Carnaval 2010 here I come!!!

Job crisis suddenly resolved as quickly as it happened - four days after asking my chair for letters of reference (i.e. betraying the fact that I was job-hunting elsewhere) my boss had a meeting with the dean about the hiring freeze, and magically pulled a big, fluffy rabbit out of the hat for me. Here's my schedule now:

- Guaranteed job for spring semester 2009.
- Then four months off. Brazil for two of those months. It'll be off-season there - I'm hoping to hook up with some escolas when they are starting their first-ever rehearsals for 2010, and play with the Olodum guy I've always wanted to play with, and hook up connections for a Fulbright scholarship in Brazil, and start a collaboration with the sea turtle people in the northeast, and visit the jaguar project again, and and and....

Then the big fluffy rabbit:
- Guaranteed job for fall semester 2010 (!)
- SPRING SEMESTER OFF 2010!!!! That means I have DECEMBER TO JULY FREEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!
- Then back to work fall 2011 - with potentially a long-term job.

So I am GOING BACK TO BRAZIL for the 2010 Carnaval season. AT LAST.

All year I have had this aching sense that I'm just Not Done with Brazil yet, that I need at least another half-year there.

And this time I'm going to stay a long time afterwards: March, April, May, June... . Hopefully, maybe, if I'm incredibly lucky, with a Fulbright. I'll definitely be applying. (not the grad-student kind of Fulbright - there's another kind of Fulbright that is for university professors & postdocs, sort of a professor-exchange-program, where you go and teach in a foreign university. That's what I'm applying for.)

Sea turtles. Jaguars. Tamarins. Imperio. Mocidade. Sao Clemente. Banga.

Now I just have to figure out how to work Bloco X into all this....

... and damn, I HAVE to start saving my money.