Take, take me home (cause I don’t remember)

These first weeks in Rochester represented an abrupt change from my last few weeks in Pueblo. Every hour seemed to be accounted for on the Pueblo end, my whole life funneled into the overwhelming project of uprooting, selling the house, packing, and moving. I found myself in possession of large amounts of unstructured time once we'd landed in Rochester. We're living at Dad's house, and we'd only been in Rochester for two days when Jon started going to work every day. So with some exceptions (4th of July, Miles' birthday, a couple of adventures with Leah, Macaroni and Cheese fest, a couple of outings with Allison and Sarah), it's mostly been me and the kids, mostly at home, and about half the time, without a car. So there's been a lot of time roosting at home. But we've done some things!

Early on, I took the kids to Mendon Ponds. This is one of my Rochester area holy sites, so it felt like making the homecoming a bit more real to bring my kids and my dog to the place I spent so much of my childhood and adolescence, wandering around with various important people in my life. It was a bit muggy and a bit buggy; I'd forgotten about these realities. We walked my favorite cross country trail through the woods, and the kids played near the pond for a while. They complained of the bugs. The dog met his first horse and was astonished.

We have visited the main branch of the public library, the one with the secret room. We'd already secured our cards from the Henrietta Branch.
                               We had a meal as a family at Dinosaur BBQ (excellent) and strolled around the city one day, stopping for a while to peer at the Rochester Subway and the attendant street art:                             We've also made two visits to the Highland Park Adventure Area, which I highly recommend to all families with children. They just repurposed some stumps and logs, bolted them together in various shapes, and kids can play in whatever way works for them! It's less clear what you're "supposed" to do with the various "equipment" which I love. I get tired of feeling like I need to tell me kids they're playing on the playground wrong. 

I got a new shirt for my birthday, btw.

Meanwhile, Miles has turned NINE! How is this allowed??
All he wanted was to celebrate with his cousins and, sometime in July, to go to Seabreeze! We managed to do both.

We've been to Dogtown, a local legend hot dog restaurant. They DO have a decent vegetarian menu, Melissa & Ann! But this is one of their plates, a kind of imitation of a garbage plate, and what Jon ordered. I thought it had a kind of ugly beauty:                                                                   I also did a 5K at the Seneca Park Zoo! I did better than I had any right to do, coming in under 30 minutes and feeling pretty good. We consumed the free Italian Ice and Miles participated in the 50 yard dash, and afterward, we took in the zoo:
 
This summer has more down time than I kind of expected. Sometimes I have trouble enjoying this, because I realized I've put a lot of my feelings of self worth onto feeling productive. A common mistake, I understand. But I have actually been quite productive with my time, securing not just one job but two! One main job at RIT (transcribing for deaf students again! I begin training in about a week) and one teaching English for VIPKid!

VIPKid is a company that uses contracting teachers to teaching pre-planned English language lessons to Chinese kids, online, in real time. It's pretty good per hour pay, but I'll have to see what it amounts to in real life. The nice thing is, I control my schedule; the downside is, I may not get bookings for when I want them. The most popular times are evening hours in Beijing, which translates to the early morning in New York, when I'm going to be putting my kids on busses and heading off to work. I'll be looking to teach in the evenings, so we'll see! I will also be trying hard to get my teaching certificate in NY, which promises to be both costly and time consuming!

There have been... other accomplishments. I hope the next post will contain more announcements- basically, as soon as Jon feels ready to share. Stay tuned!

I have lacked motivation to blog. Obviously. But I really want to keep it up, even though my audience may change. Probably I'll get fewer people from Rochester checking in, starving to see pictures of my kids. But I'm going to try to keep up, because the road goes ever on and on, and because I want to keep on living life twice!

Crash landing in Rochester

Eight years ago, I blogged out Splashdown in Blacksburg. We have moved four times since that move; I heartily hope this is our last one for a long time.

Just as when we left Blacksburg, there were tears on our last day. It felt eerie having no one else around; I think that's the only move where we had no one helping us close the truck and keeping us company. At one point, someone we only just befriended brought us chocolate chip cookies! And our realtor stopped by to keep us up to date about re-listing the house. But we closed the truck (with great effort!), we took our family drive around Pueblo to say goodbye, and then, much later than we'd intended, we drove away.

I decided there are too few pictures of me on this thing. Here I am, fooling around in the hotel room where I'm dog-sitting while the rest of the family eats. I was interested in the effect of humidity on my hair; we were in Kansas. 


Our only real break in the journey was in St. Louis, where our dear friends of 10 years now, Josh and Melissa, put us up again in their beautiful home. The VBS program on Sunday gave us a kid-free opportunity for a walk; some of our only alone time of the move. What a blessing! Downtown St. Louis is lovely and quiet and contains some very hip coffee shops.

A Missourian baby robin greeted us!

On our last day in St. Louis, Adele built a majestic tower:

And the kids clustered up for a pic. This was our first visit with two month old Micah! He is a truly beautiful baby, and totally gave me the baby rabies again. Yikes....

I spent lot of time in parking lots, which is what happens when you drive two vehicles with two cats and a dog across the country and still want to eat. I loved that we found a Big Boy's! I vividly remember climbing onto that thing's head, and only really getting mild disapproval from my parents, which makes me feel better about the things I've been too tired to stop my kids from doing.

When you break down the drive, it oddly seems to take less time. On our last travel day, we finally got to see a Great Lake. Here's Erie:

And suddenly, we were in Rochester, unloading our summer baggage into his waiting little house. He's been living in the basement since we arrived to fill his house with noise and stuff! Pray for Dad.

The next day, we got our Wegmans Shoppers Club Card!!! Only three days later, we got our Monroe County Library Card. (We've since acquired NYS licenses and plates and... other things...).

We also got ourselves a Strong Museum Membership! This has to be the most valuable membership in town, over the zoo as the zoo is really only usable for half the year. The Museum of Play is going to get us THROUGH this winter.
Here, Adele sorts mail at One History Place in the Strong:


This is one of my favorite nooks in the museum, upstairs behind the arcade. It's got like 20 floor games, including dodgeball and dance and jump rope games, and I've gotten sweaty and closed my watch rings on this glowing mat.

Since Jon started work on June 28th, I've spent most of my time at Dad's house. I only have a car about half or 2/3 of the time, as Jon's carpool (the lovely and esteemed Allison Brown) can't ALWAYS take him to work when he wants to be there. We have cobbled through, though, thanks to help from Dad's fiance, Agnes, who loans us her car so generously. (We can't buy our second car until we close on our new house for debt-to-income reasons; we know we need a second car).

So I've made a LOT of use out of the park down the street from Dad's house. There's a dog park just around the corner! And these guys are either at each other's throats or in a close confederation. They have "secret meetings" almost every day. I try to be mature and not barge in on them suddenly.

We hit the fireworks at Henrietta Town Park this year.


And, it's looking like, we're going to see them there kind of a lot in the future...

Pueblo in Review Part 2

                                                                  I need to lead with the fact that it's been an intensely difficult and stressful few months. We're working hard to get enjoyment where we can, but I've had at least a mild stress stomachache almost continuously since mid-May. These candles are used in Mayan ancestor ceremonies, and I bought and used them in a private ceremony of my own after my Grandmother, Dorothy, died in early June, just a couple of weeks short of her 96th birthday. It comforted me that our visit in 2017 was so quality, and that she was feeling so good, because she was poorly for most of 2018. But I really hate that I was only a few weeks from moving east when we lost her. In so many ways, this transition was way harder than I'd imagined.

I can't leave this for later: we're also STILL waiting for our house to sell. We had it on the market for all of May, it sold in early June after several insultingly low offers, and then the buyers reneged and we were back where we started. We put it back on the market on the 22nd, and we've had lots of showings, but here we are, July 11th, still waiting for even an offer. It's exquisite torment. I probably need to find a way to cope better with it, but I don't do well with this sort of situation. Every day feels like a year. I'd appreciate prayers!

Here is how we said goodbye to Pueblo:

We went to the Rides at City Park one more time:

We enjoyed the desert, and also danced in the rain!

I celebrated my birthday with a new dress and a visit to a dog-friendly restaurant in Colorado Springs:
 
Adele graduated kindergarten! and Jon managed to make the ceremony:
And both kids said farewell to Belmont Elementary School, the place in town that's made them the happiest, by far. The only place I cried to leave, to be honest. We all got a bit emotional on the last day, but this transition was made murky by the stress over fixing up and selling the house. We put a LOT of money and time into our house after the buyers backed out, so we're really hurting now as we try to figure out how to get jobs and live up here with no house and one car. Please join us in praying for solutions!

Next post will include pictures of our first weeks in Rochester. I truly am satisfied that we're here, deeply happy that I'll get to be with family, thrilled that I don't have to leave. I get to be here for events I've wanted to attend for years; I get to be here in the FALL, and for Christmas, and etc & etc. I'm trying to focus on that and cast patronuses every day. I have a job interview next Wednesday! Which is very hopeful. In a few months, I'll stand back from the life that I've built and admire it, I know. So I'll try to be patient and wait on the foundations.

Pueblo in Review 1

I don't believe I've ever let so much time go by between blog updates! The past couple of months have been a blur of activity and work and stress, and the effort it took to get out east was so consuming, that I just couldn't justify spending the time. And even the few times that I could, I've just had a tremendous mental block until my house is sold. Somehow, when there's an uncertainty like that hanging in the air, I'm too uncomfortable to find it very easy to be reflective. And we're still waiting for it to sell, two months later! I'm finding it's hard to keep my spirits up, even though I've finally moved home, as we've been trying to do for so many years. It's taking discipline to do productive things, to schedule things, to have fun, to do anything but keep checking my phone and obsessing over my unsold house. As I told Melissa, all signs point to my needing to learn something from an uncomfortable experience again. I hate that.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 So this entry is also an exercise in discipline, because I'll want a record of the past two months; I know I will. Just a couple weeks after we learned we were moving, I took a pre-planned trip to Blacksburg to welcome the delegation from Guatemala! These were my friends on that 2015 trip I took, the one that changed and added to and broadened my life so much. I told them when they came up to Virginia, I would would move mountains to be there! I just didn't know I'd also have to cross them.

We did hikes and visits to local farms, a meet-up with Native@VT, and (and this was my idea) a visit to the Virginia Tech International Festival! We used to attend that every year! Here, Basilia and I try on hijab at the Discover Islam table



Here we are at a Native@VT corn, beans, and squash blessing:                             And at the public library:
                               Don Otto with a goat on a local Virginia farm:That week was so meaningful and beautiful. I'm so glad I made it a priority to go, despite the engrossing project of getting out house ready to show. That took most of April, by the way. From the time that we found out about the job, until we arrived here in Rochester, we've been devoting every bit of non-work, non-church, non-girl-scouting time to our house. I think this is part of why I can't relax until the business is complete. But in the second week of May, just a week after we put our house on the market, I was faced with another emotional and labor-intensive project: the D60 Teacher's Strike.                             
To make a long story short, the district had been refusing the cost of living increases and step increases that were promised according to contract. It had been a couple of years since there had been a contract that the teachers and the district could agree on. The situation devolved into complete distrust and hostility after the district ignored the advice of an outside fact-finding committee they had hired, and while I was in Virginia the strike was brewing. May 7-11, we did not report to our schools.
                             Miles and Adele were out with us every morning, and Miles, every afternoon too. They learned the chants and made signs and loved being close to their teachers as they learned these very real civics lessons.                       

We picketed all day, every day. Sometimes we did this in front of schools, sometimes at strategic intersections, sometimes downtown. I fell so in love with Pueblo during this period because of the passionate support we received from the community. People came out of their businesses, went out of their way, to bring us water and snacks and encouraging notes and, once, packages of foot soak. We were so pumped up by the people of Pueblo that despite a lot of discouraging responses from the board, the teachers never lost momentum.                            Finally, when the board realized they had burned through the allotted snow days refusing to meet with the union, they got it done and we had a contract and a return-to-work agreement we could live with. We had to use two personal days for the strike, but the rest were paid for and there was no retaliation.
                                                              My favorite part was the line dancing! I loved the opportunity, too, to get to know my colleagues, outside the classroom and the usual contexts. As on sign said, the strike was the "Best Professional Development Activity Ever!"     

Despite all the work of trying to sell out house and get ready to move, we did make a conscious effort to do some of the things we love in Colorado one more time. I insisted on prioritizing a visit to the sand dunes. It was the most unique park I'd ever visited; there's nothing like it anywhere else, as far as I've seen. The climb to the summit of the biggest dune was very spiritual and was a great opportunity to breathe a goodbye to this state of such scenic glory.
                              My favorite goodbye to Heaton happened about we week after we returned. There was some discomfort in going back and working among people who had chosen not to strike, and among the administrators, who were fairly weird about the whole thing. So, those of use who did strike, and who called ourselves the Warhawks, ordered tee-shirts and organized a couple of reunion events to keep the spirit. I'll never forget that I had the privilege to be part of this!                                 I'm also grateful because that week provided a needed distraction from the engrossing project of selling the house. It's been so exhausting! And only some of the exhaustion is physical. Not only did we have to keep the house absolutely clean at almost all times for the last month before our move, but we had to ride this weekly roller coaster. We had probably 20-odd showings while we were still in town, and our hopes kept spiking and plummeting. This formed the backdrop to the strike, the end of the year wind-down, the field trips, the year-concluding festivities for the kids. And it's why I couldn't bring myself to update.
                                 The month of May did still have a lot of lovely moments, for which I did manage to stay present. I kept my eyes open to the desert landscape, even as I worried and prayed, because I knew I'd miss it.                                   And I do.