All Good Things Come to An End

Yup, it's that time again.  Tomorrow starts a new school year.  The kids don't come back until Monday, but we teachers are due in at 8 am for the annual continental breakfast, welcomes, and anti-bullying workshop.  That's followed by information regarding legislative changes in educational policies, and then an afternoon of meetings at our individual schools.   A full day of professional development and too-much information at once.  Thursday and Friday are also filled with in-service training and meetings.  Fortunately, my room is as ready as it's going to get.  I kept track of the time I spent this summer moving my room  --- 45.5 hours total.  That's like a 3 credit college course!   Too bad I can't get any credit or compensation for that time.  I would have rather spent that time planning or revising my language arts program.

It was a busy 8.5 weeks.  We traveled twice -- to Switzerland, and to Los Angeles.  I took a ton of pictures in Switzerland, some of which will show up in my geography unit, along with pictures from previous travels.  As we were traveling through the Jullier Pass, I was inspired to use my pictures in our study of the 5 themes of geography - place, location, movement, region, and human-environmental interaction,

I went to a lot of meetings at church, though I didn't get to Sunday services much.  One of the "perks" of my UCC denomination is its democracy.  The congregation has all the power.  That takes work.  As moderator of our church, I have had to facilitate meetings where some important decisions have been made.  We held a special congregational meeting this past Sunday where we voted to spend what is to our small church a substantial sum of money to improve accessibility to the front door of our church.  We've had a non-ADA compliant ramp for many, many years, and we have a chair-lift at our back entrance.  But we wanted a better front entrance.  So after a great deal of work and discussion, we voted to change the appearance of our traditional New England steepled church, by adding a new ADA-compliant ramp AND a new door at one end of the portico.  For those of you in small village churches, you know that getting a group of people to agree to CHANGE something is no minor task!

I did a lot of reading this summer, but I realized that 95% has been one series.  I started George RR Martin's Game of Throne series back in June.  I think I will finish Book 5 tonight or tomorrow.  Five books doesn't sound like much for me, a very prolific reader, but it's almost 5000 pages of reading.  And while it's engrossing and enthralling, you have to pay attention!!  While I will be sorry that the next 2 books haven't been published yet, I am looking forward to switching genre and author!

Knitting has been happening too.  But I've been knitting the same sweater all summer!  It's a cotton/wool off-white cardigan, and it's almost done.  I have a sleeve and a half to go, and then the sewing together.  It's not a hard pattern to knit, but I've found that the directions aren't as clear as they could be.  I've done a lot of un-knitting too -- or tinking (knit spelled backwards, which is kind of like unknitting, as opposed to frogging which is ripping it all out - frogs rip-it, rip-it)

As always, I've kept the business books up-to-date, and I've tried to stay atop all other types of recordkeeping chores.  I've also started a new exercise program which I'm trying to stay faithful too.  I've bought 8 sessions with a personal trainer, and I've worked with her 3 times already.


What hasn't happened this summer:  closets didn't get cleaned, my family room didn't get renovated, my knitting paraphernalia didn't get organized, we didn't get the paddle boat out once, the gardens didn't get weeded.  Oh well, there's always next summer!