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.”