Going Green in Texas

Another week has flown by here. They're rate of speed is becoming alarming. Leah managed to contract the plague last week and so spent most of its second half in bed resting. The tables turned for a few days there and I got the chance to take care of her. I continued to go to my summer institute sessions in the afternoons. They’ve been going well. My FA (Fellow Advisor) teaches the classes and reminds me distinctly of Anne, of Uncle Jack and Anne. She looks similar, has a similar voice and a similar sense of humor. I enjoy spending time with Anne so this has been quite comforting. It is likely that other things occurred last week, but if they did, I certainly do not remember them.

Leah’s health started to look up on Friday and she was mostly better by Friday evening. What I remember about last Friday evening is that in her newfound vigor, Leah made spaghetti. It was sooo good. I was especially thankful for that meal by about 10am Saturday morning! I managed to rouse myself Saturday at about 6:30am to go for a bike ride and beat the heat. It started great and almost finished great as well. The weather was nice, about 80 degrees when I left with high humidity and low hanging clouds. I was about 45 miles into my ride and unknowingly took a wrong turn. I began to see biker after biker after biker. I swallowed my pride and said to one of them, “Where am I?” For a split second I think he was wondering if maybe I was nuts from the heat, but he told me that I was near Mansfield Dam. Mansfield Dam is the dam that holds back Lake Travis, about 10 miles north of Austin. When all was said and done, I had tacked on an extra 15 miles, 1000ft of climbing, drained my 100oz water tank and met some new cyclists. Not too bad.

Leah's time has largely been occupied with portfolio and design business the past few days. She has a BA in graphic design and can do some mightily impressive things on the computer. Lately she has been working on a personal logo and organizing her portfolio to make herself marketable. When I consider the amounts of time, energy and frustration that are involved in simply writing this journal, the things that she does absolutely blow my mind. She is fluent in a bunch of different design programs. Many things that we look at everyday we often take for granted because our world is so saturated with visual stimuli. But all of those graphics that you see on websites, brochures, TV and packaging must be created from scratch by someone. And that person will likely be Leah in the near future.

Saturday afternoon Leah and I decided to remedy the problem of a Home Depot Gift Card burning a hole in her pocket. We finally made it out to buy plants for our apartment. Neither of us had half a clue what we were doing and luckily an employee who had recently moved here from Wisconsin took pity on us. She pointed us towards some advantageous plants to have at an apartment and gave us directions on watering, trimming and potting etc. We came home with a yucca plant and a dracaena massangeana for indoors. For our patio we picked up an aloe vera plant, a bougainvillea and a vine called an Indian Summer Trumpet Creeper. They really make the place look better. And the patio smells nice as well.

Later that afternoon, I made the famous Prescott chocolate chip cookies to take to a potluck/pool party that Leah and I were planning on going to Saturday night. It ended up being quite a bit of fun. It was hosted by the roommates of one of my fellow classmates. Great variety of people and some good food to go along.

Sunday morning I wandered out onto the patio to have a look at the new plants; to my slight dismay I saw that every bud on the creeper was covered with fire ants. I hadn’t woken up fully yet but I knew for sure that I didn’t like what I had seen. Sure enough, I looked it up on the net and approximately 40 trillion southern gardeners had complained that the creeper attracts fire ants from miles around. I thought for a few minutes on my dilemma and decided to block their path of entry and then get rid of the current intruders. I used brake grease to create little barriers around all of their potential points of access. So far so good. The unopened buds secrete copious amounts of a sweet nectar that seems to be attracting every insect that has survived the myriad pesticide attacks by our complex.

We generally reserve Sundays for accomplishing tasks like laundry, shopping, and cleaning. And that is exactly what we did. We wanted to go to Lowe’s to look for a lamp so I had their lumber guy cut me some plywood to make a bookcase out of. Leah has stated adamantly that the clutter on the desk just isn’t going to cut it, so we now have some more storage.

Monday morning began with my first "practice teaching" session. The entire process has been vague in description and lax in direction. I was just told to arrive at a certain place at a certain time and figure it out from there. Perfect. My cooperating teacher is a good guy but he's not actually teaching a class this summer. He's a behavior specialist who's there to look in on kids who have behavior plans. The purpose of me being there is to practice teaching so I made my way around until I found a teacher who will let me run a few lessons so that I can be observed and get credit. Plus my assigned teacher is explaining loads of stuff to me that I will need to know this fall. All in all it's going well. With a little self-advocacy the situation will turn out for the best.
I am fairly sure of who my co-teacher will be next year. All accounts thus far have been glowing so I will hope for the best. She has experience teaching the course so my job will be to provide appropriate modifications to the lesson plans to accommodate the special education students in the class. I will be sharing the teaching responsibility as well as doing some case management outside of class.

I can't believe that it's Wednesday night already. That's all for now.

As always Leah and I hope that all is well in Michigan. And we of course appreciate any and all pictures of the Michigan summer that we are missing.

Love Jay and Leah