blustery inside and out...

I feel blustery lately. So much is happening in such a short time that there are definitely times where I feel like a wild spring wind.

I have a list of things to do before I fly away from here. It's a typed list that is two pages long. Seriously, what have I been doing the last four months? Nothing apparently! That's not true though, I have been doing things, but now it's down to crunch time before I uproot again. It always happens this way. I save a whole bunch of things to do until the last month or so I'm in a place. So it's nothing new to me. The difference this time is I have absolutely no idea when I'll come back. I know my visa is for a year, but I'm packing up like I'm never coming back to Shelbyville, IL (which I really hope does not happen!) I've spent the last few days going through everything I left in storage before I moved to South Korea two and a half years ago. It's amazing how much crap I kept. No really...I kept every single decoration from my first year out of college, all my dishes, fabric that was given to me (glad I kept that though), books--I have a tote locker full of books to go through! Good grief. I know I'm a packrat, but this is bordering on insane. So I'm going through everything I felt was important two years ago and wondering now whether it really is important (most of it isn't). I suppose it's a good thing that I'm having a garage sale before I leave, because I just have so much stuff!

I've done this before, where I have so much and then go on an almighty purge to get rid of the STUFF in my life. I feel like that's what I'm doing now. I did decide to leave one box at home- of keepsakes from high school and college (I even have a book full of my report cards and awards from grade school ---my mom is also a packrat---). I told her that when I finally settle down I'll have her send me the last box of belongings. I'm only taking with me to NZ what I need or what's important to me. I can't use those memories in NZ for my work, so at my parent's house they'll stay.

Speaking of NZ- I'm leaving in 34 days! I will get to the South Island of NZ on April 16th and on the 17th of April I have work! Well, I'll have to adjust very quickly to life in NZ. I think I can handle that though. It's the last ten teaching days that I'm unsure of my sanity survival skills! Yes, I am almost finished teaching math to junior high students. Seriously, they may be funny, but they are dense. It's astounding really. Teaching them has been very different from teaching kindergarten though, and I know I'm really just not cut out for the junior high crowd. The last week and a half we've been working on our ISAT testing. Well, if ever I doubted their stupidity, this was the breaking point for me- I now know that they really are indescribably dense. Really they are. It's incredible. I've gone over some of their work to see if they learned anything and retained anything for any given amount of time. Not a thing.


Last week before we got started we had an assembly to recognize the students who had met or exceeded the goals for the previous years' testing. Well, after the kept announcing kids who are failing most of their classes, I leaned over to another teacher and asked, "Just how low are the goals?" He just started laughing. But it's true. How low are the goals set when kids who never complete an assignment and never pass a test manage to meet or exceed goals?

So last Monday me and my brother Sam decided to take the kids from church to the St. Louis Zoo. Of course the few days before we went had been in the 60s and beautiful weather. Then the day we decide to go it's barely above freezing. So all bundled up we drive down to the zoo and walk around with 10 kids for a day. The kids LOVED it. Most of these kids haven't been to a big zoo before (some not even to a zoo) and this was quite the experience for them. Exhaustion is a mild understatement for how everyone felt when we packed up to go home. Hope you enjoy the pictures and I'll hopefully write something funny soon.