Leah’s Cafe

We have until 30th of April to clear the premises before passing it to the new owner. They are a few boxes of T-shirts, about 30 of them that we were trying get rid of. Have given most of them to the children, they kind of excited about that and wore the shirts to classes this week.

The shirts are promotional T-shirts that we printed when we first started running the after school care. In fact, we have some promotional pens made too. But, over the last three years, we have finished most of the pens, only the T-shirts were left in the store room!

The new owners who bought the tutoring business from us asked for permission to start fixing things to setup the center. They have fixed more lighting in the classrooms. Man, the fluorescent lights are so harsh and so bright, it’s bad for the eyes. Do they think they run a shopping mall?

They didn’t hire an electrician to do the work, they did it themselves. I wonder what they have screwed up because the fans stopped working after they fixed the lights. Now, I have to teach in a stuffy classroom without fan! What to do, even though it’s early in the morning, I have to turn on the air-con, which I usually don’t.

Have been busy running around since Monday, running to and fro a few government agencies to get all the paperwork done. Haven’t have time to sit in front of the computer nor check in the various networks for assignments.

The buyer of the business had paid us a down payment on Monday as we signed the sell and purchase agreement. On Tuesday, we changed the company registration record to add the buyer as new owner. On the same day, we called the architect in so that we could start submitting the plan of the premises and start the name transferring process. On Wednesday, the buyer met the landlord, we did an assignment of the lease then went ahead to send it for stamping.

The name on the license needs to be transfered to the owner before she pays me the remaining purchase price. It usually takes more than a month to get approvals from all the licensing agencies if all the paperworks are in order. We hope the transaction can be closed and settle before the end of April.

There are piles of paperwork to sort out this week. There are a few things are going on concurrently now. There are all urgent and need to be done in timely manner so that when I leave for IL, there is no untied ends let loose.

We have paperwork related to the business that we just sold, immigration related paperwork and all the financial related paperwork that needs to be taken care of during our absence.

We spent the first half of last year wrestling with the decision whether to close down the preschool. We decided in June and it was folded up officially in August.

The big boy has delayed his plan to return here for the umpteen times, we decided that it’s better for me to move to IL to be reunited with him. That decision was made before or around Thanksgiving. The disposing of “stuffs” started then.

Everything has gone on rather smoothly after we made the big decision. Sold the first floor of the tutoring business in November 2007. Moved out of the first floor and sold some of the furniture, one thousand over children story books and the Montessori materials in December 2007. Sold more books and furniture in January 2008.

Was caught up with all the CNY activities during the first half of February. Last week of February, got an unexpected offer from a prospective buyer who had made an inquiry and had seen the place many months ago but didn’t get back to us!

By the rate it goes, our ties with the business will come to an end before April. Once we are done with the transfer of name and licensing, we will hand over of our present students to the teacher whom we are training to take over the SWR classes.

Things seem to sail smoothly, sometime I can’t believe it myself, that we are able to dispose everything (ok, almost everything) in such a short time frame. Considering the struggles we went through in the last few years, it feels very much like the light at the end of the tunnel !!

We have sold the first floor of the tutoring center to one of our teachers last year and have been trying to sell the ground floor before the move to IL. We have a few people showing interest in purchasing the ground floor setup which we used to run an after school care and preschool. Have been meeting them up and busy showing them the place.

As of today, one of them had put down a good faith deposit, so it’s officially SOLD! We are expected to get out of the business by the end of March, since I am leaving by end of April or early May, the timing is PERFECT!

Though it may look like I couldn’t be that busy with three days and 14 hours of teaching, the work at home job has been keeping me occupied this days. Have been really busy finishing up assignments, creating new sites and blogs, troubleshooting CPU overloading problem, migrating blog on subdomain to a new domain and experimenting with other ways of making money online.

Since we have decided to sell the tutoring business and move to IL, making money online will be the main transitional job that keep me busy until I get a “real” job. If work at home turns out fine, I may not even go look for a job outside the home when we are in IL. Since the big boy is making enough to pay bills, it’s time for me to take a backseat and work at more relax pace. I need to recuperate from working my butt off running a tutoring center and a preschool! :-)

The SWR classes start on Saturday, I still schedule most of the classes on Saturday. So Saturday still is the busiest day of my week in 2008. Expecting some children won’t show up until next week, like they usually do every year. They are still in their holiday mood.

Saw another tutoring center opening up just a few doors away. Looks like they are running after school care and tutoring. However, I am not afraid of competition because we don’t teach the regular school curriculum that most places do.

Decades ago, we look for a job through newspapers and also through networks of friends and relatives. But, since the popularity of online job sites started about 10 years ago, many people no longer buy newspapers to look for a job! It’s so convenient, you just have to create an online job profile and start searching and applying for jobs online, at the comfort of your home.

Monster.ca is a Canadian based company that has been around for quite a while, I remember bumping into the site as long ago as perhaps 10 years ago! I’m glad to see that it’s still around and indeed it’s become a worldwide operation with sites for specific countries such as the United States, Australia, Hong Kong, and many European countries. Is there any part of the globe that they don’t cover? All this can only translate into so many recruiting options for employers and opportunities for job seekers.

If you are visiting the site to look over their job listing you’ll find a wide variety of positions from professional listings in the engineering field to service or retail industries. You can search by the type of employment you are looking for or you can search for jobs near your locality.

If you are a job seeker, you can register and create a profile that includes your resume or curriculum vitae. This will stay on the site and you can update it over time. Employers can look over the listings as well to find potential employees that might suit whatever position for which they are hiring.

If you are representing a company i.e. human resource personals, you can easily create a company profile and start posting jobs in the system. The job seekers who found your postings will then apply through the system. You may call them for personal interviews after screening through the applicants. As you can see, the process is rather straightforward and cannot be any simple than that.

There are quite a number of other resources at Monster for anyone who is searching for a job. I’m certain if you visit the various centers you would gain some valuable insights that would help you to get through interviews successfully. First and foremost, you may learn to create an impressive resume that catches an employer’s eyes and lands you an interview. :-)

I have worked in three different colleges before I quited to run my own Montessori preschool. I started my teaching career in the mid 90s, a time when personal computers were starting to get popular, but the penetration rate for Internet access was still very low. We were considered the privileged few to have free access to the Internet at the college 24/7.

At the first college that I worked with, we have two computers in the staff room for about 70 staffs! The second college I worked with has a tiny little room, where they stuffed in 7-8 computers, the computer carts and the LAN Racks for about 30 staffs. You would think that would mean very little access to the computer for us. Well, most of the older staffs there did not know how to use computers at all and knew nothing about Internet! So, in actual fact, there were only a handful of younger staffs were using the computers and Internet a lot.

I moved back to my hometown and found a teaching job with the university there in 2001. At this university, we were given a personal computer and a monochrome laser printer in each of our individual office. They also have a computer room equipped with the most state of art scanners, color printers and photocopy machines that we can use. It’s a medium sized room, but the LAN Racks and huge color printers took up quite a lot of space.

Well, I wold say the machines were under utilized most of the time, because the teaching staffs were just so occupied with so much administrative work, not many people have time to think of how to use this facilities to spice up their lecture presentations or make it more visually pleasing with the readily available color printing service.

Someone recently introduced me to some Taiwanese expatriates here who are interested to learn to speak and write better English. The two engineers who came to meet me hardly speak any English! I wonder how they get around communicating with the people from MNCs whom they often have to deal with.

They told me only the universities in Taiwan use more English, but they didn’t go to university, they went to technical college. In technical colleges, everything was in Mandarin and they didn’t have to use English at all. They are willing to learn English from scratch, even suggested that I put them in the class together with the children. But, most unlikely we can do that because adults learn differently from children.:-)

We have officially taken my name off the tendency agreement for the tutoring center starting from 1st December. The second floor of the business setup is officially SOLD. We were paid the good faith deposit a while ago and we will receive the first payment this week and the last payment in the beginning of 2008.

The new owner used to teach at the center, she was our best teacher who had been with us since we started the business three years ago. Since her hubby is helping her with the running of the center and I am sure she would be doing fine. In fact, I sold her the money making part of the business, the tutoring center is the one that kept the Montessori preschool running because the preschool was running at a loss.

With the second floor being sold, we are currently looking for someone to take over the after care setup that we have on the ground floor. It is a bit difficult to sell it because we have stopped running the after school for one year and people didn’t like the fact that we don’t have existing students for them to start off with.

Two more classes tomorrow and Friday, then I would be done for the year. Since I started the tutoring center three years ago, this is the first time that I am taking a month break at the end of the year.

Enough of  teaching non-stop whole year round and running holiday program during the school break!! It’s time to close the center for a month and take a break, thanks to all the extra income from blogging, I can afford to do that!

Hubby is planning to return here. We are discussing about how he is going to make a living here. He would rather look for a job outside than working at the center, but it’s probably not easy for him to find a job immediately. So we will have to work together as reading tutors until he finds a new job. We try not have to see each other 24/7, as we had a lot of disagreements and got on each other’s nerves working together last time.

We were running the after school care, preschool and tutoring business before he returned to see his parents in IL. Now that I have folded up the after school care and preschool, the only thing he could help out at the center would be teaching the Spell to Write and Read program. I hope it will work out this time as we do not have so much workload and the business is debt free, so no financial pressure with the enrollments.