Month of May

It's been a while.

The weather has been absolutely incredible - sunny and 80 degrees with no humidity for the past week or so. I was able to drive out to the Coast on Saturday and hike over the Pacific Ocean. Afterwards, I wanted to go to a McMenamin's pub in nearby Lincoln City. For you East Coasters, McMenamin's owns fifty or so pubs in the Portland area and throughout the state of Oregon. Each pub has its own style and personality, and I was looking forward to going to the Lighthouse Brewpub in a seaside town. Unfortunately, it looked like a pretty standard restaurant from the outside and it was in a shopping center next to a Dollar Tree. So I drove home and cooked instead.

For the first time since I'm out here, I feel like I'm able to come home from work at a reasonable hour, get things done around the apartment, run errands, etc. and be able to spend time properly preparing for classes. It sounds basic, but for the first few months I would be at school from before sunrise until after sunset and be so busy teaching and involved with events outside of normal school hours that I would crash by the time I got home for the night. I'm hoping to build on some of the momentum I have until the end of the school year. The job hasn't gotten any easier, but I feel like I'm managing it a bit better. I would love the chance to spend a summer actually planning my classroom and curriculum before beginning next year. But, that's yet to be determined.

It's insane how fast time is going. In about a month classes will be finished for the year. But I'm feeling relatively at ease with the future amid the stress of concert season and year end stuff.