Hello, everyone.
It's been a long time, hasn't it? There's been a lot going on here.
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Artemis Muse |
Last May, on my patron Saint's feast day (15 May), I adopted a new dog. Obviously, she won't ever replace Puppy-Dude, of course, but I believe he had a paw in bringing her into my life. Her name is Artemis, and she's two years old. She'll be three in a little over a month, and she's been such a blast to have around! She has me laughing all the time, we do everything together, and as I type this, she's laying next to me just watching out the window, occasionally looking over at me like, "What are you doing, Mom?"
She's been such a wonderful companion through all the ups and downs in life. We've gone on many adventures together, and I'm hoping to be able to take her for lots of fun adventures this summer. I'm already trying to figure out logistics on a road trip across country and take her with me to Oregon to visit my brother and Mom and then up to Washington to visit some friends up there, too. I love traveling by train, so I'm trying to work out all the details on cost and such, and then we'll go from there. My hope is to be able to stack up some money between now and mid-summer so we can pull this off. If it comes down to it, maybe a car rental would work better, but we'll see. :)
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Frodo Tolkien |
In other things going on, I've finally - finally! - landed my dream job. I am working for an afterschool program, and it's been a lot of fun. My job has a set schedule, the staff I work with are phenomenal, and my director is super chill. I work with fifth graders, and I'm starting to really understand how true the statement is that no one on this planet will humble you quicker than a child.
Allow me to explain.
So, I work for an amazing afterschool program. The kids range in age from Kindergarteners to 10th graders (I think?). I work with the fifth graders. I share a room with a sixth-grade tutor and her students. The children I'm in charge of, and I do admit I walked into this one on my own, but these children had me mentally making a note to check out nursing homes to potentially rent a room and move into one. How did this happen? Well, the children know that they are to come into the classroom during academic period to sit down, quietly, and work on homework. If they don't have homework, they have other things we can give them to engage their imaginations, keep them working quietly so children who do have homework can study with as minimal distractions as possible.
Well, this was my first day with these wonderful children, and I noticed one of them had a laptop out and I asked what they were working on (they know they're not supposed to be on any social media (TikTok, YouTube, etc), and since I know that children think they're slick, I walked over to where they were and looked at the screen. It wasn't a social media thing, but I wasn't sure what I was seeing, so I asked about it. I was told it was something on "Google Classroom," which isn't software I'm familiar with how it looks. Like, I've heard of it, but my experiences with it are next to nil, so I'm not sure about much of anything beyond what "Class Dojo" looks like. This is where I realized I walked into this one: I mentioned to the kids that I "grew up in the dark ages, we didn't have internets and laptops and such like there is available nowadays; I'm older than Google and the internet and all that." One little guy... a whopping ten years old looks up and completely serious says to me, "So... Were you alive during the Great Depression?"
-RAPID BLINK-
No, no, that was roughly shy of fifty years <i>before</i> my time. Somehow, the conversation evolved to comparing technology I grew up with versus what's available now, in the 2020's. I was asked about video game consoles, and I said yes, we had video game consoles when I was a kid, but they weren't as fancy with the graphics and such back then. One little guy says, "So, what did you play video games on when you were our age?" I told him, "Well, we had Nintendo (this sparked a whole thing about Nintendo, how the kids know what that is, and I was quick to point out that the graphics back then were terrible haha), and before that, we had Atari." This sparked the question that brought me all the way to wishing I could melt into the floor: "What's an 'Atari'?"
-RAPID BLINK X2-
I love children, man, they're hysterical! I look forward to going to work everyday now, because I never know what sort of quips they're going to have for me. The things they come up with just have me laughing so hard! Sure, the children I work with, we do have the occasional issues that crop up, but that's to be expected. They're children, so they're still learning how to behave and such, so it's all good. Overall, though, we get along pretty well, and they know that I'm there to help them, not there to be mean.
In other things, I've been reading a lot more - I initially had set myself a goal to read twelve books for the year like I did last year. Well, barely into the new year, I'd almost already achieved that goal, so I've bumped that number up to fifty for 2025. It's going well so far, happy to say. I've also signed up for a photography course, and later this week, I've got a meeting scheduled for a discussion about a tech course, but I want to see how I can wrap that around my work schedule so I can do both, and neither will suffer. More on that later, probably next weekend.
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