A lot of people are wondering if Jem and I plan to be on vacation for the next two years. If only. Instead, we are basically picking up second jobs as 7th and 8th grade teachers. Jem did stop teaching his regular course load and go on sabbatical. I joke that he left his college teaching job to become a middle school teacher. (Not really that much of a joke. And not one he finds that funny). He still has other academic-related commitments, but plans to do a lot of the actual teaching during the next two years.
I am maintaining my law practice. I have a lot of experience with remote working going back more than 15 years. In 2006, I thought I wanted to take a break from the law rat race and move to Hawaii. I moved to Hawaii, but never quite left my law practice and clients. In the end, I worked remotely from Hawaii. I used to say my office was wherever my laptop and cell phone were. I was remote working 15 years before it was a thing.
So, I don’t really plan to do anything differently than I have been doing for the past 4 years, other than adjust for time zones. New Zealand isn’t too bad. Some days I might have to start working as early as 5 am local time, but generally, I can have about 4 hours a day of overlap with US business hours. Not like Japan, where I have 0 overlap with U.S. business hours. For the Worldschool part, I am responsible for overseeing Math and foreign language acquisition but I will do that in the several hours a day I will get back since I am no longer driving to school, picking up from school, and taking to and from activities.
Remote working for me is really no different than for anyone else who has embraced a nomadic remote working life. We look for rentals that have work spaces or hotel rooms with a separate room for me to do calls or meetings as needed. Sometimes I really luck out and my workspace is fantastic. This one this summer had an ocean view.
So did the place we stayed in after that:
Weirdly, both locations this summer were across the street/next to churches. Something Sophie picked up on right away: “Why are our houses always next to churches?”
Our third rental of the trip had this across the street:
Weird. I don’t think New Zealand has that many churches, but we just ended up next to some of the few ones they do have. Very pretty ones to boot; at times I felt like I was back in Europe.