I've written before, it seems to be the thing that I was meant to do.

So, I've got that going for me.  Which is nice.

This is (an old photo of)
my band!

Other things have also been developing since I last wrote (which stands to reason, considering that it's been THREE YEARS): my grasp of Italian has gotten better, and I am more capable and confident in my abilities.  I can kind of cook.  I took a few months of horseback riding lessons.  I've met some of the greatest people ever: I started a two-person cover band with one (GIRLusconi 4ever!) and am in a long-term relationship with another (love you to pieces, amore mio).  Some of my students outside of the school have become dear friends and even semi-adopted me into their families.  I have a smallish but cute apartment, a bike and a bus pass.  Oh yeah, and there was this other thing that happened super recently, and that was that I started writing about and sharing my Italian-living and English-teaching adventures again.  This is that.  Thanks for coming back or, if you're checkin' in for the first time, thanks for doing so.