July microblogging: Sam Gribley, you were my first boyfriend

Yesterday's prompt, which I forgot to address, was to write about a favorite childhood book. My all time favorite book from my pre-teen years was Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain. It's fantastically nerdy, without a shred of fantasy; the tale of a city boy who runs away to the Catskills to live off the land for a year. It sparked all sorts of personal nature study for me, and inspired my early foraging efforts, as I learned about edible wild plants in the area where I grew up. It made me excited about camping and being out in the woods, and probably spurred me on to do things like rappelling and canoeing as I got older.

Now, years later, I discover that this wasn't the only book George wrote about Sam Gribley! I am so getting my hands on these!

Here's some milkweed I came across in West VA, in my cousin's area. No, I did not eat them. Yes, the pods are edible.

July goals: a month of mini-blogs

Following Dianne Sylvan's theme of 31 days of smallish bloggery, I launch here. She has a months worth of prompts. Not saying I'm going to do them all, but there does seem to be blogfodder therein. I'm having a hard time blogging; the book of faces and the instant gratification gram are chewing up my social media time. It's a problem, though.

Here are Sylvan's prompts, should you be interested...

http://diannesylvan.com/archives/5183

July's goals are simple. Enjoy my summer. I am off work til July 30, and I need to do 2 things...clean my crazy house, and figure out some way to set some boundaries around my work life. Because last year was just 180 days of drinking from a firehose, and it wrecked me. This year, far less, and far less stress over it all.

To that end, I'll continue to work at sustaining my meditation practice, and do some enjoyable things. I'm signed up for a qigong class at my church, and am also going to the Dirty South Yoga Fest at the end of the month. So it looks to be a month of mind-body practice, which I desperately need.

Leah's coming to visit in 11 days, and I'm so excited. It'll be good to have witchy company. We are going to the pagan-flavored Mystic South conference - hey, I'm all about the con this year!

But I'm facing the stiff challenge of getting my guest room and office ready to house her. The Clamcave has become the repository of all my chaotic mess from the end of the school year, and it's first on my list to bust a move on, starting tomorrow. I should have begun today, but ended up playing D&D all day at Jessie's so no housecleaning today.

Other goals for July (though I hesitate to make any more, because the aforementioned ones are lofty as all get out) are making a good effort in my brother-in-law's Workweek Hustles on the Fitbit platform, and cooking and eating more at home. How this jives with my newfound love of festivals and cons, and my party girl Leah coming down, I'm not sure...

I'm also doing Tour de Fleece. Clearly I haven't learned anything from the year's biting off more than I can chew, though I really only have to spin 10 minutes a day...

striking gold in the salt mine

It's a deeply rainy weekend, kicking off what appears to be a solid week of the wet stuff coming up, if my phone can be trusted. I've turned a corner, though, and since Imbolc, and a luminous ritual with my Druid group, I've been fairly on the up-and-up. Even the flu, which came this past Sunday, and stayed til yesterday, hasn't really gotten me down. Oh, I took 3 days off to work, and a lot of Tamiflu and tea, but I'm feeling better. Spring, which always seems to pop up in GA in February, is working its magic.

I was struck with a thought about my work this morning. We are deep into ACCESS testing at school. ACCESS is the annual test of English language proficiency, that most of our students take. It pulls me out of my teaching job for 5 weeks, to give group written tests, online tests, and 1:1 speaking tests. Now I don't really like tests, and think we give far too many in our current educational culture. ACCESS is mostly performance-based, though, and isn't ridiculously rigorous, as tests go. I don't hate it, and it does give the examiner a good idea of what the ELL student can actually do, in English. What I realized, though, is that by being involved in testing children, I get to avoid the regular weekly meetings at school where administrators talk about testing. Because the testing schedule runs all day, and doesn't follow the rest of the staff schedule. Win-fucking-win!!!! ACCESS can go on all year, as far as I'm concerned...the entire month of February is simply going to work, testing children, working after hours on my various extra-curricular projects and afterschool club, then coming home to enjoy home life. No lesson planning, no collaborative, data-centric meetings of any kind eating up my nonexistent planning time. It's going a long way to ensure my enjoyment of my job, right now.

Thing is, I really still enjoy teaching, and like the kids, the families, and my colleagues. But our school has turned into a Georgia Milestones-CCRPI-obsessed, numbercrunching score-mill, and our planning periods have been hijacked by time with administrators and coaches pushing one or another initiative down our already choking throats. It has raised everyone's stress level, and to be honest, it's happening in every school in the district, so I can't even escape with a transfer. The one good thing (and really, finding a silver lining in this stormcloud is as a stretch) about it all is that it has caused me to move my retirement plans up a lot. I am planning 3 more years in the field. Slightly more than a Peace Corps assignment, right? I'm just about ready to start counting the days. I never thought it'd come to this. And really, if I weren't so deep into it, I'd just leave, but I do like the money, the benefits, and the dubious retirement potential.

But I am all about finding me some joy right now, and that includes ways to transcend the drudgery.

I have also just registered for 2 pleasurable escapes, thus spending all my disposable income for this month. One is my spinning guild's retreat, to be held in March, in a big rambling house not too far out of Atlanta. The other is the 2nd annual Mystic South conference, coming up in July. Both of these events are serious good times, and feed my soul. I'm hoping a friend from up DC way will come down and stay with me for Mystic South again. A couple of facebook messages, and yes, she confirms it.

And now, my dears, I am leaving this cozy chair for a bit of spinning and Olympics gawking.

Once more into the breach!

It's mid-January. The light, promised at Solstice, has finally started to creep back in. Days incrementally longer, and the deep freeze of last week has finally broken - today's high is 65F. About damn time, too, as I was getting tired of being cold. Our house is not well-insulated, and we spent all last week swaddled in layers of wool, polar fleece, and thermal underwear. Most, if not all of our freak 2 inch snow is finally gone.

I was so cold, from the deep freeze, that I actually finished a pair of knitted gloves, that had been on the needles for years - years! They worked out well, and I'm now over my glove-knitting hump. I will make more! The pattern is Ringwood on Ravelry, and it's a free pattern. Yarn is my handspun, a Knitty n' Color superwash merino from stash. Now it's on to finish my Slytherin socks, and the Iba sweater, which would have also been most welcome in last week's 16-degree temperatures.

I'm thinking, seriously, this time, about taking a long break from social media. It occurred to me at church today, during a talk on The Transcendentalists, how much senseless noise I get in my life, from Facebook and to a somewhat lesser degree, Instagram. The Transcendentalists got inside their own heads by spending time in quiet, in the woods, in solitary industry, in reading, or in stimulating conversations with like-minded friends.

Epiphany! 

Oh I love keeping up with my friends, but I'm sick of the rabbit holes, and am frankly stunned by the hours and energy whiled away online that I could be using to do something or nothing else. I'd kinda been planning a break at Lent, but am thinking to make it earlier. Trouble is, I do use social media to calendar things like our D&D games, and various pagan activities. So I can't get completely free of it, but I can damn sure reduce it. I logged out of both Fb and Instagram, and removed the apps from my phone as a start. I think the hard thing will be to break the habit of checking the feeds - gonna carry around some knitting with me for awhile, and just leave my phone on the charger at work, as I go to my classes, so I'm not automatically reaching for it. Yes, I text my spouse, sister, and friends at work, but it's not like I have to be available all the time for this activity. So, new venture, to try and make some space in my life.

Right now, it's time to prep some food for dinner and tomorrow's breakfast; Asian coleslaw, shoyu eggs, and prepack my lunch. Then a yoga video (kind reader are you familiar with Adrienne?) and maybe a little bit of spinning.