Changes, big and small.

As was hinted yesterday, change is in the air.

After a year and a half of off-and-on job-hunting that has proven rather fruitless in my professional field, it might be time to consider other career paths. "Why don't you teach English?" I've heard multiple times from many people. Okay, fine, why not? To that end, I will soon be taking a month-long course on ... teaching English. It begins in late July, and I've already begun preparing for it. (I wasn't just reading a grammar guide to find stupid things to blog about, you know.) Cool. For reasons related to scheduling and price, the best place for me to take that course is in England. Cool, except not. I will miss Gilles, and not only for his stud services.

Before that though, I'm going to visit my family for three weeks. I've been missing them so much and dwelling over a trip for a long time, but first I was in too fragile a state to do anything about it and then too unwilling to miss a month of potential baby-making. Now's the time to get over that, though, because after I return to Switzerland at the end of August, just in time to cry into Gilles's shoulder about the scribbled-out due date, my typical state of housewifely indolence will be rather impacted, rendering me unable to slip away anywhere until Christmas.

Why? Because in September, I'm going back, back, back to school. (Anybody else love Grease 2?) It's a two-year program at the local university for a diploma in French as a foreign language. I'm not sure what value it will have to me beyond personal enrichment, but by the time I started thinking about other kinds of programs that might perhaps lead to gainful employment, it was too late to apply with my foreign diplomas. This will fill the time very nicely for now; even if something else comes up later and I don't finish the program, I'll still benefit from what I will have learned.

In the meantime, I'm trying to kick a bad lazy personal care habit that frequent homeboundness has encouraged me to develop. If I'm here, I'm comfortable – meaning in lounging gear, as an old friend of mine with a penchant for bedazzled pink velour sweatsuits liked to call it. (Not that my particular kind of lounging gear is bedazzled, pink, or velour.)

Although Gilles is never critical, he did politely request last week that I not be in lounging gear – or, as he put it, "those horrible pajamas" – if I wanted more than a fleeting chance at accelerating the baby-making-mobile past a certain green light. If Mrs. Draper can perfectly set her golden curls and slip into girdle, robe, and stockings before greeting her low-down dirty no-good adultering specimen of a husband with a peck on the cheek and an old-fashioned, can't Madame Gilles at least slap on jeans and a cute top to brighten the homecoming of her own sweet hardworking treasure? The answer is: I can and I will, especially if it leads to what it led to the other evening ... dinner being served late (ahem).

i'm not there yet ... but i'm trying.