Themeless in Seattle

It's not that there hasn't been anything to write about recently. More like there's been too much. Life can get get very complicated very quickly around here.

The last part of spring break was not very breaky, though perhaps at times achy breaky, as it included extreme heat, college news for one daughter and early morning track practice for the other. All in all, it was a recipe for neither levity nor deep thought. However, here's a brief summary:

College admittance was a mixed bag, as it is for most kids, and the subsequent uncertainty, while different and I guess slightly better than the pre-results, has yet to subside. Selecting a college seems like a big decision, though the consequences of a college selection cannot be anticipated and, in fact, may never be known. Weird to think that you make this huge decision and you might never know if you got it right. I feel like my college choice seemed like pretty much a disaster, and my life turned out pretty good in spite of it. So does that mean that it's not really such an important decision? Maybe I would have been just as miserable somewhere else and pretty much nothing in my post-college life seems even remotely connected to the particular school I attended. Actual big decisions, like finding a job, getting married or having kids, very quickly give you a lot of specific feedback as to whether or not things are working out.

I'm writing an expanded version of that last paragraph, which I'll post as its own entry when it's done (and note the correct use of both versions of its/it's in the previous sentence).

Getting back into school has not been very easy, but the school days themselves are easier, since I only have 3 classes to teach for the remainder of the year. It's the time of the year where I have to figure out what we need to get done before we wrap it up. This sometimes leads to me cutting huge swaths out of the curriculum and focusing on a few key points, and sometimes has me rushing through whatever's left. I'm also torn between just doing math and spending time on other things I think are equally important.

The good news is that I'm getting back into biking. I'm feeling stronger than I did last year, which is a pleasant surprise. It's not that I feel like I'm really old or anything, but I've gotten used to a slow decline in some of my physical abilities. That being said, I'm a better skier now than I was a couple of years ago and my biking has been surprisingly strong.

I'm finally moving into the new school building. Because we were having a family health crisis at the time we moved out of the old building, all I'd done was throw everything in boxes and put them in the basement. While this is not that different from my normal paperwork management system, we got water in the basement and all the boxes got wet and one collapsed and I had to dig through another one of the boxes looking for something so it was a total mess. So now the stuff is no longer in my basement, it's in the trunk of my car. It has been in the trunk of my car for 6 days now. I brought one box into the office, but have not done any more for two reasons. First, the already-brought-in box is still sitting full where I put it last Thursday, and second, I realized from the funny looks that I was getting as I brought that box in that all the boxes I used formerly contained beer. Hey, I can't help it if the place we keep beer is right next to where the papers are. That's why there were boxes available when the other one fell apart. What was I going to do? Put the stuff in shoe boxes? I live with 3 girls, so there are plenty of shoe boxes available, but you can't put file folders in them.

So when I went to buy beer over the weekend, I had to move beer boxes full of school papers out of the way to get them in the trunk. Ah, the circle of life.