In Which I Learn to Relax While on Vacation

What a strange concept that is.

This is Jason's new apartment building:



It's not as posh as his last place, granted, but still pretty spiffy. His couch, thankfully, is comfy, and I pointed out that his plan is a clever one - his smaller-than-the-previous-abode apartment will seem quite spacious when he gets it to himself after sharing it with me.

We went to dinner last night at this tiny cash-only hole-in-the-wall-ish restaurant:



in this strip mall:



Which feels oddly Casa Bonita-like, in a Vietnamese way.

As we drove out there Jason explained that the best food is in the suburbs. If this place was any indication, he's very much correct. The caramelized chicken with lemongrass and chilies was delicious.

We went to Harris Teeter, a grocery store, after dinner to get some supplies, then back to the apartment.

We did talk for a while past bedtime, but turning in at midnight was a much healthier time achievement than we usually make the first night of reunion. Thanks to a terrible bedtime the night before (3:00), I hit that type of exhaustion where you're so tired you can't sleep.

Jason was up bright and early at 7:00 the next morning to go to work. I bid him farewell. Then I thought about getting up right then, too, and getting to work on my vacation.

Then I realized that there was no reason I needed to and, in fact, I would fare better for the day if I got rid of my headache.  So I went back to sleep.

I don't know if you know what an achievement that is.  One of our family mottos is "If you don't need a vacation after your vacation, you did it wrong" (followed by "We can make that" and "Du beurre, du beurre, et encore du beurre").  I am squishing a lot of guilt for indulging in a life of leisure for a little while, but I am determined to try out this new lifestyle.

When I did get up, I showered, dressed, and watched The Daily Show while eating brunch.  I was already off to a terrific start.

Next I wandered around Jason's neighborhood a little bit to get a sense of the lay of the land then headed to the Smithsonian via the metro. The ride was fun, since a quatro of Italian men in natty dress shirts and sunglasses (which they kept on in the metro, of course) sat not too far from me and spent the ride in vigorous conversation in Italian.  Diversity!  I love it!

I didn't linger outside on the mall for too long, given this:



(Note the "Feels Like" part)

So I headed for the American History Museum.

It was packed! There were quite a few high school groups there in matching t-shirts and I was torn between a) an "Aww - teenagers!" nostalgia, b) an annoyance at the noise and chaos of that many young people, and c) actively suppressing my urge to manage that many young people and terminate their unruly behavior. My field trip instincts are finely honed and hard to turn off.

Here are a few of the things I saw besides teenagers:


A Tax Collector strung up in a tree


The diary of a Civil War nurse named Amanda


A map of immigration patterns for museum visitors (I added my family's history to the database - you're welcome, Smithsonian!)


An exhibit about transportation in America that included creepy people statues who stand outside of the display barriers (Don't blink!)


An exhibit about moveable-design books (as in pop-up books)


The original textbook and radio microphone from the Scopes Monkey Trial


A wind-up animated Friar from the Renaissance


A mask from The Lion King


This highly accurate (from my observations of Family/Jack dynamics) comic


Some old friends


and Julia Child's kitchen (man, that woman's awesome)

They've redone the entire museum since I was here last, and I like the changes and additions overall. In particular, the display for the Star Spangled Banner is nicely done.

I kept overhearing snippets of conversations to the effect of "Okay, so from here we'll go to the Archives and then swing through the Portrait Gallery..." and I noted how nice it is to not be doing that. I got to see everything in one museum, and then I headed back to cook dinner when I was ready. That's it - no rushing to the next place, no aching feet or dehydration. It's really, really pleasant and I feel extraordinarily lucky to be able to try this kind of vacation (Thanks, Jason!).

Jason got home around 7:30 and we had dinner, watched an episode of Doctor Who, and did some event planning for the rest of the time I'm here. Within an hour I

• Bought a ticket to a matinee of Follies (with Bernadette Peters!) at the Kennedy Center,
• Bought tickets for Jason and me to see Aretha Franklin at Wolftrap (if anyone has picnic menu ideas (Rachel, Miranda - I'm looking at you!) let me know!),
• Booked an evening painting class in Georgetown, and
• Registered for a ticket drawing to see a free OkGo/Pomplemousse concert (fingers crossed!)

While I still don't have a daily agenda, I made the beginnings of a To Do in DC list. The heat wave's supposed to break this weekend and the forecast is for Monday to have a high of 80 (whoo!). I think a trip to the zoo is an appropriate celebration of that. Tomorrow, though, I'm going to do whatever I feel like doing.

And that's perfectly okay.

My Kind of Mall

DCA

Hello from the East Coast!

I can feel the patriotism already.

I'm hanging out at baggage claim, since Jason so nicely offered to leave work early (i.e. 5:00) to escort me to his place.

Hurrah, Hurrah

Not only did my sweet packing skills allow me to pack for two different extended trips in only two pieces of checked luggage, but they also both arrived with me! Yay!

PS It's 98 degrees here.

Installation Airport Art

I'm on my way!

After very little sleep and a couple of obsessive closet clean-outs, Rachel picked me up this morning and drove me to DIA.

DC, here I come!

In the meantime, I'm testing the photo-blogging setup with a picture from the airport: The walkway to Terminal A is currently adorned with a stream of paper cranes. I like it!

We Won't Forget to Write

Per my usual pre-trip rituals, it is 8:00 PM and I am not anywhere near done packing yet.  (I don't think I have ever gone on a trip with a proper night's sleep behind me.  It's just not done!)

I am, however, attending to some very important blogging-type stuff.  At the moment I'm working on activating my phone for mobile blogging.  Because I know you're excited to see up-to-the-moment pictures of my adventures to come!

In other blogging news, Jason has started a blog!

Since we will be sharing many of the same adventures in the weeks ahead, and since our different perspectives can be entertaining, here's the link if you'd care to read:

www.amoregentlemanlikemanner.blogspot.com

He's a pretty funny guy when he's not working 84 hours a week.

Until tomorrow then!

I Finally Enabled My Phone for Mobile Blogging!

Does that blow your mind?

Happiness is a Thing Called Joe

There are three Trader Joe's within 15 minutes of Jason's place.

I'm good now.

(I'm also jealous.  Stupid Colorado liquor laws.)

Hey There

While babysitting Jack today, we watched a little Battlestar Galactica.

I thought it was pretty cute the way every time the show cut to black to mark a commercial break Jack start clapping with a big grin like, "Good job, guys!  That was a great show!"

The best part, though, was when Gaius Baltar appeared on the screen for the first time in that episode and Jack did a double-take, then exclaimed, "Da!  Hi-yeum-da!"

Which is exactly how he greets Ben.



What do you think? Is Ben a Cylon?*

* By which I mean to imply that if Ben and Gaius are the same person,  they must be Cylons.  I am NOT implying that Gaius is a Cyclon because I don't know if Gaius is a Cylon yet because I haven't seen the Final Five.  Please don't spoil this for me. And yes, I like Battlestar.  And yes, I fully embrace my nerdity.

Our Little Secret

No matter how much I love traveling or how often I do it, I get nervous before a big trip.  It usually dissipates when I get to the airport, but those moments (i.e. days) before I leave are pretty anxiety-ridden.

It's not the travel itself.  I'm not afraid of plane rides or not speaking the language or diseases or the other things that I assume keep other people close to home.  It's actually the same thing that makes me anxious the night before every school year begins: I'm just afraid of the unknown.

I like having a plan.  I like knowing what I'm going to wear the next day, what will be for dinner, what's expected of me.  I can handle spontaneity, since that's really just making plans very, very quickly.  I can also handle, even delight in, not having a plan for a few hours (or days, if I'm traveling with Emily), since not having a plan for a set amount of time in a set location with pre-determined company is a very solid plan.

What I don't like is having a long stretch of time in front of me that I can't plan for because there are so many unknowns.

There's a little game I sometimes play when faced with unknowns.  The first time I remember doing it was when we moved to Germany when I was 8.  Sitting on the plane to Frankfurt, I wondered what Germany was going to look like.  We had moved quite a bit already at that point, so I knew a lot of different types of homes and cities.  But they were all American and this was Europe.  This was going to be different.

And so I imagined all the different ways Germany could look.  I pictured different types of streets and houses and landscapes and I figured that it had to be one of those.

Then the plane started to descend and I looked out the window to see Germany for the first time.

And it was nothing like I had imagined it.

It wasn't better or worse.  It just wasn't at all like I pictured it.

I kept playing that game over the years - when faced with an unknown situation I think through all the possible ways it could turn out.  And here's the thing: I have never, ever been right.

Even more recently, now that I'm very aware of this "game" and of its inevitable outcome, I consciously and deliberately think through every possible way some new thing could be.  And I'm never, ever right.  Things never turn out like I imagine they will when I play that game.

I call it a game because it actually is fun for me now.  For one, it gives me something to focus on when I get nervous.  But I also get a kick out of seeing just how sneaky the universe is.  Because I can be a pretty thorough thinker when I put my mind to it, and yet I never, ever imagine the way things actually turn out.

And so I spend the van ride to the Russian mental institution calling to mind everything I've read or seen about mental institutions, and yet I didn't imagine the smell or the bars on the windows (not the look of the bars, but the feeling of being locked in a strange room with bars on the windows) or the sound of Russian coming from a medicated toothless old woman who insisted on showing me her breasts.

And so I spend the plane ride to Valdelavilla imagining all the ways I could teach English to grown-up professionals, what the other Anglo volunteers would be like, and what a restored medieval Spanish mountain village would look like, and yet I completely missed the way I would so quickly come to adore the people I met there.  And I certainly didn't imagine dancing with all of those drunk, adorable people until 3:00 in the morning.

And so I wander all jet-laggy through the Bangkok airport at midnight, marveling at the giant green demon statues, the lovely curly swirls of the writing, the extremely long and lone nail on the customs agent's pinky finger that he picks his nose with.  I'd heard about those aspects of Thailand, I knew about the art and the humidity and the sounds of the language.  I spent the last part of the plane ride imagining what it would be like there, picturing every possible combination of all that I knew and didn't know about Thailand.

And yet it was nothing like I imagined it would be.

On Wednesday I start my summer adventure of 2011.  Rachel's going to drive me to the airport so I can go to DC for six weeks.  This one's different - I've been to this city before, I know Jason pretty well, and it's still America, for goodness sake.

And yet I'm nervous.

Despite all that I do know, there are some big unknowns about this trip.  I don't have a volunteer position set up at a local orphanage/retirement center/monastery to schedule my time around.  I don't have a plan in place for how to fill each and every day from X:00 to X:00, nor do I have a set goal to accomplish.  I am excited about having so much time to play in DC as I please, and I am also terrified to have so much time to play in DC as I please.

I am not so nervous about the evenings and weekends, since I'll get to hang out with Jason (and hopefully Meg!).  We do and will continue to have plans when he's not working, of that I am comfortably certain.

And yet!  This isn't the same as the other times I've seen him - we're not living in the same city, or traveling together to a new place, or spending a pleasant long weekend together.  He'll be going about his normal life and I'll be there, in the middle of it.  There's so much I already know about what it will be like, and yet I can't even imagine what it will be like.

I'll keep trying to imagine it right up until I'm there, I'm sure; and I'll keep on being nervous, because I keep imagining what it will be like knowing that I will never, ever be right.

And so I imagine what this trip could do to our friendship, and I conclude that there are only three possibilities: that it can either make it better, make it worse, or make it stay exactly the same.

 So what options am I missing?

When I Look at You

Natasha summers in Grand Junction now. 

I am lucky enough to have parents who don't mind taking in my beast in the summer months so I can go on my extended escapes unfettered.  Since I'm leaving for my next trip in a few days, I took Nash down to GJ this week.

It was delightful as always to get to hang out with my parents.  Despite the craziness of their work load (and their patients), they made time for some fun.  For example, Mom helped me make a maxi-skirt out of some fabric I've had sitting in my to-do pile for months now, and Dad put off chart-reading Wednesday to take me to a fun little used bookstore and to go hunting for some items for Peru.

We also measured the ceiling a lot:


You know how I travel to stave off my perennial need to move?  My parents do that, too, but since they are so tethered to their patient load (44 Avastin treatments today alone.  44!), they've replaced travel with renovations.  The house currently is covered in a layer of drywall dust and their kitchen has been relocated to their garage.  The changes they're making are pretty sweet, though.  For example, here's a quick shot of the new breakfast nook (for lack of a better name):



It's going to be awesome. Duane and Janet, two good friends of my parents, stopped by Tuesday night. Duane suggested my parents should put in a good mural on the ceiling in the nook. I agreed, and although I'm still a fan of my dad's old idea of a mural depicting our ancestors being driven out of their various homes (the Mormons being driven out of the eastern states on my mom's side and the Catholics being driven out of Italy after refusing to do free labor for their village church on my dad's side) (I come from a long line of stubborn people who challenge authority), I suggested they do something more like this.

Math and measuring fun aside, I also had some adventures with Natasha.

I've put off her annual shaving because the weather out here in Colorado's been much cooler than usual for this time of year. Finally, though, it had to be done. I made an appointment for her this morning at a pet grooming place not too far from my parents' office. When I dropped her off this morning, she looked like this:



I was helping with some filing at the office when I got the call that they had finished shaving Nash. It was perfect timing, since I could now swing out to get her, run her back to my parents' house, then go meet them for lunch before I took off for Denver.

I picked up Natasha, marveling at how getting her shaved makes her look like a completely new cat:



"Really, it's amazing," I thought as I drove back to my parents' house, "The short fur makes her look totally different."



"And act different, too," I noted as the cat sniffed all around the cage with nary a mew. I lifted up the lid to scratch under her chin, and the beast didn't respond.

"Poor thing," I thought. "Being around all those barking dogs really scared her."



I took her inside the house, opened the lid, and lifted her out for some cuddling before I left her for the summer.

"Huh," I said out loud. Something's different. She's not butting her head against my face.  And I don't remember Natasha having a white chin.  Or a pink nose.

I pulled out my cell phone to check:



"This isn't my cat," I realized.

"You aren't my cat," I said to the beast that was squirming in my arms.

I called the pet grooming place and told them, "I think you gave me the wrong cat."

"That's impossible!" the cat grooming lady exclaimed. "I keep track by the collars. Did you get the right collar back?"

"Yes..." I said looking at the collar that was clipped to the cage handle, "but I don't think this is my cat."

"Well, bring it back then," she said, then hung up.

So Not Natasha and I got back in the car and drove back to the pet grooming place. I called my parents on the way to explain why I was going to be late for lunch. When my mom stopped laughing, she said I could put Natasha in the back room of their office so I could still go with them for lunch. She and Dad met me at the pet grooming place and she took one look in the cage and declared, "That's not your cat."

I carried it inside. The cat grooming lady was suddenly apologetic, since the other cat's owner had shown up in the meantime, taken one look at Natasha and declared, "That's not my cat."

The cat grooming lady led me to the back room where, waiting patiently in one of their cages, was a newly-shorned but not-so-different-looking Natasha.



This is my cat.

Mom and I shut her in my dad's bathroom at the office. She made a quick note to tape on the door to make sure none of their staff accidentally let Natasha out:



When we came back from lunch, we found an addition to the note:





Wait a second... that cat looks a little different than I remember.

Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying

I'm famous!

A few weeks ago I emailed a question I have pondered for a long time to one of my favorite bloggers, Amalah.

And today she answered it!

This should be worth some good street cred, right?

I Got A Little Time

Oh, man.  The things you can do when you have time to do them!

I've been busy since Monday.  For example, here's what I accomplished just today:

- Hair cut and colored
- Drop off at UPS
- Drop off at Post Office
- Grocery store run
- Made mustache straws for Jack's party
- Made parts of the propeller pops for Jack's party
(pictures of the former 2 will come after the party!)
- Worked out
- Washed and folded 2 loads of laundry
-Tidied up the kitchen

I also have exciting plans for ironing tonight.  I'm hooked on Battlestar Galactica now, so a lot of the above happened while I was watching episodes of that.  It's handy having an iPad to take about the house with me while I work in various rooms.

It's so ridiculously nice to be able to get so many things done and still, you know, sleep and eat and such.  It feels .. too nice.  Like this isn't right, I shouldn't have so much time.

But, believe me, I will enjoy it while it lasts.

All on a Golden Afternoon

Here's how I spent my Half Day Which Kind-of Heralds the Beginning of My Summer Vacation:

First I went to

where I browsed around this:

Then I drove to

and had a treat.

Next, I took myself to a matinee of this

at this theater:

Finally, I got take-out from here

Which I enjoyed while watching

But my favorite part will be later tonight when I turn off my alarm and sleep until I am done sleeping.

Mmm... delightful.

Summertime

We're DONE! Yay!!

Classes are over, finals are graded and in the computer, and I'm keeping the same classroom next year (first time in three years!) so I don't have to pack everything up to move.

Monday's a half-day for teachers. We have faculty meeting, then time to work on whatever we need to. Me, I have one last kiddo coming in Monday to take a final and then I get to do all my filing and tidying up. My office has some great bookcases in it, but they're filled with old French and Spanish materials. (Hey - Spanish! It just occurred to me that I should borrow a workbook or dictionary to get ready for Peru! Handy!) I'm going to box those up and claim the shelves for all of my books. Bwah, ha, ha.

I'm looking forward to Monday - I can get up at 5:45 instead of 4:45; I can wear jeans; and I get time to crank up my music, kick off my shoes, and get organized. Putting things in alphabetical order makes me happy, you know?

Today's actually a half-day, too. They finally figured out what a waste of time it was to have kids go to all their classes the last day when they took half of their finals the day before. (I usually just pull out my stash of board games to keep them occupied for the 90 minute sessions.) John, Tiffany, and I are getting out of here soon. I'm going to celebrate the shortened day/start of summer by taking myself out to lunch and then to Tattered Cover to look for guidebooks for Peru. An excellent way to spend the afternoon, if I say so myself.



Whoo! Summer! Whoo!

Another Winter in a Summer Town

With just a half-day tomorrow to go, the end is so close. I administered two finals today AND I graded and recorded them in record time. I just have one final left to go tomorrow, then the usual end-of-the-year wrap-up business at the teacher work day on Monday. But I'm having a hard time believing it.

As eagerly as I look forward to it, it doesn't feel like summer is here. I'm guessing that this might have something to do with it:



Yup. Snow. It started just before noon and was still going strong when we left school around 3:30. The drive home was actually a little perilous, since it was accumulating and freezing.

Ah, May in Colorado.

Another One Bites the Dust

The backstage area was an absolute mess when I started here.

This year we've tackled a lot of it. We've sorted through the flats to toss out the torn and the broken. We found hammers and paintbrushes in all sorts of unimaginable places and relocated them to a newly-designated tool closet. We've converted my office backstage into a dressing/current-show-storage room. We broke apart the more dangerous pieces of scenery, salvaged the screws and found a storage place for good scrap wood. We reorganized the big pieces of scenery backstage to make the area navigable and safe. We even took a stand against the wrestling team storing their giant (GIANT) wrestling mats backstage and moved the mats to the wrestling room at the other end of the building.

This week was the granddaddy, the peak, the Everest of the clean-up. This week we tackled the costume shop.

The costume shop is a narrow room at the top of a shaky set of stairs backstage. Due to some ... supervisional issues from the teacher before me, I was only granted a key to that room when I swore that no students would be allowed up there unless I was standing in the room with them.

And so I put off that room until we had cleaned up everything else. With the other projects I could make several hot-spot-small-group assignments to a class and then migrate from place to place to supervise, assist, and answer questions. The costume shop was not large enough for an entire class, though, and I was not about to leave 20 kids down below alone while I supervised one group upstairs.

I knew I would be staying after for Grad Night yesterday, so I put out an invitation to both my drama classes that anyone who was willing to come help clean up the costume shop would be more than welcome.

We started with 8 kids. We finished with 2. (Not because the other 6 were buried under giant piles of fabric or anything - they just had to go home.) But by golly, we cleaned it. When we started, we had to shove shoulder-to-door to get into the room because so much stuff was piled on the floor. And now the junk is gone, the remainder is either hung or boxed and all is labeled. (In fact, we filled 1.5 of the school's dumpsters with junk from that room.)

As great as that feels (and, believe me, it feels great), I am especially proud that there are teenagers in the world who would gladly spend four hours cleaning out a dusty, musty, disgusting room simply because I asked for help.



Man, I like teenagers.

Don't Do Sadness

Last night was Grad Night, an apparently long-standing tradition at MTHS. The seniors and the teachers get together for an evening of dinner, a slideshow, and general end-of-the-year emotional stuff, including awards presented by the seniors to the teachers who are present (about half the staff). Most of them were joke awards, but they're all quite congenial.  It's a fun way to glimpse how the students perceive the adults.

My award is pictured above. The student who presented it said to the crowd, "If you've ever been in a play or musical, you know that although this teacher is a very loveable person, if you do something wrong, she'll call you on it and make you work until you do it right."  It provoked much laughter, including from me, as I went up to get a certificate and a little gold trophy.  And so I am the proud recipient of "The Caged Tiger Award." 

This morning, with the little trophy twinkling on my desk, I mentioned going to Grad Night to my Humanities class.

"Did you cry?" they asked.

"No," I replied.

"I heard everyone cried," they said.

"I'm not really a crier," I said.

And I'm not. As do all teachers, I've said good-bye to hundreds, probably even thousands of students by now. It's part of the job. You get to know them, you do what you can for them, then you both move on.  I think of former students often and wonder how they are.  Some individuals and some groups stand out still, and there are some student-memories (and one particular DPJH dvd) that are very dear to my heart.  But good-byes are said annually and I prefer to stay in control of my emotions.  I've become very good at not crying.


I like that this group of students respects me enough to see me as a fierce director.  I've worked with a lot of them in the last two years, and this is a fantastic class as a whole. There are kindred spirits in the bunch, and I will miss many of them next year.  But I'm not going to cry over my little trophy or over pictures of them as second graders, especially since I'll be seeing them all again for graduation on Sunday.  Grad Night will probably fade to the general blur of yet another last week of another school year.

However.

There are those moments that stand out, those times that you can point to and say "This.  This is why I keep teaching.  This is why I'll come back next year and do all of this again."  What I will remember from this week is one of my boys - my Macduff, my Jack Worthing, my Schroeder - coming into my room on the second day of his summer break, hiding something green behind his back.

We were in the middle of check-in, and he crossed to me ignoring the chorus of happy hellos from the juniors and sophomores who were left behind with me.

"I wanted to give you something," he said. Then he held out a feathered and beaded and beglittered mask.

I exclaimed with delight when I saw it, as did the other students.  "Try it on!" they called, and I did.  I promised it would go on the wall next to my desk where the masks I collect from my travels hang.  Then I hugged that tall, tall boy.

Then, later, when I was alone in my classroom, I opened the card he had given me too.

And I read it.

And I started to tear up, just a little.

Then I tucked away the card somewhere safe, and got ready for my next class.

South American Way

Finally, FINALLY, Jason and I have decided where we're going this summer.

Drumroll please...

We're going to Peru!

This place.

After months (MONTHS) of discussions of where-to-go, let's-be-practical, how-about-here? -ness, tonight we actually bought plane tickets, thereby ensuring some sort of civil war or llama uprising in the next two months.

As you may recall, we were going to be good travelers and stay domestic (i.e. North America) this summer in hopes of going to Europe for Kristkinglemarts in December and St. Petersburg next summer.

But then Jason told me last night that he just can't make the December trip happen with his work schedule.  My heart was bruised (oh! how I miss Germany at Christmas time!), especially since I really don't know anyone else who would/could make that trip with me.  And while I certainly don't mind traveling on my own, that particular trip was meant to be shared.

Not going to Europe this winter does open up some financial possibilities, though.  And so we started poking around Kayak again.

And then we spotted round-trip tickets to Peru for $501.

"Peru...?"

"...Peru!"

We immediately started researching different travel sites, reading out loud to each other the various facts and opinions and suggestions.


"We can go on a four-day trek through the jungle and camp out!"
"Oh.  That sounds... fun."

and

"We can volunteer in a classroom with kids for an afternoon, singing songs and teaching English!"
 "Oh.  That sounds... fun."

(Betcha can't guess to whom each suggestion belongs!)

Within an hour, we had convinced ourselves that Peru was it.  Finally we were excited, not just content but excited, about our plans.

And then we went back to book the tickets.  The $501 was still listed, but it was impossible to find on the booking page.  Darn you, Kayak!  Darn you and your travel-teasing ways!

We searched and searched watching the prices climb higher and higher.  Really, it was bizarre.  I've never seen plane tickets change like that over such a small chunk of time.  Within two hours of our original search, Peru was pulling up at $950 or more with 9-hour layovers in the middle of the night in Bogota or El Salvador  Not the best itineraries.

Frustrated and dismayed, we called the search off for the night with promises to reconvene soon, maybe Peru, but probably our domestic roadtrip plans to confirm instead.

But the bug had bitten - I was feeling that excellent nervous-excited tremor about Peru that I hadn't felt about any of our many, many other trip ideas.  I had spent Friday at a faculty party having this conversation over and over again:

"So, where are you going this summer?"
"I'm going to go live in DC for six weeks."
"Oh.  You're not going overseas?"
"Not this summer."
(with visible disappointment) "Oh.  Well, that'll be fun, too."

I hated it!  I'm spoiled, dang it!  I want to go somewhere with great possibilities for great stories.  I want to accomplish something travel-wise this summer.  I want adventure and novelty and foreign-language mishaps.

So when I wrapped up work at a reasonable hour today I hopped on itasoftware.com to see what they could offer.  When I found a really reasonable itinerary for under $900, I emailed Jason.

A flurry of emails and several refreshings of the search screen later, we had our tickets to Peru.

Peru!

Now there's all sorts of accomplishment to be had - a new continent!  Heck, a new hemisphere!  And, best of all, now I have something new to research!

Man, I love researching a new destination.

(Say, who's got two index fingers and a place to go this summer?)

Boom, baby!

Come What May

Dear Colorado,

It's just cruel to dangle the possibility of a snow day in front of us in May.



Sincerely,
There's 8 days of school left.

Always True to You in My Fashion

It was about halfway through the pre-show rigamarole that I suddenly realized what I was wearing.

I've been on the path for a while, but Friday night I truly became a drama teacher.

I also demonstrated my true bloggerness, since my first thought was that I needed to get a photo of my outfit to show you what I mean.  Five different kids were looking for me at that moment, though, so I have no photo evidence to show you.

Well, I do have this:


E.K. Hornbeck snagged me after the show to take a picture "Asian style!" in the dressing room.  But it hardly shows what I'm talking about, and I can't let such a momentous transition in my life go unnoticed.  So I drew you a picture of what I was wearing:

See what I mean?  I swear all I'm missing is one more flowing layer, and I actually had intended to grab a black and red silk scarf that morning.

Sigh.  I am a drama teacher, aren't I?

Jolly Theatrical Season

I officially declare the MTHS theater season of 2010-2011 closed!

In the past eight months I have produced/directed/designed seven productions:

One classical comedy,
One children's play,
One Shakespeare tragedy,
One one-act festival,
One musical, 
One slapstick comedy,
And one drama.

Additionally, I've taken students on field trips to do two theater facility tours, two acting workshops, and to see eight different theater productions.

I'm not tired of theater yet, but I am certainly ready to be just an audience member for a while.

Alegria Quote

(This is just for me - I'm constantly looking for where I left this quote, so I'm putting it here.)

(It's a good one, though, isn't it?)

“When you step into the light to do the show, play your role with everything you've got. Invest every tear, every laugh, everything beautiful and ugly from your lives.  Do you show and live your lives with humanity, because whatever you do, it changes someone's life forever."

-from Alegria

I Dreamed a Show

(It may have been that the whole class was slaphappy after doing a show last night, but this quote from our discussion of what musicals we should do next year too good to simply use as my Gmail status.)

Kate: "We should combine Chicago, Rent, and Sweeney Todd for the musical next year!  We can be barbers who murder their husbands with AIDS!"

Children and Art

I am rather worthless right now.

My 2nd period Humanities class is drawing to a close, but I can't bring myself to grade the stack of papers next to me.  In fact, it's taking most of my willpower to not curl up on the carpet in the middle of this computer lab and give in to sleep.

No worries about my teaching, though.  My students are hard at work.  They're writing biographies of artists of the 19th century right now and posting them to the class blog.  And they're listening to the techno version of Grieg's Peer Gynt, thanks to one student.  He had been whistling Peter and the Wolf until his neighbors begged him to stop.  So he switched to Peer Gynt.

I can't blame him for the earworms - they just took the classical musical listening test.  Which, if I have time tomorrow, I'm going to try again to figure out how to post that test online so you guys can try it, too.

The Adv. Drama class performance #1 was last night (hence the tiredness).  A lot of forces combined against me to make doing the show difficult, but, as always, Dionysus prevailed and the kids pulled it off. 

Kind of. 

We'll call last night a dress rehearsal.  Tonight they'll be good.

Haben Sie Gehört das Deutsche Band?

I got a sneak peak at my schedule for next year. Nothing's set in stone, of course - even as I walk into the building on the first day of school I halfway expect a new schedule of classes. But still, there are some highlights:

- They actually listened to me when I asked if they could please not schedule drama classes at the same time as the band class. Jesse's got a lot of percussionists, and it's really hard to rehearse on stage when they're wailing it out Stomp-style in the backstage shop.

- No English classes again! This is the one that I'm keeping my hopes the lowest on. I loved (LOVED) not teaching English this year and I'm glad that my drama enrollment's up enough for them to decide that I'm more needed for electives than English.

- Humanities is still on the list. I keep expecting this class to get cut, since it's not the most popular elective. The counselor assured me that not next year but the year after that she can arrange for all the students who are in AP World History to be concurrently enrolled in Humanities (a marvelous idea all around). I was surprised that my gut reaction to that news was something close to panic at the thought of being here for that long. But that's a subject for another entry.

I'll just be glad to be able to use and improve my Humanities curriculum for another year, since I have put at least a hundred hours into it. Plus, there's all kinds of new things to add to it. Like this!



How great is that? The second week of my class involves a virtual visit to the Lascaux caves. Now I can supplement that by introducing my wee ones to the wonders of Werner Herzog.

(A Werner side note -  Is hearing one's own heartbeat such a big deal?  When we were in Phra Den's cave at the beach wat in Thailand, Phra Bart repeatedly commented on how thrilled he was that it was quiet enough to hear his own heartbeat.  The other meditation students nodded with similar reverence and awe.  I was just baffled - I can hear my own heartbeat anytime I'm in a relatively quiet place if I listen for it.  Even right now, I can hear it when I pause in my typing.  Is that really so unusual?)

Good Clean Fun

The Intro. to Drama class play wrapped up just fine. The parents enjoyed it Thursday night and the entire middle school came over on Friday for a matinee performance.  They were a rambunctious and reactive audience, in a good way, thankfully. They laughed at all the parts which I had assured my students were indeed funny. My students approached me with trepidation afterwards because they had skipped five pages ahead at one point (right over a key blocking sequence that set up the entire ending of the show), only to be pulled back to that part later by the senior I had filling in for one of the missing narrators prompted them to do so (how she came to be onstage is a whole different story).

"Did we do okay?" they asked.

"You did great!" I exclaimed.

"But we skipped..." they trail off, imagining me docking their final exam scores for their mistake.

"And the audience didn't have a clue. You kept going and they didn't even know that anything was wrong! That's exactly what you're supposed to do."

They collectively sighed in relief and then got to work cleaning up the lettuce and shaving cream before they missed their buses.

We'll do a better post-mortem on Monday in class. This group is so very novice that they need that assistance in processing this past week a lot more than usual. And then, as usual, we'll strike everything, set things up for the next play, and then celebrate the glory that is us.

I thought about coming out to Salt Lake for the weekend. My parents were up there to meet the new family members and I was struck by a sudden strong missing-my-SLC-friends-ness that had me looking for last minute plane fare deals. By the time I had cleaned up the show Friday and was heading down the mountain, though, I had a rotten headache and a strong urge to do things that required very little planning or stress.

Instead, I went to the temple Friday night and treated myself to a trip to Rumbi's, one of my favorite SLC restaurants (yup, there is indeed a Rumbi's here in Denver, but it's very much out of my way).

Rachel came over Saturday morning with a sick-but-getting-better Jack and we had a day of sister-like fun. We went shopping (Rachel got some very cute dresses), went out to lunch at Panera's, went to Fancy Tiger to ooh and ah over their new fabrics, got frozen yogurt at a new favorite place, ate pizza and watched the new episode of Who at Brian's, and wrapped up the day by watching the first part of the miniseries of Battlestar Galactica back at Rachel's.

Rachel has been talking for a while about getting me to watch that show (she's also trying to get me to watch Star Wars, which might finally happen this summer.) (Did you know that I've only seen one of the Star Wars movies? It's yet another fascinating thing about me!), but she also cautioned me that it's pretty depressing and that it makes for serious geek cred. I trust her recommendations, though, since the other geeky TV shows she's introduced me to make up the majority of my favorite things to watch. (Given my same pattern of then introducing said TV show to you, Jason, you should expect me to coax you into continuing the Battlestar Galactica this summer.)  I happen to enjoy both geek cred and a good show, so I'm looking forward to seeing more of it.

Today, Sunday, I did very little.  I read a book, washed my dishes from the week, did a slew of laundry, and I cleaned out my refrigerator, reducing the contents to little more than salsa, lettuce, a few apples, and six eggs.  Because I've been off omelets since my time at the monastery, I'll have to hie me to a grocery store in the near future.


I also gave in to the temptation Rachel laid for me yesterday.  She told me about this.  I did my own research, thought it over all day, then decided that not having to scoop cat litter was indeed worth $260 to me.  Plus, I love my cat and I do feel guilty whenever I abandon her.  The least I can do is get her a 1960's-version-of-the-future-looking gadget that guarantees her a clean bathroom, right?

I will only be abandoning her once more this school year, I think.  I'll be up at MT for the last half of this week for the Advanced Drama class play, Inherit the Wind.  I do love that play.  It's got some marvelous speeches in it, and I get all sentimental since it was the very first play I was ever a part of (Mrs. Blair - a speaking part as a freshman!).  We'll see how it goes - as of Friday, none of the leads were memorized yet.  I'm also curious to see how the community receives it.  MT is pretty conservative.

No matter what, though, in five days I'll be done with plays for the school year.  I'm definitely ready for that.

Small Talk

You can watch a more complete talk by Sir Ken Robinson at a TED conference here. I've seen it before, too, but it's well worth multiple viewings. It includes ideas such as:

You probably stayed benignly away from things at school, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you won't be a musician. Don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign advice now profoundly mistaken.

Which, incidently is exactly the philosophy that led to my current superintendent cutting classes like Home Ec. from my school. He discovered that only a few students went on to graduate in Home Ec. in college and concluded that the classes were therefore a waste of time and money.

I Wanna Be A Producer

Now my backseat contains 3 cans of whipped cream, 4 cans of shaving cream, 10 heads of lettuce, and a giant tub of licorice.

I have a strange job.

Too Many Mornings

- I drove through snow to get to work this morning.
- It's the last week of April.
- A cloud settled in on the school during first period, which meant the view out my windows was completely and totally white.
- It was kind of awesome.

- After some shopping and cabinet-rummaging, my backseat currently holds two rubber chickens, a 6' long piece of pipe insulation, batteries, a bejeweled plastic goblet, a sewing kit, and four pie tins.
- My second-to-last play of the year is Thursday and Friday this week.
- I am so very, very ready to be done with plays for the year.

- Today was Senior Ditch Day.
- I pointed out to the seniors in my Adv. Drama class last week that I would be a lot less ticked at them if they ditched for a day if they had their lines memorized.
- Especially since, you know, the play's in a week.
- The seniors were all missing today. So were half the sophomores.
- Grr.

- For Easter, Rachel, Ben, Brian, Jack, and I had a potluck dinner (Ham! Deviled Eggs! Various Side Dishes! Strawberries!) and watched the new Who.
- I like Who. A lot.
- I also like peanut butter M&M eggs.

- Remember that obtuse blog post from two weeks ago that I never explained?
- There system panel for all of the fire alarms in my building is located in a closet on my patio.
- Occasionally, it starts beeping one really loud beep every six seconds.
- It likes to start doing this sometime between 11:00 PM - 4:30 AM.
- My HOA won't give me a key to the closet because I'm not supposed to have access to the fire panel despite the fact that my water heater is located in the same closet.
- I've gotten really good at jimmying the door lock since I moved in.
- As far as I can tell, no one hears the beeping but me. The fire department certainly never respond to it and the HOA swears they can't fix it because it's never going off when they check it.
- I pointed out that's because they keep checking it during business hours and this fire panel is running on Tokyo time.
- ANYWAY, it went off again two weeks ago. Each night I broke in, hit the silence button, and called and called and called person after person to try to get someone to help me.
- Finally, I found someone at the HOA who seemed to care (I think the three messages I left on her voicemail in the middle of the night while standing in the closet itself so they could fully appreciate the loudness of the BEEEEE helped).
- She gave the fire company the approval to turn off the beeping.
- They came out during that obtuse blog entry.
- It hasn't beeped since then!
- Yay!

- Saturday morning I woke up at 4:30 when I heard a loud "BEEEE".
- I flounced out of bed (oh yes, I flounced) in a murderous-albeit-sleepy rage and went to the kitchen to get the trusty knife I use to jimmy the lock.
- Then I heard it again: BEEEE.
- But it sounded a little different. It was louder in the kitchen. That's not how that works.
- I waited clutching my knife, my cat-like muscles poised, for the next beep.

- Of course, when I say cat-like, I mean hypothetical cat-like since my resident cat's muscles were occupied with butting her head against my leg in an attempt to get scratc-

- BEEEE.

- Ah. It's my carbon monoxide detector.

- I took out the batteries and waited.
-
-
-
- Silence.
- I went back to sleep.

- There has not been any beeping since. Happily, I also have not died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

- Yay!

- P.S. Summer vacation starts one month from today. Not that I'm counting or anything.

Hernando's Hideaway

So... I have this blog entry that I don't want to share with the whole world.  I certainly don't mind sharing it with you, dear family/friends/former students, just not with Random Stranger McGee.

My probably-overcomplicated-as-I-am-sure-Ben-will-prove-by-suggesting-a-far-better-choice-within-seconds-of-reading-this solution was to make a seperate blog that's private.

If you don't mind a little extra work to read an entry, just let me know - send me an email (chitarita at yahoo) or leave a comment (as long as I have your email address).   I'll send you an invite.

Sorry about the hassle, though.  You'll see why when you click over.  And I promise I'll keep posting here per usual.

Happy Friday!