Editions of Me

Source unknown I know, it's been a while since I've posted! Still here, still alive. I can't even claim to be too busy, since I'm on summer break right now, and if you're friends with me on social media, I've definitely been posting there. I guess I've been preoccupied? by a lot of other things. So what have I been up to? At the time of my last post, I was in the middle of jury duty, and it was kind of an intense criminal case. Then I developed an eye infection and a really bad cold. And then I got better and went to Disneyland with two of my dear friends, a grown-ups only trip (since my trips over recent years have always been with Jolie). I've been reading and writing and knitting and sleeping and thinking a lot about the current state of the world and listening to Hamilton . And now? We're two weeks away from moving. TWO WEEKS. Am I excited? Totally. Am I nervous? Yup, definitely. Am I daunted by the sheer amount of THINGS that need to...

I talk about a lot of aspects of my life, but one thing I generally refrain from talking about much is my long-time relationship with my boyfriend/the father of my child, Jimmy. Mostly, it's to respect his privacy. He's a very private person, even more so than I am, and I know he would not appreciate my sharing every little detail of our relationship on the Internet. But it's Father's Day, and I have let many Father's Days pass without talking about this person who has been central to my life for so long, so I'm going to do that now.

For some reason, I thought I had already done this blog post, and it turned out I hadn't :) This is probably going to be my last race for a while, as I get ready to move and then get settled in at our new place. And appropriately, it was a leisurely, fun walk along the bay with my daughter.

Watch the full vlog here . It's worth it. Hank Green, again, voicing the thoughts that I needed to hear most, right when I really needed to hear them.  I would be lying if I didn't say that part of the reason I'm no longer going to teach is that my Impostor's Syndrome gets pretty crippling, and more often than not over the span of my teaching career, I've generally felt like I'm not making difference, I'm not effective, I'm not ENOUGH. That I really suck at this job, and that I don't deserve to be here, and that anyone could do my job a hundred times better than I could.  I'm not perfect - no teacher is! - and while I have had exhilarating, triumphant moments throughout my career, I have also found that the flipside is, this job has a million and one ways to break your heart. This indefinite hiatus that I'm taking is for me to patch over the cracks and figure out if I'm strong enough to handle more in the future. I'...

(Design source unknown) It's the last week of the school year. It's my last week at MHS, and it's also possibly my last week of teaching, period. As you can imagine, I have a lot of bittersweet feelings about this. I've been here for ten years (eleven, if you include my student teaching year), so of course this place, this job, has changed me immeasurably. I've grown a lot since the first day I showed up here, and the friendships I've made over the years run deep. There are a lot of memories wrapped up in these walls, good and bad. I have always wanted to move to Portland, but there was always a reason to stay; I'm not saying those reasons don't exist anymore, but if I keep waiting until I'm perfectly ready, it'll probably never happen. (And as much as I love my job, I'm not super keen about being stuck in this particular town for the rest of my life.) It's hard to walk away, but it's made easier by the fact that I have some...

I know this isn't my book blog, but bear with me here. I want to talk about romance novels. I like them. I read them a lot. Not so much with the corsets and men riding horses, but just contemporary, new adult romances, because they're fun, sexy escapism, and they're quick to read. (We all have our things, I guess.) Maybe it's because I tend to seek out the free/cheap ones instead of casting my net farther and wider, but I had a very obvious realization this morning about romance novels...

This year marks the 5th anniversary of the runDisney Tinker Bell Half Marathon, and in addition, it will be my last Disney race for a long time (since it's not so easy to drive down to Anaheim from Portland), so of course, I had to make it EPIC - I decided to run the Pixie Dust Challenge. (And Jolie did the kids' race, of course.) Basically, the challenge is to run the 10k on Saturday and the half marathon on Sunday, totalling 19.3 miles in one weekend. I've done this before , but I was in much better shape then, and I didn't have knee pain plaguing me every step of the way, so I knew this was going to be a true challenge just to finish. I haven't been training at all, except for some 4-6 mile runs/walks on the weekends. It's amazing how, when you get out of the habit of running regularly, it becomes difficult to reintroduce it back into your life. I had intended to train for this while I was training for my powerlifting meet, but of course, my knee prov...