How Summer Is Going

I went to a wedding over the weekend of a friend of my daughter. Everyone kept asking me how my summer is going (They know I am a teacher.). My answer is that summer doesn't start for me until summer school is over June 28. But in the meantime, I've been trying to catch up on some things around my house and yard. Because of all the rain, it has been hard keeping up with mowing, planting, and weeding, but I have managed to reap the rewards and share the bounty of my harvest of roses, both physical as well as cyber bouquets via Facebook posts.

Some years in summer school, I find time to explore new ideas while the students are reading or working independently, but in these first two weeks, I have spent most of my time grading their quizzes and essays and making sure they are on task in some way. I like to browse the Internet for teaching unit ideas for the literature I teach. This year, I probably would spend extra time reading blogs since that is a part of this learning.

I am also working on some technology and social media ventures for a committee I co-chair at my church. We are making a brochure (not so technologically advanced), have created a gmail account and began a blog there, and are exploring a Website on Wix, Twitter, and other social media. We are planning a "How Plugged In Are You?" survey via Survey Monkey, but we will probably also offer it as a paper opportunity for those without Internet access or for those technologically impaired congregants. All of these things I have been putting off for a few months because teaching takes a lot of time and energy in my life.

Taking up other summer days will be the Apple Foundations Training course in July and a trip to Dallas with my youngest daughter Kelsey to visit a friend who lives there. We are planning to visit the new George W. Bush Presidential Library while we are there and will make a side trip to St. Louis on the way back for a Cardinals-Phillies' game -- we're hoping former Bellevue East Chieftain Tyler Cloyd might be the starter for Philadelphia that night but haven't stopped to calculate the odds of that happening. I hope to take in Shakespeare on the Green with my sister Carol at the end of June at Elmwood Park to see Twelfth Night. 

Sometime during the summer, I will have to travel to Ames, IA, to visit my oldest daughter Jessie who works at Reiman Gardens as a gardener and whose name for this year's theme was created by:  "More Than Meets the Iowa." You can check out the garden online at:

http://www.reimangardens.iastate.edu/

Their volunteers have a blog with some pictures of the summer project in the works. As I was musing about this, I remembered a connection that Brent Catlett and I have because it was working for his uncle's greenhouse set up at Menard's parking lot (before they had their own outdoor department) which first got my daughter interested in her career in horticulture. Small world.

I suppose I will have to find some time for relaxation and rejuvenation as the summer progresses. I do that by reading (I'm finally almost finished with Anna Karenina, which I started about a year ago -- if Tolstoy had had as many interruptions writing the novel as I have reading it, it might never have been finished!) and watching baseball (America's pastime) and entertaining my critters, one of whom is pictured here, Oliver: