End Of The Summer, Beginning Of The New Year

Wow wow wow and wow! What a great summer it has been and what a great year I hope it's going to be. I've too much to tell and will have to condense.


Trips
I've already written about my trip to Las Vegas/Grand Canyon West/Hoover Dam. This year ND and I also made it to Portland. We saw few friends this year, only carving time really for family. We were there for a week and almost a half.

 We arrived on a Sunday and jumped right into the first week in which ND went to Portland Zoo Day Camp. It wasn't the easiest transition, coming off a plane one day and the very next day dropping her off in a new place, but she really enjoyed it ultimately and still talks about everything she learned. One highlight was petting a walking stick (insect). This gave Mom and me a few hours each morning to have adult-time only. Then in the afternoon the three of us could enjoy time together or gave the two of them time together while I took care of my Portland checklist -- seeing a few people, visiting Powell's, walking an old favorite forest trail etc.
On the second week, just a few days, we crammed in LOTS (too much) of special stuff. We did the Bridge Pedal, with ND on a trail-a-bike with me, my Dad riding with us and my Mom doing the Bridge Stride with a friend. We visited Seaside all together which was frigid and cold in a way that only the Oregon Beach can be when the rest of the valley is suffering a 95-100 degree heat wave. We made a pilgrimage to the Enchanted Forest which I'm struggling to finish writing about -- a task I've been trying to get just right for nearly 10 years, but that's a story for another time.

It was hard to say goodbye.

Not long after that trip we did our annual camping trip with Emarcy, this time with her almost one year old baby, at Wells State Park in MA. It was a decent campground, better than I expected in some ways. They didn't have boat rentals but we could swim and it was a very quiet area. Most new places we've visited (as opposed to our favorite place in Haines Falls where we visit on alternate years) have disappointed us by being just a big clearing with way too many people and too much noise. Here the woods were thick and people were respectful. In fact, one of the things I always look forward to in a camping trip is during that necessary middle-of-the-night bathroom trip, the chance to look up and see the stars. In this case the canopy was too thick to allow for that. So I didn't get to look for constellations, but I could at least enjoy where we were.

Once again, it was hard to say goodbye.

On the way home we would have loved to stop at Old Sturbridge Village. I had really been looking forward to that, but it's clear you need to allow at least half a day for it, and we had a three hour drive ahead after leaving our campground at 12:30. Instead we stopped at Dinosaur State Park. It's another place where you could spend a very big portion of the day, but just to go into the museum and see the dinosaur footprints you could do in about 20 minutes and WOW was I glad we did. I've never cared much about dinosaurs, but seeing those tracks... those many many tracks that actually show paths these creatures walked was mind-blowing. ND was interested for sure, but I was stunned by the experience. History is cool, but prehistory... unfathomable.

The footprints at Dinosaur State Park

It was a long drive home afterwards still, though, and we had to keep moving. Didn't get home until 6:30 PM and we were both tired and very sad to have had to say so many goodbyes throughout the summer. I'm looking forward to us getting back into a routine with our local friends so the distance from all these other friends and family doesn't hurt so much.

Health 
I wrote previously about trying a new limited meat eating experiment. That's going pretty well although I've eaten it more times than I'd planned so far... I'm up to about 8 times which means I only get meat 17 more times this year and I have to make sure I leave enough times for Pesach. I've had a few disappointments... like when I ate it just to be polite or because I thought I really wanted it and then discovered it wasn't so good. Other times have been special like the barbecued free range hamburger I had last week at a sheva brachot for a friend of a friend. I'm trying to learn from each experience and am wondering whether I want to become an herbivore again ultimately. I don't like when people say, "but it's ok to eat meat because the Torah says so" and then gorge on too much in an unconscious way. What I'd like to say is, "I feel I'm too disconnected from the experience of taking away this animal's life so I can eat meat to really appreciate the experience the way I should." But I think that the Torah allows it makes for a space of allowing conscious moderation. In some ways I think that limiting consumption of something has a greater impact than eliminating the consumption. As another example, I do my best to purchase free range eggs. If I were to choose not to purchase eggs at all, I couldn't have the consumer power of voting with my money on what kinds of eggs are best to get. As I DO continue to eat meat currently, but in limited quantities, I reflect on the process.

Shortly after I wrote that post about the experiment, I decided to read Crazy Sexy Diet. It was an intense and difficult read for me as I didn't like her writing style but learned a lot about food about our bodies. I had to sift through a little to determine when she was writing about health, when she was writing about her personal lifestyle choices, and when she was proposing things I already had covered in my life in other ways. For example, she spoke often about the importance of meditation, but I already have the meditation/yoga/prayer area of my life covered in my own way without having to follow her practice. Also, she's an adamant ethical vegetarian (along with being vegan), but I'm already doing the above-mentioned experiment and working with Torah to determine the ethics of what I'm doing. I had to sift through to see what I wanted to try and what not.

In the end, I bought a juicer which I try to use almost daily, and I tried her 3-week cleanse with a few modifications. It was too hard to do total vegan AND gluten-free, so during those weeks I did eliminate sugar, alcohol, meat, dairy and gluten, but I allowed fish and eggs into my diet. I chose to do this during the Three Weeks leading up to Tisha B'Av which contained religious fasts, but I didn't do the juice fasts she recommended. I kind of hoped I'd feel completely healthy every single day of the cleanse. I didn't. I had days with headaches, days where I was tired, even a minor cold, much like I do during most of my life already. I also suffered somewhat for not getting my usually yogurt acidophilous and had to remember to take supplements. But I liked how conscious I felt about how and what I was eating. I do think I had a little more energy. I felt I had an invisible fence that prevented me from just stuffing things in my mouth and when I started eating all my favorite cheese, bread and sugar again after the three weeks, I felt a little yucky. So rather than change my lifestyle permanently, I want to use this cleanse idea as a reset button now and then. I've already scheduled it into my calendar to do after times when I tend to over-indulge or eat poorly -- after Sukkot, after Channukah, after Pesach, and then again next year during the 3 weeks. I might modify how I do the cleanse each time such as by eliminating fewer things but for longer. Already that equals 12 weeks or more of the year, a nice way to inspire conscious healthy eating. Oh, and did I mention I lost weight? I didn't mean to. I wasn't worried about weight. But it was within a healthy zone and I was happy about it.

Writing
I had hoped this summer to spend 40 hours with writing (drafting, editing, revising and marketing). The thinking is that if I were a full-time writer, this would equal just one week of work. I've tried this goal before, maybe only last summer, but still I didn't make it. 20.5 was what I got. But when I think about how I spent both my writing and non-writing time (I cleaned house a LOT in places that needed it), I think I did the very best I could. Better yet, I felt I had a writer's mindset, making notes, thinking about my reading in active ways and so on. I've sent out a lot of work for publication and had a poem accepted that I sent out last winter, so I'm in good shape. Incidentally, the time I spend on all that has taken away from this blog...

Reading
Didn't read quite as much as I might have liked, but it's ok. The main thing about reading is that I brought home a rather large pile of books from Powell's and New Renaissance and now have a second experiment in the works of seeing if I can actually read more of the books I have in my house before purchasing or even borrowing more stuff. The main things I did read were 1. A Spot Of Bother -- I'm a little surprised by some of the reviews I see at this site. In short, I found the book touching, funny, but a bit too silly and sudden of an ending. I thought that if ever I take on writing a novel (which I'm thinking about for the first time in my life) I might want to use some of the conventions he did. 2. I also finished reading something I've been working through since last Sukkot when U. asked me if I have a very quote from literature and I started sentimentalizing about a section from Virginia Woolf's The Waves. This is my second read-through and it is certainly not an easy book to read, but it is one of the most beautiful I've read in my life. The poetry inspires me and I feel trance-like when reading it. Now one of the many books I'm working through is Woolf's Writer's Diary as edited by Leonard Woolf. I don't think I would have liked hanging out with Virginia Woolf in person during her life, but I'm thoroughly captivated by her anyway.

Mindset
These past few weeks I've felt calm, patient, surrendering to whatever comes without too much worry about if it's all going exactly the way I want. Wouldn't it be great if I could maintain that?

What's Coming
Much of WHY I have a good mindset right now has to do with my expectations for this year. I haven't announced it here yet, but I've had a change in position at my school. As you remember, I taught 2nd grade for 6 solid years. My last year there was strong and successful but I wanted a change. I switched to 1st grade. Without going into any detail about that, it was a hard year. What I really wanted was something that would allow me to focus more intensely on a few important aspects of teaching and relating to kids instead of spreading myself so thin between the million factors that we have to think of all at once as classroom teachers.

So this year I'm a "support" teacher which is sort of like being a "resource room" teacher as some people call it. I'll be assisting the teachers, modifying for students, meeting with small groups of kids and so on. I know I'll have some very busy hours later on, but right now I don't have to set up a major room, I can be the calm presence helping the teachers who are scrambling. When school starts I can respond to problems as they arise among the kids rather than planning and then figuring out how to change my plans on a dime when those problems arise. Best of all, I already know over half the kids because I was in their grade last year either teaching them directly or knowing them in the other room.

So I'm in a really good place right now and am open to what comes.