Back to School

Well, it's finally here. School has started! This is so exciting. My job takes me to a little school in southern Utah teaching music. Even though school has only been in session for two days, one of my ensembles has already performed once, and we have another performance coming up next week! Hoo!!

Football season is in swing at my little school. Last night, we had a game versus a school that is state ranked. This was an endowment game, and we didn't do so hot. I'm sure our team put in a great effort, which is definitely to our new football coach's credit! We went to SUU together, and I have a lot of respect for him. The next game should go much better, since we'll be a little better matched.

My new car gets great gas mileage. It was worth the wait, and it's even more worth having a car that's exclusively mine to drive. :) This week, I drove back and forth to work on only one tank of gas. That's pretty good! It's a 40-mile round trip, and I filled up last Saturday. On a "normal" week, I'll only need to fill up once a week. Sometimes, though, I will put 80 miles on in one day, having two trips to the school and back. But I'm OK with having to only fill up once a week.

Uhm... I played a video game for a while today, and decided this game isn't really worth investing a ton of time into playing. One of those weird moments of growing up and deciding that you really are an adult is losing some of that drive to do things you used to enjoy much more. Kinda like games such as Minecraft. Sure, it's fun, and you get to do such interesting things, but I also realize that eventually, we need to get to the important stuff in life.

What else is newsworthy? I played the tuba the other day in class. The high school band will be interesting. I have eleven students, and none of them play the tuba... We essentially have one to a part, and I have two or three kids that play on the sports teams and/or cheer in the cheer squad. The plan is to include the middle school students wherever possible, but not always.

Orchestra won't work quite right, either. Only one person signed up for the orchestra class, and they are not in the actual class. The others enrolled are there for individual lessons on different instruments. We'll just have to see what we come up with as far as that goes! I have had several students come find me about orchestra that can't sign up for the class, so I think I have enough interest to start an after-school group...

That's about it... Next week, I may or may not be getting an electronic organ. w00t! We were supposed to get it today, but something in the mix went wrong, so we didn't make it happen. Looking forward to it when it happens, though!!

A Few Thoughts

Well, here it is, the last two weeks before school starts! Once again, I haven't been doing so hot keeping this blog up to date. Facebook makes it super easy to keep lots of people posted at once. I hate that site, but it helps keeps me up to speed with what's happening with people around me and others that I care about who aren't so close around me without actually having to talk to them. Isn't that terrible?

This week, I spent a few days in Barstow and Los Angeles, California with my good friends, Katy and Brandon. We had such a good time visiting together that we almost forgot that it wasn't even the weekend! Since graduating, we're pretty spread out, and time to get together is pretty rare. Brandon and I drove down to California on Tuesday to see Katy. While we were there, we spent time playing video games, splashing in the pool, and hanging out in L.A. and at the beach. All in all, it was a great trip, very relaxing, and with such great company!

My classroom is pretty well set at this point. I won't have much more time to fix it up before school starts, so I'll just have to leave it basically how it is. I might move some of the posters around and decorate a little bit, but we'll see about that. At some point, I do have to get the equipment for the orchestra so we can practice first thing... One step at a time?

Anyway, that's about all I got right now. I'll be on the lookout now for interesting things to put in my blog. There's no doubt in my mind that in a few weeks, I'll have stories to put here. First-year teacher with tons going on? Yeah. Definitely!