Two posts in one week? Surely not...

Check me out, another post in less than a week! We'll see how long I can keep this up.

Well, this week was a pretty busy one in terms of work/school stuff - one of the side effects of being split between a high school and a middle school is the double duty when it comes to events like Open House.

So, Tuesday night was the HS Open House, but I only teach classes during the last three class periods of the day. This matters because for the fall open house, parents walk through an abbreviated version of their child's schedule - so for the first four class periods (an hour in open house time) I didn't have parents in the room. This was handy because it was kind of Forced Organizational Time for me. A did two bulletin boards, moved around a bunch of risers and such, did some general cleaning/organizing, made handouts for the parents, etc. during that first hour. Then, I only had to run through my "choir spiel" three times, which was kind of nice in its own way.

Thursday night was the MS Open House, but only for 7th and 8th grade parents. 6th graders had their own Open House before the school year officially began. So, yes, for those of you keeping score at home, that's a grand total of three open houses. But, I only had two classes at the sixth grade one a few weeks ago - 1st and 2nd period, so I got to spend the rest of that OH time organizing my room. And the one this week was a one-class-only OH, so I came, I talked, I went home. Well, I left out the part about how the rain was coming down in sheets at the time, so... I left the HS, got totally drenched in the process, stopped by our apartment and put a hairdryer and some clean & dry clothes in a trash bag, THEN went to the MS, changed, dried up, talked, and left.

Wednesday night was the normal church choir thing, with the addition of Grace Notes to my schedule. This is the smaller adult choir at church - it's not really auditioned or anything, I'm not sure how best to describe the nature of the choir - but they were short on altos, so I volunteered to help out.

I am becoming such a Bleeding Heart.

Speaking of which, I may become the Whiz Quiz sponsor at the middle school? More on that story as it develops.

Annual Update

I keep saying blogging is going to become a part of my life... but obviously that hasn't happened yet. The last update to this blog was not quite a year ago, at the end of September 2008. A LOT has happened since then. Basically...

• Andrew applied and was accepted to Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University for a Masters of Theological Studies, starting in Fall 2009... more on that later.
• I finished out another great year at my middle school choir directing job - and decided to make a move to a new position for 2009-2010... more on that later too!
• We continued to work our financial plan with great success - allowing us to save upwards of $500 out of each of my monthly paychecks, as well as 90% (post church giving) of Andrew's paychecks from his work at The Handsome Hound.
• Andrew received $21,000 in scholarship money from SMU and the United Methodist Church, which when combined with our savings, allows us to pay for his education in cash. No loans!!!
• My new job is what I in some ways consider to be missionary work: two schools in the district have very small choir programs - so small that there is one director spilt between these two schools: three daily classes at a middle school and three daily classes at a 9th-10th grade only high school. I am the lucky teacher split between the two schools. This is a position that I essentially volunteered for, and so far so good.
• Andrew quit his job at Handsome Hound just before he had to go back to school, so at the moment he's not working outside of school, which is probably a very good thing - school is pretty intense so far.
• On the home-sale front - the original listing of our home expired near the end of May. We then spent a month or so looking for a new realtor and preparing to try again in a summer market. We found a new realtor and were waiting to list the house on July 1st, based on the fact that stats about the listing's Days On The Market would reset after 30 days off the market. On July 1st, before actually listing the house, we got an offer, countered, and our counter was accepted. To make a very long, stressful, and semi-expensive story short - the month of July basically consisted of home repairs, cleaning, packing, and of course moving.
• In the midst of that process in July, I took a three-week Kodaly course at the University of North Texas in Denton.
• Also, Andrew's grandmother's illness progressed and she elected to stop dialysis. She passed on July 28th and we traveled to Joplin Missouri to pay our respects. This was also the week that we moved to our apartment.
• Thankfully my parents came down to assist with the packing, moving, cleaning and closing process - we truly could not have done it without them and were happy to have them here at that time.

That's most of our recent history. I'll try to post again sometime soon to give a glimpse of our present and what we know of our future. Promise!