San Francisco - Part 1

I haven't forgotten to blog about the trip. It's just that I've been pretty busy since we got back, and today is the first day I've had to collect enough minutes together to give my few readers a decent account of our trip.

We left on Wednesday, July 15. Our flight was in the evening, and we got there pretty late. We had Super Shuttle take us to the hotel. THAT was an adventure. Our first experience on the streets of San Francisco was terrifying. The driver of that van only knew two speeds: stop, and fast. The streets of that city are very hilly and narrow for the most part. It was like being on a roller coaster, only we were really fearing for our lives. We were happy when the traffic lights were red, and feared when they would turn green. Yes, it was that bad... We survived the trip to the hotel with white knuckles and palpitations.

Thursday morning we hit the ground running. We ate breakfast at a nearby Starbuck's and bought San Francisco City Passes. The City Pass included our public transportation while we were there (including cable cars and the old F line train), de Young Museum, California Academy of Sciences, Legion of Honor, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and an aquarium (which we really didn't care about since we had just been to an aquarium in Albuquerque).

After breakfast, we hopped the bus over to Golden Gate Park, where we went through the de Young Museum and California Academy of Sciences. That was pretty cool. After those two places, we walked around a bit and wandered over to Haight Street and down to Haight Ashbury. We had lunch in a really good hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant over there, and then headed over to the Legion of Honor. Our de Young ticket included admission to Legion of Honor, but it had to be the same day. We were blown away by the Rodin collection at there. That was definitely our favorite museum of the whole trip. (In the Hitchcock movie, "Vertigo", Madeline, thinking she's Carlotta, goes to the Legion of Honor to look at a particular painting over and over, and Jimmy Stewart's character follows her there. It's a fictional painting, so it's not like we saw it, but we did very well see the room where they filmed that part of the movie.)

After going to the Legion of Honor, we went back to the hotel, and found a spot where we could buy groceries (mainly breakfast bars and Coke Zero) for the remainder of our trip.

That evening, we went to Ghirardelli Square, which was very close to our hotel. The Ghirardelli Chocolate company has bought and renovated several buildings all near where the first Ghirardelli chocolate was made. Now it's a bunch of condos, hotels, and restaurants. We ate dinner at a little 50's style diner, and then had dessert at the Ghirardelli ice cream spot. And that was our first real day there in San Francisco. (At some point in that day, we rode a cable car, standing on the outside step and hanging on for dear life, but I don't remember exactly when.)

Friday we went on the free bay tour cruise that came with our City Passes. That's something we wouldn't have done if we hadn't bought those passes. It was really quite neat to go all the way up to the Golden Gate Bridge, still not able to see it through the fog until we we were right under it, turn around, and come back via the far side of Alcatraz Island to the pier. I took lots of pictures of the bridge and Alcatraz from the boat.

This is a collage panorama of the backside of Alcatraz. I like it. I think it turned out pretty cool.

After the cruise, we went to Pier 39, the tourist trap of San Franciso's Fisherman's Wharf. We bought some cute T-shirts for the girls, and that was just about it. We had already seen the sea lions that live there from the boat we had just taken, and we've seen plenty of restaurants and shops in our day, so we didn't spend too much time there.

As I can see, this post is already very long, and I haven't been able to tell more than the first day and a half of our visit. To be continued in a future post...

Pulled in a new direction

I'm starting to try and get my feet wet with work before my school year actually starts. Today I went to GMS and saw my office for the first time since I was a student there (and never went in that office). I opened a file cabinet drawer, and just started reading through music. The library there is pretty extensive, since the school has been around for at least 30 years. I didn't get past the A section when the custodian came and let me know that they were about to wax the floor in the hallway. I had to get out of there so I'd be able to walk out of my room and get out of the building without messing up the newly waxed floor. In the short time I had to read, I found one piece I really like that will be perfect for my DMS 6th graders, and maybe will work for my GMS choir too, I just don't know. It's hard to be picking music when I have no idea what my students will be able to handle. If the piece I've pulled out is too hard, then maybe that will give me a target for them to achieve by the end of the year. If it's easy enough for them to take on for the Fall concert, then so much the better.

My main impression after this day is that I really enjoyed the time I spent working. I've always heard that the key to a happy life is to find a line of work that doesn't feel like work. I know I'm still in an idealistic fog about all this, but there's a decent chance that I may be in that situation... The music excites me, and I just can't wait to meet the kids and win them over.

After I left GMS this morning, I went laptop shopping for a little while. I'm excited about getting a laptop. The flexibility to sit on the comfy couch with my computer is very appealing, and the idea of using a computer that's less than 6 years old that won't lock up every time I try to multi-task is down-right FANTASTIC. I can only imagine it at this point... Some day... very soon...

Then this afternoon was my HR seminar, contract signing, benefits info session and such. Turns out we'll be saving on our dental plan by using mine instead of hubby's and getting vision coverage that's actually worth having. I wasn't able to complete any of that stuff there since I wanted to bring it all home and compare with hubby's plan before signing anything. And I'm so glad I did it that way since we did discover some savings.

For so many years my heart has been tied to home, and now it's really being pulled a new direction. I know it's God's timing, and it's right. To make sure I got some good time with my girls, we read an extra book at bedtime. That also solved the conflict since they didn't agree on which book we should read. That time of day has been precious to me in the past, and now I see it being all the more precious as other parts of our day together won't be as they have been.

A new twist to my life is that I seem to be motivated to follow through on doing the dishes after dinner for the first time ever. I think it's because I know I won't have time to do it later. I hope that trend continues. I know it's better for me, and better for Hubby, and certainly a better example to my girls.

I've had laundry hanging over my head now for the last several days. I had planned on doing it this past weekend, but on Friday I found out that the workshop I thought would be just Friday was in fact Friday, Saturday, AND Sunday. I was pretty unhappy about that. As a result, laundry never really happened, and I have some work to do tomorrow. Amazingly, tomorrow is the first day in 5 consecutive days that I don't have to do something for my job. Summer break isn't supposed to be over until the second week of August. It's still July, even if only for a couple more days.

I shouldn't really be complaining about that training I had to do... God did some cool stuff through it. It's a long, long, LONG story that probably won't make any sense to anyone, so I won't get into the details, but I met several people who know people I know, and then I ran into one of the elementary music teachers whose school feeds one of my middle schools, and lots of good discussions took place.

God is so good. REALLY. He's SOOOOOOO good. He's so good to ME (and you, too). That's the song in my head, by the way. Little Girl sang it with me tonight. What a sweet time that was.

My Job!!!

As I mentioned in my post on the 4th, I got a new job. And I found out that I got it while I was driving on the last leg of our trip to Albuquerque. I had interviewed for it the Monday before that, and I had felt pretty good about the interview. Getting the call that I got the job was a surprise and a relief. I had given up on hearing anything until after the holiday weekend.

I'll be a middle school choir director at two middle schools in the district where I live. One of those schools happens to be where I went for 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. I'm going back to my old stomping grounds, this time as a teacher. The kicker is that I never was in choir at that school. I was in band! I did have 2 classes that took place in the choir room, one was theater, and another was called Future Problem Solving, and it was taught by Mr. P, my band director who I blogged about before. I'm very excited about teaching there, even though it's only a small fraction of my part time job. I'll only be teaching one class period there.

The other half of the job is at a rival middle school, one that most of my high school friends went to. (I transferred to the high school across the highway from where I lived so that I could stick with Mr. P.) There I'll be an assistant to the choir director I student taught for 10 years ago. I worked very well with him for the 6 weeks I was assigned to his school (which was a different school in a different town, closer to where I went to college). He had picked me to be his first student teacher. He met me when I was working for the music conservatory at the college I attended. Kids would come in for piano lessons or voice lessons, and as a part of their program, they'd also do their music theory assignments in a little room where I worked as the theory lab instructor/facilitator. He taught voice lessons at the conservatory, and every now and then when he'd have a no-show lesson, he'd hang out in the hall outside the theory lab, and that's how he got to know me. To now be going to work with him after all these years is really fantastic. God really does work all things together for our good.

The reason I was working in the theory lab back then was because I dropped out of the music group I had been singing with to marry my dear husband. I couldn't have really done the traveling music group thing as a young newly-married woman. The dean of fine arts created that job in the theory lab for me so that I could meet the conditions of my scholarship. I have often had moments of regret over having quit that group. I truly loved making music at that level, and I loved many of the people in it. I didn't really like the "on the road" aspects, and I had burned out on it after two school years of it, and doing even more in the summer between those years. I knew quitting was right for me at the time. And now to see how my life is impacted by the "replacement" for participation in that group... God is really amazing. He knows what He's doing, and I can trust Him.

I'm very excited bout teaching choir. When the elementary job didn't work out like I thought it would, I was rather disappointed. But even during my interview for that job, as I was answering one of the questions, the thought crossed my mind that the answer I was giving would be more compatible with a middle school choir job. Even then, my heart was with choir, and not teaching elementary music, even though there is an after school choir at the elementary level.

All together, my job is a part-time job with .5 of it being at the school where I'll assist my old supervising teacher, and .17 of it at my alma mater. I'll have time in the middle of my day in which I can run errands and get some grocery shopping done sans my kiddos. I think this is a very good lifestyle aspect to this job that would not have been the case with the elementary job I didn't get, which was full time.

I've already got a training thing tomorrow, a meeting on Monday, and another training thing on Tuesday. Today I was fingerprinted, which is a new requirement set in place during my stay-at-home mom years. I'm going to have to do laundry on Saturday this week. It will be my first "working" weekend. My life is already changing.

I have so much more to blog about, but I just can't do it right now. I'm about to take my girls to the pool while we still have some summer left!

I just heard "Walk Like an Egyptian" as bumper music on a radio show I'm listening to. Now that's in my head. Now there's a blast from the past!!

May the 4th be with you...

Happy Independence Day, everybody!

My husband, girls and I are all in Albuquerque, NM visiting my brother and his wife. We got here Thursday after a long day of driving. Yesterday we went to Sandia Peak and took the girls to ride on the longest tram in the world. That was really cool. It was about 80 degrees at the bottom, and at the top it was about 55. We almost didn't take jackets with us, but we were SO glad we did!

Today we spent the day at the Rio Grande Zoo, which is the city zoo in Albuquerque. It's a pretty good zoo. There's a train that takes you to the aquarium and botanical gardens, and if you're ever in Albuquerque, skip that train.

The girls have been total troopers. They have surprised us with their lack of complaining. Even when they have been up early in the morning, up late at night, having to wait to be fed, through it all, they've done great. They're taking their first real nap of the trip and it's day three... I am convinced that I have the best kids ever.

On a side note, Big Girl has taken to saying that this or that is the best ever or the worst ever. Her speech is heavily sprinkled with hyperbolic statements. It's kind of funny. She'll say stuff like, "that cloud is the best cloud in the world..." and we adults all look at each other and grin. She doesn't know why she's funny.

Oh, a total highlight of this trip, I nearly forgot to mention, before we got to Albuquerque, when we were about 40 miles outside of town, I got a phonecall on my cell phone from a principal I interviewed with on Monday. I have a job this fall for the first time since Big Girl was born! I know that's kind of a gigantic postscript, but that's all I can really say for now. I'm on vacation!

Today when we were waiting for our ride from the aquarium, Hubby, the girls and I sat and sang, "I Love My Lips," the VeggieTales song. That's what's in my head currently. Sorry. You get what you get around here! :o)