The Blahs

I've come down with a mild case of the 'blahs.'

I hate waking up every day to a to-do list full of nothing but household chores and unpacking the last 10 boxes. I don't want to unpack the last 10 boxes. I have nowhere to put that stuff.

I don't want to clean the toilets... again... because I feel like I just cleaned them.

I don't want to vacuum. I don't want to do the dishes. I don't want to do laundry. I don't want to do homework for school tonight.

I just want to lay... and just... be.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy my life. I just am sick of housework. I am sick of unpacking. And I would take a long break... except that CB goes to the hospital every day for at least 12 hours. If I haven't done anything when he gets home, I feel horribly bad. Like I have failed as a wife. I don't have a job, and I don't do housework either. I am a parasite. He doesn't say these things of course, but I feel that way on the inside.

8 days left of teaching my students

Seriously. 8 days. That is... nothing. And then I will no longer teach for my school. It is simultaneously saddening and SO exciting. I am at wits end this time of year. I find that I become more insulting and more easily pissed off at kids, for 2 reasons really: 1. They have decided that they are just done learning, and it is such a struggle to try to get them to understand anything, and 2. I also have kind of decided that I am done and all I can think about are the things I have to look forward to this summer. Seriously. This makes for an easily distracted teacher. 

The saddening part is that I actually love most of my kids. They make me laugh, smile, scream, want to punch them all in the face, feel joy and accomplishment for them, etc. I will miss yelling at them. I will miss throwing pens at them when they are talking while I am talking. I will miss hearing about the dramas of their lives, and OMG guess who is dating whom?! (except they don't say whom...). I will miss sharing my life with them, hoping in vain that they might learn something from my experiences (most won't... most need to do it themselves to learn). I will just miss them. 

They have hired a replacement for me. Now I don't even have a job to come back to, even if I wanted to.

I thought I would be freaking out at this point. Way back, when CB first proposed and we knew for sure that I would be uprooting my life to move to be with him, I just knew that I was going to be a mess about all of this. I hate change. I always have. When I graduated from college I went on to experience the worst summer of my life. The change of moving out of a dorm and into an apartment alone. CB moving away to DC- after having spent 7 months seeing each other every day, living next door to one another... UGH. I HATED summer 2007. Since that summer had a lot of change, and so does this one... I figured I would probably hate this too. 

But I don't. 

I have no apprehensions about marrying CB. I thought I would, given my parents' wretched divorce and the fact I have never personally witnessed a successful marriage.

I could marry CB tomorrow and not think twice about it. Call me naive or what you will, but I do not care, nor would I think that maybe you had a point. You do not have a point. I am not naive. I just know that CB is it for me. The end. 

CB has no apprehensions about being married to me. He is not the 'dying to be a bachelor for his whole life and omg is this the last girl I'm going to kiss/date/.....' type. Naturally, I appreciate this.  He is extraordinarily excited about all of this.

I thought I would be absolutely depressed about leaving my city, my job, my family, and my teacher friends, and while these things certainly are sad, I am okay. My friends lives are changing. It was about time that my life change too. 

More than anything I am SO excited for these changes. I am excited to experience something new. I am not freaking out. I am ecstatic. 

Tomorrow I depart for SA. We are perusing 8 houses, eating great mexican food, and playing tourists on a popular walk with a river. 

YAY : ) 

PS: CB is done with his 2nd year of medical school tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YAY for the academic portion of medical school being OVER.  And, interesting/horrifying fact... If you were to calculate his 'hours', so to speak, per academic period... they are taking roughly 60 hours/week of classes. (pathology alone was 14 hours a week... shoot me in the face.)

An Update... and some peeektures.

(A note about the pictures: I seem to have lost my touch with the formatting of the blog, so unfortunately the pictures I talk about later have been placed at the beginning... except one of them, which is where it needs to be)

Hello dear friends,

It has been awhile since I last wrote anything. So sorry. CB was in town for a whole week and I got to experience firsthand what it would be like having to work everyday and deal with stress, all while having someone around at the end of the day.

He was wonderful though, as usual, and when I was a beastly, grouchy woman at the end of the day, he just smiled and made me dinner and tried to help me clean (Seriously... a man of seemingly infinite patience). He also got my brakes fixed one day while I was at school (not to mention that he got my car washed, went grocery shopping for me, and fixed my windshield wiper fluid leak). I definitely found myself a wonderful person, and not just because he does stuff for me either. 

One of the (many) things we had to do while he was in town was have our professional engagement pictures done. Earlier we had a friend do pictures which were amazing, but as part of the package I got with my wedding photographer was a complementary engagement session. Overall, so far I do not like a majority of the pictures, and I do not fault the photographer in any way. I fault my stomach... and butt.... and double chin... In other words, I haven't been working out or doing anything I should be, and in far too many of the pictures I look a tad on the pregnant side. It is scary. 

I have a choice 5 I will share here (see above), though I should note that these were copy/pasted from the photographer's website and I am not sure if I am supposed to have them- so know that if these pictures don't look quality it is probably because of that, not him.  All photos are done by Roe-White Photography. And they are beautiful when they aren't copy/pasted. 

Anyways, that is all I've got for now. I am still looking for a job, and I am terrified of the one I potentially found/don't think they will hire me because I don't have a certification already. I wish they would work with me, but then I kind of don't because, well, it would be a LOT of classes to teach and all of the sudden I wouldn't just be doing Latin 1, I would be doing Latin 1-AP Latin. Not that I'm not capable, but geeeeez. 

In case you didn't know...

I cannot wait to get married to CB.

I also cannot wait to move to San Antonio.

I cannot wait for CB to be in town for a week during his Spring Break.

I cannot wait until my Spring Break, the week before.

The End. 

Freak Out.

Last night, after I wrote that last post, I had a freak out. A huge one.

A freak out because I am leaving the ever so steady, stable and assured job I have right now. A job they would gladly let me keep forever as long as I kept doing a good job. 

A freak out because I am in a place now where I have to get my teacher's certification, which is not inherently a bad thing, but the process of it is so extensive. So extensive when I have already been teaching, and not just teaching- but teaching well and effectively- for 2 years now. 

A freak out because I could skip lots of that process, a good 13 weeks of it, if I just take the TExES/EtCET Latin Exam.  At first I thought, pffff. No problem. What do you think I have been doing for the past 2 years? What did I study so much in college? Uhhh. Latin. 

But then I looked at the practice exams, and really freaked out. It is h.a.r.d. And I am good at Latin. But honestly, I haven't LOOKED at Vergil's Aeneid (in Latin) since Junior year of college. I have NEVER read any Cicero. There were some authors listed that I had flat out never heard of.  And if I were to take this exam and pass, I would enter into the program just in time to be employable for the 2009-2010 school year. Sounds great, huh? Not when the next, and last possible exam date to be eligible for this program is April 4. Less than 2 months away. Again, not a problem when you don't teach full time already. I just don't think I have the time for heavy, difficult Latin reading outside of what I am already doing to stay on top of teaching, stay on top of my life, stay on top in general.

If I don't pass that exam, I will have to wait and apply for this program in May. I wouldn't be able to teach in a public school until 2010-2011. This would mean that for 2009-2010, I would be working through content stuff and general classes, but most of these classes are evening classes and Saturday classes.  

CB has already told me that I do not have to work when we get down there. He has told me that if I want to go back to school, I can do that. Not trying to be gauche about this, but he makes enough that I don't really have to work full-time, and he is okay with me going to school instead of working. But the idea of not working honestly freaks me out. 

I have thought about being a full-time private tutor. Tutoring, and working my way through the alternative certification program. Then going back to teaching in 2010-2011. Or I could work on finding another private school job which might, perchance, hire me sans teaching certificate, but let me work on it while I am teaching.

I just don't know and that scares me more than anything. 

The heart of the matter is this: Every aspect of my life is changing in less than 4 months. I am leaving the only big girl job I have ever had. I am leaving a perfectly stable, good job. I am leaving my secure apartment. I am leaving the area I have lived in my entire life. I am leaving my family,  from whom I have never been further than 45 minutes. What if my new teaching job sucks? What if the students are horrendous and mean? What if the other teachers are mean and unfriendly? What if CB and I get down there and fall apart- nevermind the fact we have been together over 2.5 years by then and have known each other for over 4 years, and the fact that I respect him deeply as a person and love him deeply and consider him my best friend and that we have worked really hard to make our relationship work through being in college together to being long distance together. What if it all comes apart? What if I can't find a job? What if I do find a job, and they don't think I am a very good teacher? What if I fail? 

What if I fail? 

I <3 October.

I love the fall. More importantly, I love October. The temperatures drop to comfortably cool, and sometimes a little uncomfortably cool- enough to warrant my putting on a sweater, which makes me happy. In Texas, the trees don't do much, but that's alright, it is the weather that matters most.

October is the beginning of the holiday season in my mind. Birthdays (including mine... next Saturday!!!), Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years all consecutively fall in line starting in October.

And, as weird as this will sound, October has a smell. Certain things just start smelling like Fall. I love it.

In the meantime...

the chapel is reserved for the wedding. (yesssssss). December 19, 2009.
a friend of CB and I is taking our engagement pictures in November.
and my mom is worried enough about silly wedding details that I really just have to sit here and relax.

Next order of business: finding a reception venue. All in due time.

I am trying to recover my work ethic. Getting engaged knocked it off balance for a good two weeks. I was lucky to get my 1st quarter grade in on time... sort of.

And it's October... it is so hard to focus during such a gorgeous month.