Happy Birthday Dave!

Tuesday Dave celebrated his 23rd birthday. He has been getting presents from relatives ever since the beginning of June, so it has been a month long celebration of sorts. After a weekend of shopping for some new school clothes, I made the day special for him by adding some extra decorations to the apartment while he was teaching.
These are the streamers I hung up in the apartment





And I gave him a special chair at the dinner table


Here is the carrot cake we had after dinner. Just enough for two!





Happy Birthday husband! Here's to many, many more together!

Jobs and the GRE

For the past month I have been unemployed due to a difficult, but necessary, life mistake and character building growning pain. If you could ring me out into a milk jug, I think I would overflow with character juice right about now. While I am thankful that things have worked out despite the extreme embarassment and shame the whole drama brought onto me, I am starting to get a little stir crazy in the house. Trying to conserve gas has me tending to lots of things at home...and when you only live in 975 square feet, you soon run out of home. The job search has gone very well, and infact, I have a brand new job to look forward to starting early this fall. I am a new Consultant for Glencoe-McGraw Hill textbooks. A consultant? What's that you may ask? Well, basically, I get to build relationships with teachers and school board members along with a few other consultants on my team and introduce them to our new textbooks coming out. How might I do this convincing you may ask? That's easy...take them to lunch, throw parties, have dinner celebrations, all on the company...including miles. This will be something totally new and different for me. Very self pased and self motivated job, and they actually want me to work part time, so it will all fit in perfectly with the coming school year. I will be working with a girl from our Sunday school class who offered me the job when she saw I needed work. This past week I went to a luncheon at Joe T Garcia's in Ft. Worth to watch a presentation, and I really think I will enjoy this. Praise God for his Faithfulness!
Not working currently has left me much time to prepare for my highly anticipated GRE test next Saturday. Now, while I say it has left me much time, me taking advantage of that time is a different story. Unlike most people in my position, I am not studying non stop and drooling over the dictionary. I heard from so many people so many different things...."read the book three times through", "don't even try to study, there is no point", "I didn't study and I did fine", "It was the hardest test I have ever taken in my life". When hit with so much conflicting advice, my philosophy is thus:do what is best for you personally. And for me personally is to just brush up on the basics and to not worry about learning every little thing possible. We will see next week if that tactic works or not. Hopefully my basics will give me the needed 450.

On another note, Dave has convinced me recently to read the Harry Potter series. I watch my sister and sister in law get hooked on these last year, and now I have followed. I am currently a third of the way through book 4, and I can't wait to get to book 5 since I don't know anything that will happen. Should be good for lots of reading by the pool. I love newlywed life!

trying to make a lack of productivity productive

I laugh at myself as I see what a year in the realm of education has done to me. The average Joe(or Jane) goes to work, does their thing there, and then goes home. I feel like a career in education such much larger an undertaking. I realize that only after one year in teaching, I have a hard time relaxing and being unproductive. I have ghost grading/planning pains, meaning I think I should be planning something or doing some kind of work, but there is none to do. It is done for the year. So, as I sit on my first real day of vacation (spent lots of time with the family last week), I realize that it is hard and even to some extent uncomfortable to sit and relax. I think I may actually like stress. Go figure. So, I am endeavoring to do things to fill the relaxation gap. I am reading books, refinishing furniture, exercising, trying to get a summer job teaching. All kinds of fun stuff, just to keep from having to be unproductive.

But here is the real conundrum. I actually think that after being so driven, stressed, and "productive" all school year long, that unproductivness is productive. We have to go through a cool down stage or else the average teacher would spontaneously explode in a mess of educational jibberish. Thus, the lesson I am learning this summer is to relax and enjoy the break, try not to be too "productive" and just enjoy life without 20 screaming kids and planning to do, and get comfortable with those wonderful things in life that being productive takes me away from like my beautiful wife, hobbies, exercise, enjoying watching the sun go down, etc. Thus, in the near future, if you ask me how I am doing, it is my endeavor to say, "Unproductive and loving it!"