Well, the blisters on my fingers from the typing are almost gone....
Glad I could help. There's still a lot left out but by the time you get to try out what is above for a while you'll be able to fill in the blanks yourselves. Perhaps some of the others here will add to what I wrote to help fill in the blanks. Certainly a few of them have in the past. I'd strongly suggest you try some searching within this forum for keywords like "finding thermals" or "learning thermals" or similar and see what comes up.
Another excellent resource if you can find it is Dave Thornburg's book The Old Buzzard's Guide to Soaring. It covers such stuff as the low impact searching like I spelled out as well as many other topics. Like proper soaring the book is as much a philosophical "how to" about the most effective way to fly a glider as it is a detailed description of what thermals are like as well as how to fly in them.