Life in the fast lane

Sorry about my last email to everyone where I did not include the blog address so you could actually click on the link.

As usual, life has been a bit insane since school started. We are having a much different school year than last year. A dear friend of mine at the school, Earl Street, died unexpectedly at the age of 47 and we found that out the first day of school. The yellow parrot in my mural down below was named after Earl last summer after he and I spent many hours talking about all of life and his love of birds. Then, a week later, our supervisor in elementary school, left very unexpectedly. He was also a good friend who lives in our building. We've had a teacher leave as well. When you have a small staff of teachers (we have just 10) you get very close and that was sad as well because it was not under good circumstances.

My class this year is very different than last years. Each year is different and the challenges this year to my teaching skills are considerable as we seem to have more in the way of true learning disabilities with lots of ADD or ADHD thrown in. I have a class of all boys (1o boys) and they are very sweet and very cute.

Chris and I are still in NYC and right now, it does not look like we are going anywhere. We are hoping to be transferred by next June, when school lets out. Chris has only 3 years and 8 months until retirement (but who's counting, right?) and he would love to get out of here for his remaining years. We had, at one time, thought Pittsburgh or Houston would be a possibility but now that is not to be. I believe that our next best shot will be Denver in the late spring---I am perfectly okay with Denver!! But we shall see.

Update on the kids:

April and Dave are the parents of a now 2 year old and loving it.
Meghan is still in Africa and having many learning experiences under challenging circumstances.
Jonathan got married last March to Lauren; still living in Fredericksburg, working for a high-end cabinet company/remoding company doing kitchen and bathroom design work.
Katy is living in Round Rock, TX and working as a 911 Dispatch Operator and has really done well there. She hopes to return to school soon while continuing her job.
Valerie is living in Dallas with her mom and working at Chili's. She is trying to save money to buy a car.

Life in NYC is very challenging for us but we are having a lot of really good experiences, too. If we end up staying here for the duration of Chris' career, we are going to try to find a much less expensive place to live and work on being more adaptive to our environment. We are finding out that there are alternatives to taking care of a house, having building projects, and doing lawn work. It has been a very hard lesson for us, which is sort of wierd. You wouldn't think mowing the lawn and weed eating would be something you miss, but we do. If we stay, I am going to try to do contract work in the schools here doing art projects with students like murals in the schools. There is a lot of grant money for the arts in the schools here and a good friend of mine, who is a special ed teacher for the public schools, is helping me write up a proposal as we speak. It could an interesting way to finish up my short, but interesting teaching career. It sure beats all the paper work tied up with special ed.

Love to all of you.

Nancy