Time to Wrap Things Up

This monstrosity began as an assignment for my alternative certification program. It became a sort of obsession for a while, a place where I could explain and think at greater length than in a Facebook post. It was even a place to vent, although the warnings of friends and family convinced me to delete a few of my more caustic comments. It was even a place to tell the occasional long story, and a few people seemed to enjoy those.

As time went by, I don't know if I had less to say, or whether I figured I had already said what I was thinking before. Many experiences were later versions of the same thing that I had written about previously. And a lot of the things that were central to my daily experience were not things that I felt it proper to write about here.  The number of posts declined in response. By the time that the baby was born, I just had gotten out of the habit.

At this point, it is hard to know what to say anymore. We have the same events yearly. We have the same test-driven obsession that has apparently permeated education. More of our time is spent preparing for, administering, and "interpreting" bubble-based tests. Life outside of work centers on Alice, and time spent with her diminishes our time spent on school-related activities in the evening and on the weekends. There are social activities that we pass up because we don't have the time with a toddler, and there are ones to which we are simply not invited.

We have become kind of isolated on staff here. Our neighbors, and friends, across the hall decided that they needed a change of scenery and left at the end of last year for Bethel. We have seen them from time to time when we get up there, but they have not been able to make it down here, because of their schedule. Our new neighbor is great, but we do miss our friends. We have little dinners with our neighbor and our 5th grade teacher occasionally, but the rest of the staff seems to cluster in a group from which we are excluded. It's kind of childish and annoying, and I hate to give it a lot of thought.

But now, our lives are about to change dramatically. Some friends of mine own a law firm in Cadillac, MI, our old home town. They needed some help, and one thing led to another. I will be starting a new job around the first of June. I am going back to practicing law. I had not considered it, and was sure for a long time that I would never go back. I figured that I would retire from this job. Every year, I would grumble about renewing my lawyer license back in Michigan, and swear that this was the last year for that. I guess I was wrong...

My wife is going to take the next year, and stay home with our daughter. There is some loose talk about another child. She is going to finish working on her Master's degree in Special Education. This means some evening classes that will go on until nearly midnight in the Eastern Time Zone. But it will also mean that Alice can be a Shrimp for swim lessons at the YMCA, and that she can go to the library and go for bike rides in the trailer behind Mommy and Daddy. There will be a lot more activities available to her there. Having a child radically changed our outlook on things.

It took us literally weeks to make the decision. We agonized about it to the extent that we finally agreed to just stop talking about it for a week. After we decided, we hesitated before we told people at work and our students. We hesitated about turning in our resignations from the district. We waited to post it on Facebook. We thought about changing our minds afterward. It has just been a hard process.

But it is time now to quit temporizing. Six weeks from today, we will leave the Delta. Six weeks from tomorrow, we begin to construct our new lives in Cadillac. We have an apartment rented for the next year, which should give us time to make more permanent decisions about long-term housing. We will need furniture, which will keep us busy during that week of Memorial Day. Our car is apparently going to be driven from Alabama to Chicago, so we will be able to take it north after we arrive. Logistics will be a challenge, but they appear to be working out so far.

Until then, we are about the business of preparing to either ship or sell our possessions here. I predict a couple of yard-sale type events. We sold our snow machine yesterday, and we are working on getting the car sold. That may prove to be more challenging.

More on all of this to come. I have come back to this blog to begin to wrap it up. There had been something around 946 entries on it when I logged on to do this one. My plan is to get the number up to an even thousand and call it good. We have six weeks to go, and there will likely be one or two things to write about between now and then. We will see how it goes...