Today, I am grateful for a friend who makes me smile, Mr. Otto. He was responsible for getting some muffins for our Staff breakfast for Friday and he had an event and I was fortunate to experience his event through voice to text messages and a phone call. If you have not ever received a voice to text message from Otto you are missing out. It is an adventure. This time though they were coming in so fast that I had to read backwards because the messages were disappearing from my screen too fast. lol. Muffins were found BUT it was a super interesting hour. Reading the messages outloud the next morning got him all worked up again. lol. I am grateful for my friends but I ain't reading all that!
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Today, I am grateful and excited about fishing this summer as I travel. You can see this giant fish that took hours to reel in. I was exhausted. I want to catch some fish in the rivers and lakes that I travel to throughout this summer and then prepare them over a fire and eat them! I am excited! I have never did this process on my own but I want to! Summer is almost here! Today, I am grateful to have a buddy, Jason, that likes to golf and invited me to go out after school. Golf is fun. So freaking hard but fun. Every shot is different. Different lies for the ball. Different levels for where your feet are. Super hard. Then having a buddy who will say something if the shot goes somewhere it's not suppose to, is fun. Getting out in the sunshine is fun. Hitting my driver and having the ball actually go where I want it to go is fun. Making a long putt is fun. Today, I am grateful to get out on the golf course and having opportunties to hang with buddies. Today, I am grateful for making travel plans for this summer! I know where I am going but I do not know how I am going to get there or how long it will take. I am planning on taking my son to Idaho to see my sister's family. I am planning on going to South Dakota to see my parents and sisters and brother and their families. I do know I want to see the beautiful land that I see in pictures and videos and it gets me excited that my son will be able to experience these places with me. My girls have to go to their dads in South Dakota so they will have to fly to be able to have that time with him and his family. I have tentatively started to have conversations with people about what there is to visit and experience throughout the west coast on my way to Idaho. I do not just want to get on the interstate and fly by all this beauty. The destination is not the journey. I want to be present and soak it all in. Oh, and this will not be expensive or I guess a better way to say it is that I will do my best to make this as cheap as possible. Tenting. Filling a cooler with food. Eating clean. Hiking. Free activities. Fishing. I cannot wait to see what this looks like. Today, I am grateful that a loss by my favorite team was a small win for me. I enjoy watching sports and I budget to have a little money each month for entertainment and I like to do research on sporting events and guess what will happen and bet money. I have my limits. I know my budget. $10 is a lot of money for me. Suns messed around in the first half. Weird rotations. For the playoffs the Suns should not have four bench players and one starter on the floor for a significant amount of time when Durant, Booker, CP3 and Ayton are healthy. Hopefully, the next game will be a win-win for everyone! Today, I am grateful for the idea of using pictures as bookmarks. I was able to see my beautiful Grandma's smile, she passed away in 2021. I was able to see my Grandpa who lives in South Dakota. I was able to see my son as a 5 year-old with them when we visited in 2020. I don't know where I got this idea but I use anything and everything as bookmarks. I had pictures and then I would smile when I opened my books to find the picture again and again. I print off a bunch of pictures sporatically and then place them in the books that I buy or want to read again and when I open them I get to smile again. Love you Grandma and miss you every day! I am excited to visit you this summer Grandpa! Today, I am grateful for the ability and privilege with my finances to be selective in the food that I consume that matches with my goals. I chose to order the wedge salad at Four Peaks and it was delicious. I forgot to have the bacon bits removed but I was kind with myself and enjoyed their crispiness :) This wedge salad did not stand a chance! This lone tiny cherry tomato was the last of it and it was also delicious. I was not perfect this week with my eating but I am taking steps and trying to make more postiive decisions in my food than negative ones. If you want to enjoy something simple, get a wedge salad! Today, I am grateful to reflect on the words of this post. Ending things is hard. Sometimes those things are my choice and sometimes the choices have been made for me. Sometimes the end of something are because of the negative choices I have made. What I am grateful is for the understanding that even though things are hard when they are ending, those endings leave a space for something new to grow in its place. My goal is to be a good person for my kids, my family, my friends, my colleagues, my students, my community and those who I encounter throughout this journey. Cheers to ending things, going through the heartaches, then looking forward to the growing that is going to be taking place! Today, I want to take a minute and be grateful for the people that surround me at Tempe High. I would probably not be in teaching or be in a very different place if I had not make the switch to where I am now. I know that I have people who professionally challenge me and I want to do good work to impress them. This place is dope. I hope that I add positive value to this experience for my colleagues and students! Today, I am grateful for finding my communities of resistance.
I moved to Arizona with my family and not knowing another soul who lives in this state. That move happened in the Fall of 2019 and in the Spring of 2020 we did not return from Spring Break because of the start of the Pandemic. This was a wild time. To add to it my own kids were trying to figure things out with moving. We couldn't go anywhere and had no places to go. I didn't have time to meet and hang with my colleagues before everything was shut down. During this time it became more and more clear that my wife and I were going down a path of divorce. Fast forward. I have now lived in Arizona for almost 4 years and have been able to grow relationships with colleagues and co-workers at my second job and I know I can call a handful of people who would do what they can to help me and my kids if we had anything happen. I know I have people in my corner. I know I am not alone. I am grateful for being able to know this and feel this. |
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Header (above) - Black Hills, SD, 2013 Portrait (below) - Me! Compadre High School, 2021 Dylan WinceI am not a writer. Archives
May 2024
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