Catching Up: June

A Month of Milestones...

27

Because of the timing of our trip to Roswell for a wedding, I was able to celebrate my 27th birthday (albeit a few days early) with my family and a batch of Mom's homemade cinnamon rolls.  I most certainly ate 2 of them!  Amar and I continued our tradition of celebrating birthdays Foodie style, and we went for a tasting at Journeyman Restaurant in Somerville with friends.  Finding the place is an exciting experience in itself: after wandering up and down Washington Street for a few minutes and catching a tempting whiff of some Indian fare nearby, we turned down a large driveway.  Just past a dumpster and a delivery van, we were faced with a partially-open garage door to our left and a solid black stage door to the right.  I confess we seriously considered that ducking under the garage door might be the correct option.  Once inside the restaurant, the novelty kicked in and it felt quite special to be tucked away in a place that is so difficult to find.  Despite a rough start to the tasting menu with a fish-food-flavored cracker amuse-bouche that made me wonder what the chef was thinking, we had a delightful meal!  Turning 27 doesn't seem like much of a milestone necessarily, except that I feel quite settled, which, after several years of graduating, graduating again, starting a job, getting married, moving to a new city, searching for jobs, and working at three different schools in two years, is a welcome milestone for me!

4

June 18th marked the end of my fourth year in my teaching career and my first full year at AB.  It was strange feeling like a first year teacher again--and working about the same hours--as I adjusted to the new curriculum, and yet reminding myself that I already had 3 years experience behind me.  I asked a lot of questions that I really already knew the answers to, looking to feel secure in a new school culture.  Overall, it was a fantastic year with fantastic students.  They were so eager to learn and discover, and that made teaching them an exciting task.  They loved the books we read, or they loved to hate them (which is, in a way, the next best thing), they practically cheered about learning new vocabulary words, and they wrote some of the most beautiful personal narratives I've ever read from a group of students.  At the end of the year, they just sort of floated away into summer, as if they'd be back next week, except for a group of students from 7th period.  I couldn't help but laugh as these three boys came up to shake my hand in honor of a good year--such a fourty-year-old gesture from boys who are still so-fourteen.  I'm both excited and nervous for next year, hoping that my students from the Classes of 2016 and '17 weren't anomalies!

55

Back to Roswell for the start of Mission Trip 2014, and I was blessed to spend part of the afternoon visiting with my grandparents on their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary!  How much they've lived and loved through together, and I'm just at the very beginning of that journey!

10

At the end of June, I participated in my 10th STA Mission Trip to Whitesville, WV.  Since my first trip 13 years ago, I've built a wheelchair ramp that allowed a newly wheelchair-bound man touch grass with his toes, repaired porches that were rotting away, replaced walls, windows, and floors, and installed air conditioners for a woman who couldn't keep her house warm in the winter or cool in the summer.  I've met people who have tremendous faith and generous spirits, and I've seen how powerful love can be in transforming people's lives.  I'm honored to have spent ten summers serving on this trip!

2

I returned from Mission Trip to spend my first night in our second home in Boston.  Amar and his parents (and some unnaturally strong movers, from what I hear), had moved our belongings from our first apartment on Gardner Street into another charming apartment in Auburndale.  My first contribution to the new house: hanging a Welcome sign that a friend in Whitesville made for me years ago--I've just never had anywhere to put it!  For the next few weeks, we'll be unpacking and settling into the new place!

Week-End Update: Changing Seasons!

This week...

1

I restarted my exercise routine!  I'm trying my best to come home from work at a reasonable time in the afternoons to make some time for myself.  I've been doing pretty well eating healthier foods and better portion sizes, now it's time to be better about exercising multiple times during the week!  Next up, maybe I'll have time to exercise AND read for fun on a weekday!

2

We said good-bye to winter!  Walden Pond has melted, the cows are making their way back to the big fields (a much-enjoyed sight along my commute home), and the snow-berg in our backyard is gone!  Now that the temps are hanging around the 55-65 degree marks, I celebrated by changing out the clothes in my closet and opening the windows around the house!  I can't wait to switch to springtime produce next week!

Thoreau's Cabin at Walden Pond

3

Both classes finished classics this week: can you guess what they were?

"Two households, both alike in dignity
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life
Whose misadventured, piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents' strife."

"And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me,so I could go on sleeping; [...] and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now;and then I happened to look around and see that paper."

4

I volunteered to join the interview committee at work. It took up until the second question I asked one of the candidates to start to feel as though I had something to contribute to the process.  The best part of the experience was recognizing what it is that I value in the teaching profession as I listened to the candidates' responses, and what that shows about my growth so far as I finish up my fourth year of teaching.    

5

I watched the film version of The Lovely Bones, which is still one of the most powerful books I've ever read.  The film does a good job of capturing the story and the mystical vision the author has of the afterlife, but there's something about Alice Sebold's prose that cannot be replicated.  If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it!

“These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.”