Last summer it was cold (good for summer school) and cloudy. My flowers didn’t do well, and we hardly had any for bouquets. This summer has been very hot (bad for summer school), but great for flowers. Here are a few that are blooming on our patio in pots or in our gardens. We’ve had a pitcher of flowers on the table almost constantly since the Fourth of July.
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I’ve been stuck and uninspired recently. I can’t quite come up with a reason, but it’s been hard to think about writing for the blog, creating a scrapbook page, or doing much creative. I have been keeping up with the journaling, and I’ve made a bunch of cards, but that’s about it.
I was just about ready to get started on the blog again and then my daughter went to the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico and started posting some of the most beautifully written entries I’ve know her to write. She’s a wonderful writer, but the Ghost Ranch inspires her deep reflection and the language she uses is so wonderful. It’s very interesting to be intimidated by your daughter!
Summer school ends tomorrow and then we’re headed south; first to Atlanta to visit with Sarah and Adam both of whom will be home (briefly in Sarah’s case) for a few days. Then we’re off to Beaufort, NC for four days at the Delamar Inn and time to explore the Outer Banks, golf, sightsee, and sit by the sea. I am really ready for a rest. I’m looking forward to the scrapbook shopping at Archiver’s, organizational shopping at The Container Store as well as checking out all the little shops I’ve been reading about in the Insider’s Guide to North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
Although summer school takes up half my day there is still time for the pleasures of summer:
The pleasures of summer. . . I suppose they are even more appreciated here because our winters can seem so long and dreary. This summer we’ve had almost continuous sunshine — just another pleasure.
We spent Saturday with good friends at their cottage on Canandaigua Lake. It’s one of New York’s beautiful Finger Lakes. What a relaxing and enjoyable time we had! Wonderful food, a boat ride, good conversation. When I was growing up we moved several times. The longest I lived in any place was nine years. Now I’ve lived in this house for 20 years and I have friends I’ve known for 32 years. Seems amazing to me, but it’s a good thing.
Rochester hosts several arts festivals each year. One of my favorites is the one in Corn Hill, a wonderful neighborhood of restored homes across the Genesee River from our house. This year Tracy and I decided to walk. It was a picture-perfect day-hot but breezy, low humidity, and lots of glorious sunshine. Walking had several advantages: we had our exercise out of the way first thing, we had to limit any purchases to things we were willing to carry home, and it extended the pleasure of the day. We ended up buying a bonsai for Matt and the very last poster from the 2004 Corn Hill Arts Festival which I wished I had bought last year. Here are a few photos, including one of the Rochester skyline from the Ford Street Bridge.
Two days of summer school have come and gone. I am always glad once things are underway. Summer school is a real change for me, as I am the administrator rather than the teacher. I’m in charge of making sure everyone has what they want and/or need, that parents understand the attendance policy, that buses come and go on time, and children get where they need to go. I enjoy the challenges of the administrative role for the summer, but I would never want to trade it for the teaching job I do during the regular school year. It’s interesting, however, how a title gives you the aura of power. Children respond so differently to me during the summer when I’m the “principal” than during the year when I’m just another teacher. Even the kids who know me first as a teacher during the year, give me a different level of respect during the summer.
Among the many pleasures are the great people I get to work with from other buildings and all the people I’ve come to know in different departments in the rather large school district where I work. I count as friends bus drivers, purchasing experts, administrators, office staff–people I would barely know if not for this summer job. I also like the opportunity to work, but not to plan for instruction and not to have to grade papers and write reports on children’s progress. It’s good to have a change of pace.
Sometimes it is amusing. Yesterday (Tuesday) my secretary called all the parents of the students who didn’t show up. We have a very strict attendance policy where parents agree to have their children present for the five week, half day program. If you go on vacation for a week, the child loses his/her spot to someone on the waiting list. So my secretary talked to a father who said his daughter was in Vietnam this week with her mother visiting relatives. When Deb explained to him that his daughter’s place would be given to someone else next week if she didn’t come this week, he said he’d call and see if he could have her here by Thursday! I’m not expecting her.
I decided to set a goal for scrapbooking this summer: five one-page
layouts a week. I also decided to try 8 1/2 by 11 layouts for random
photographs that aren’t part of a themed scrapbook. I came too late to
scrapbooking to deal with chronological scrapbooks, so I’ve finished
scrapbooks on our southwest trip, our annual vacations on Kiawah, a
favorites album, a mini-album on an afternoon at the Atlanta Botanical
Gardens during a Dale Chihuly exhibition, and a couple of paperbag
albums. So here are a few of my first layouts for the summer. I’m
having a bit of trouble taking photos of the layouts. Maybe the scanner
would be better but it’s not hooked up to my iBook. The Faces layout is
a blatant scraplift from Cathy Zielske’s wonderful book Clean and Simple Scrapbooking.
My eyes are drawn to her layouts in every idea book or magazine where
she is featured. Clean and simple is a goal, but I’m finding it doesn’t
necessarily mean easier or faster, although scraplifting does help.
I’ve finished nine layouts this week!
Sarah was here for four days. She came home to preach her first church sermon at the invitation of the First Presbyterian Church in Honeoye Falls, NY. She worked there for two years as Director of Christian Education before heading off to seminary. It is a wonderful and warm congregation, a great place for a first sermon. As always she was poised and articulate and asked hard questions. She asks no more of her audience than she asks of herself. I am constantly amazed by the depth of thought and questioning she and her friends pose. (Check her side bar for a list of great blogs.) What a pleasure to hear her preach-and how proud we all are!
My classroom is cleaned out, all the good-byes said to a wonderful group of fifth graders. And today we set up for summer school. I am the coordinator for one of two sites for elementary summer school. It’s a wonderful program in its sixth year now that provides academic support to a group of students who struggle in reading, writing, and math. This year there was almost no break between the end of the “real” year and the beginning of summer school. But now I have four days off and I hope I can forget about all of it for the long weekend.
It’s the end of the school year (one week left with kids; seven staff days), and half of 2005 is over. Both are hard to believe. In January I was inspired by a project in Scrapbooks, Etc. to make a little New Year’s Resolution book.
I thought it might be appropriate to reflect on how I’m doing. There were four categories:
Self: I stole a phrase from the Paper Source website (and one of my favorite stores): Do Something Creative Everyday. Then I wrote “work on a scrapbook every week” (not doing so well on that). I scrap in spurts, but I DO have the April vacation put in the Kiawah scrapbook, and I did a simple 8 X 8 album two weeks ago in one night.
I’ve finished two paperbag albums and an 8 X 8 albums of my favorite photographs from the last 25 years. This week I’ve made 10 cards despite summer school chaos, summer school parent meetings, and attending four concerts at the Rochester International Jazz Festival. Writing this all out says to me: not so bad, Karen. My job is very time-consuming and for the last two months I’ve essentially had two jobs-my regular classroom teaching job and the elementary summer school coordinator job. I also wanted to Journal Every Day-I’ve kept up with a very simple journal of activities almost every day. I’m doing pretty well on this one.
Enjoy: Work less, Prioritize, Keep a Positive Attitude. I’m doing better on working less. I stop grading papers/planning at 9:00 and give myself an hour almost every night to blog or read message boards, read, or make a card or two. I’m doing a good job of prioritizing and making sure I get some Me time, and it’s been pretty easy this year to have a positive attitude. Check my gratitude list.
Money: Budget and Stick to It, No Impulse Buying (24 hour rule), New Item In, Old Item Out. Not so hot on the first. I still spend too much money on paper stuff, books, and clothes. But…better on thinking through the purchases. I walk out of Joanne’s and Michael’s empty-handed as often as I purchase. Even when I have a great coupon. And I’ve gotten rid of an item of clothing or a pair of shoes for just about everything I’ve brought in. This is an area that still needs work!
Health: Workout at the Gym 3 Days a Week, Watch Portion Control, Limit Nighttime Snacks. Like scrapbooking this goes in spurts. The best I do is 2 days a week at the gym. The eating part has been really bad recently, but it’s usually fair. This is an area that really needs attention as soon as school is out.
Overall, not as bad as I thought. It does pay to put it down in writing. Then you can see what’s what. Hopefully I’ll give more attention to the Health and Money goals between now and December. Projects to work on. That’s a good thing.
I thought I was starting a very quiet blog. I knew my daughter and her boyfriend would check in on me, but I wasn’t ready to share it with the bigger world quite yet. Then a friend at work called me with great excitement: Sarah’s got a link to your blog! I made her promise she wouldn’t look until Monday. When I got home that night I discovered that Sarah had not only a link, but a post about my blog (and others). So I was forced to upgrade the site much more quickly than I might have. It’s great to have support….but there’s been a lot of pressure the last two days!
Gratitude has been on my mind a lot recently. So much bad news floods the airways and covers the newspapers, and I feel truly blessed. I do my gratitude thing in the car on my way to work, but I thought it might be nice to share some of them:
There’s plenty more; lots of little things, but these are the big ones that come right to mind.
We have a quiet house. In the last year, since both my kids moved out, I’ve become accustomed to a quiet house. But last week my daughter and her new boyfriend were here for five days. And my son, who lives nearby, came for dinner two nights. There’s been lots of laughter, conversation, music, and even a blaring TV. But they’re gone, and I have a quiet house. I miss the noise, I miss the laughter, I miss my kids. In a few days, I’ll get used to the quiet house and the comfortable rhythm my husband and I have developed over the past year. I like that too. But I’d rather have a noisy house.
So now I have a blog. Three months ago I didn’t even know what a blog was. Then my daughter, Sarah, had a friend set up a blog for her. Soon I was reading her blog and several of her friends’ blogs on a daily basis. Over spring break I discovered the 2Peas Message Board. Although I had been scanning the galleries for a couple of years, I had avoided the message board. (Considering the time I now spend there, it was probably a good decision.) Once on the message board I found the scrappers’ blogs. Now I’m hooked.
So why start my own blog? I’m hoping it will encourage me to be more reflective about my life, attend to the daily instances of grace in my life, and to record significant events in my life. Stamping and scrapbooking have made me so much more attentive to design, light, and color; perhaps blogging will make me more attentive to journaling which I find so much more difficult,
