I’ll be posting about my talk with the students at Reinbeck Elementary School soon. Yesterday and today have both been pretty long days, though – Cricket just can’t seem to shake this flu bug. In the meantime, posting may be a bit sporadic. I imagine everyone’s schedules are in a bit of flux this month, so I hope you’ll all kindly bear with me. I should be back to normalish soonish.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
What a day! It’s been a rough couple of days for me, guys. Today I worked straight through my lunch hour and didn’t have a chance to do any writing till sometime after seven o’clock tonight. It was nuts! But hopefully things will settle down after tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll be posting more snippets soon.
But now, bed. We have a date. I need all the Z’s.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
Yesterday, the courthouse groundskeeper was busy putting up fresh evergreen garland around the lampposts that dot the square. Today, he was busy mowing the lawn and it felt like spring. I know it’s Iowa and the weather will change at the drop of a hat, but dude – it’s November. Get with the program.
Just don’t swear. You can hold off on that till after New Year’s.
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
leflore marching band (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Fall, despite being the herald of winter, is easily my favorite season. And why not? There’s so much to love: hot apple cider, marching band season, beautiful scenery, not to mention all things pumpkin. I could go on and on.
There’s always a day in September when it begins. The air is a little cooler, the walk to school a little more brisk. Mornings like this hold a special kind of beauty. The sky seems just a little more blue when the leaves are changing, and the brightness of the sky intensifies the crimson and gold of the leaves.
That’s right, things started looking much better for me in my twenty-fourth year. Much better, as a matter of fact. The whole year was pretty stellar, really. See, my birthday is at the end of January. Shortly before my birthday, I signed up for Yahoo! Personals. I had gone to a wedding a few months prior for a couple who had met on eHarmony.com. The groom and I had gone to high school together and I thought, “Hey – if Seth can meet such a nice girl online, maybe I can find a nice guy myself!”
I had a few first dates, but nothing that really went anywhere. Then one day, I was scrolling through matches in my area and came across a guy who was a few years (okay, six) older than me and hailed from my hometown. I had no idea who this guy was. My hometown has a population of 1800 people, so everyone pretty much knows everyone else. The first thought that ran through my head was, “Who is this guy and why don’t I know him?”
I clicked on his profile and read through it. That was when I had my second thought: “I need to know this guy!” He was a former military officer and a single father who was “not looking for a mom” for his daughter. He was also a self-professed Star Trek freak. Could this guy be any better?
When I was twenty, I returned to college. I took a semester off when Tomcat was born and transferred my credits from Wartburg to a community college a little closer to home. I was no longer working toward a bachelor’s degree in creative writing, but at least I was still working toward a degree. As one of my floormates from Wartburg put it, a degree is a degree is a degree. While it may not be the one I wanted, it’s better than no degree at all.
During my time at MCC, I was selected for their honors program, which left me speechless and flattered (okay, not truly speechless – that’s only happened once, but definitely shocked). In order to obtain my degree with honors, I had to take several honors classes and attend a certain number of honors seminars, one of which was mentioned here. I took honors art appreciation, honors music appreciation, and honors American Indian history. It was either that or honors computer applications. I thought history would be easier than computer, but I was wrong.
The professor I had for American Indian history was brilliant.
It used to be that at age sixteen, you could get your driver’s license and hit the road, but when I was a teenager, Iowa passed a graduated licensure law. What it amounted to was that at sixteen, assuming you had passed driver’s ed when you were fourteen and then passed your driving test down at the DMV, you would be granted a restricted license. You were not allowed to drive between the hours of midnight and six a.m. You would receive your full (unrestricted) license at seventeen, assuming that you hadn’t been involved in any accidents or received any speeding tickets or anything during the preceding year.
What does all this have to do with a post about the age of eighteen? Well, when I was twelve, my dad stopped driving and sold our car. He’d been suffering from seizures (which had been misdiagnosed for years as TIAs and weren’t correctly diagnosed for many more years) that would cause him to lose his vision sometimes, so he voluntarily gave up driving.
I don’t know what I wrote, but evidently someone – or several someones – found something I said of interest because my blog traffic is through the roof today. Normally I can expect to see twenty, maybe thirty people stop by on any given day. On a really good day, the number of visitors jumps up to around fifty. It’s a small following, I know, but I truly appreciate those who stop by regularly. I think it’s better to have a handful of loyal fans than a thousand people who maybe stop in only once.
But today? Today I’ve had 303 hits. I don’t know what I wrote that was so dadgum interesting, but whatever it was, I wish someone would let me know so I could do it again! Or at the very least, I could try to do it again.
And now, back to my writing cave!
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice. –Cyril Connolly
(c) 2012. All rights reserved.
I like to read WordPress’s Freshly Pressed articles. I don’t always read them, but every now and then, one will catch my eye. The one that caught my eye today was called Frankie v. Debra, Roe v. Wade: Can you still be a feminist if you’re anti-abortion?
I read the article, but not all 200 comments. The article began by comparing two of Patricia Heaton‘s sitcom roles and then discussed some of the actress’s personal opinions, including her membership in a group called Feminists for Life, a group that apparently is very pro-life.
Suddenly they all died. The end. 