So, I tried typing this earlier, but apparently my blog was stupid and wouldn’t save.

Jared and I got ourselves a dog! His name is Stevie, he’s about a year old, and he’s a darling Italian Greyhound (smaller than a regular greyhound!). Here are some pictures of our new family member!

This is one of my favorite pics of him, playing with some unwanted sweatpants.

this one is pretty cute too! Jared and Stevie are so cute. I love the two men in my life. 🙂 Just note, if you get an IG, it will want to sleep in the bed with you. IN the bed. Under the covers. And they have long, gangly legs, so that can interfere with your sleeping as well.

Note those long, gangly legs!

Anyways, we’re finally getting settled here. We have furniture in our bedroom now (Ikea rocks our world!), I have gotten to read and reread several of my favorite books (like A Wrinkle in Time and the rest of Madeleine L’Engle series) and new books (The Host by Stephenie Meyer and The Kite Runner) and Stevie is pretty much housetrained!

Life is good. 🙂

We never figured out what was wrong with my head. Oh well.

Good news is that I am with Jared again and we are now in our lovely apartment in Austin, Texas!

The craziest part about driving from Utah to Texas was that we went through a large part of utah, some of Colorado, and across New Mexico in one day. Then, from the outermost part of Texas to the middle (Austin) took us another entire day! Yes, Texas is big.

So, my main job right now is to be the live in maid (you know, unpack boxes, organize stuff, clean, and cook), in exchange for Jared letting me live here. I’m a bum! I don’t have any income and it will be a bit before I can get my Texas teaching license, so until then (or finding another job that is just happy about me graduating from college), I am the live in maid! It’s been cool. I like cooking, so that’s been fun, and in my free time, I’ve just been reading things like the Twilight series (I <3 Stephenie Meyer!!!!) and other older classics that I have ignored during my student teaching time.

Speaking of student teaching, my last day ended quite well. I loved it. My B3 class was the best- they brought in all sorts of treats to send me off. I even got a couple of thank you cards! It was really sweet. Apparently, they liked me. Which was kind of a nice feeling afterall. 🙂

Hmm… well, I should go clean more now. blech.

I was happily grading research papers (ha)… and when I realized Gmail kicked me out of my account that I was logged into and chatting with people. When I tried to get back in, I got the heart-stopping message, “Sorry, service is currently not available. Please try again later.”

What?! No.

So it’s been about a hour and I can’t get in. How pathetic am I to be so completely dependent on EMAIL. Silly. Really.

I’m moving on…

And it’s four more days til I see Jared and literally “move on” to Texas! Yay!

That reminds me of a joke I used to say with my friends in junior high… “Denial…. and no there ain’t no river in Africa.”

For the past two to three months I have become increasingly more ill. At first I was just more tired than usual. I attributed it to not being used to my teaching schedule (going to bed about 10:30pm, getting up at 5:15am). I then was slowly getting headaches… not everyday, but just enough to cut back on my productivity. I associated it to stress; my husband and I were separated [update: He just read this and pointed out that “separated” sometimes means “don’t like each other right now” –I meant physically separated! He’s working in Texas and I am still stuck in UT finishing my degree for another couple of weeks–we do still like each other and everything], and anyone who’s tried their hand at teaching high school kids (or kids of any level, for that matter!) know that trying to entertain and get kids to learn for 90 minutes at a time definitely has a lot of work behind it!

Then the headaches moved beyond just uncomfortable pain–and ibuprofen and Tylenol weren’t relieving it at all. I started to feel like I had a slight headache all the time… and then there were times where I became extremely dizzy and would have to rest against something… It started to interrupt with my ability to teach (and do all the extra stuff homework you have to do in order to graduate with an education certificate!). When I came home, I could barely get lessons planned, much less work on my extra requirements for my TESOL K-12 minor or my Teacher Work Sample.

I decided to visit the doctor (thank heavens that Jared’s company has good insurance!). What a waste of a co-pay though! All he did was tell me a few mental tricks because he thought I was psyching myself out. While I do appreciate the fact he’s trying to help people not be hypochondriacs, I hate going to the doctor and taking pills of any kind. I have been known to scare myself silly about other things, but if it includes forcing myself to take more pills, count me out.

Well, off I went with my new tips on trying to organize my life and if I did get a headache, I could try an acupressure thing in my hand that always worked for the doctor when it came to normal stress/tension headaches. Never did work for me. At one point I was lying on the couch and kept feeling like I was going to fall off it though I was lying perfectly still. That’s when I decided to go back to the doctor because if anything, I felt worse, not better.

At this point, my father mentioned that I should have them test me for West Nile. He had gone to the hospital a month or two before all of this due to headaches that turned out to be encephalitis, and when they did tests to identify what could have caused encephalitis, they found he had West Nile. Of all the random things to come down with in the month of January in Utah, he had West Nile. Of course, we all went to Hawaii for our Christmas cruise….

…So I went to the doctor, and when he suggested we do a blood test just in case, I mentioned the fact my dad had West Nile, and we thought it could possibly be from this cruise that I and Jared happened to go on. Well, he didn’t think much of it, but if I was going to get stuck with a needle, might as well get all our bases covered at once, no? A week later, I found out that I tested positive for West Nile.

After a bunch of prescription anti-inflammatory drugs, loads of tylenol and ibuprofen, and anti-anxiety pills, the headaches are still here. I have so much to do in the next two weeks, and yet I can’t be productive because of the pain. When I finally was able to get a hold of the doctor today, they want me to get an MRI, which I can’t really afford even with the better insurance we have.

Plus, what if, after all, I am just psyching myself out… and in reality… it’s all in my head?

I’ve been learning a lot about love the past few months. Not the passionate kind of love–this kind is more silent but seemingly powerful.

First, I’ve had to closely study a lot of books so I could teach them to the students; oftentimes I felt that these books would be too hard for them, but I’ve been happily surprised that my students have come and conquered fairly successfully. Particularly challenging for me are the books I’ve had to read for my college writing kids. I’ve really struggled with their class; the other college writing teacher is amazingly fabulous and has a very rigorous system set up for the students that I just can’t compete with, though I have been trying my hardest to keep up with it. They’ve done a lot of difficult reading, Song of Roland, Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, and now, Crime and Punishment. Maybe for some people, these are an easy read… but they all have heavy messages. I am trying now for the second time to get through Crime and Punishment–not because I can’t read and understand the text, but because the message is often so dark and heavy until the very end that I struggle to keep myself lifted up enough to read it.

It gets so dark and discouraging. Everything is so dark and discouraging. I’ve been really ill, and trying to keep up with everything around me and it feels like I’m just falling further and further behind; I’ll never make it up. I can’t possibly do everything everyone expects me to do! Seeing past tomorrow seems impossible.

Every once in awhile though, I get a glimmer of hope that there is good in the world. It seems really cheesy, but I saw “Less Miserables” for the first time in my life tonight. Some of my students really wanted me to see it since they were in it, and I wanted to support them in it, but didn’t know if I had the time to go. After talking to the college writing teacher, she encouraged me to go so I could talk about it in correlation to Crime and Punishment. There’s definitely a lot of connections I’ve already seen there. Anyways, to make a long story short, I went, and it was really neat. First of all, the kids did great–it was better than your average high school musical. 🙂 But the messages behind the whole play were amazing. The intricacies of the characters are astonishing–the world is so used to trying to make things be black or white, good or bad, and these characters had such an interesting blend… like Crime and Punishment (specifically Sonia). It really was one of those glimmers… one of the “ah-ha!” moments of life that make you want to be better.

Of course, that can only carry you so far.

I’m nearly done with student teaching, but one thing that really surprised me about student teaching was how powerfully I cared about all “my” students. I want them to do well in my class and work hard, and I am sad when I can tell they are tired or sick or just frustrated with all they have to do in life. I really am beginning to love people, I think, specifically for all their potential that I see them have, even if they have been choosing not to use it.

I wish I could be better for them. And for him. I want to be the best I can be, and yet I fail miserably. Is that what humanity is all about? Loving despite all these downfalls, mistakes, wasted potential and bad attitudes? I don’t know right now. I don’t know anything.