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!