Profound ya say? Never, none of my ramblings are profound just… ramblings…
Another week has come and gone and it just amazes me how fast things go by and how easy it is to forget whats important. I haven’t updated this in months, haven’t gotten in contact with anyone on myspace in awhile, been trying to weekly email some good ole pals of mine but it just seems like trying to run up a sand dune… almost futile. I am not even sure who all reads these sporatic blogs of mine since there isn’t anything “exciting” going on now that I am free of the cancer thing. Life just went back into routine, people lost interest, normalcy was reached.
So where does that leave me? Its 11:59 right now on a Friday evening ready to slide over to Saturday morning and I should be in bed. With school the way it is and my personality, the end of the year is just a crazy time for my students and I. Patriotic presentations last Thursday ’til late, papers being sent to the conference for safety committees, students grades being posted so they know where they stand, just so much to do.
I have 6-credit hours remaining in my Outdoor Education Masters… 6 little credits after the last 3 summers of classes. I have talked to my professor at SAU about what to do and he recommended doing an internship. I tried contacting a clownfish breeder I know from the local reef club but due to new insurance policies if you’re not an employee you are not allowed on the premises. I recently went to a camp down in the Smokeys with my students for a few days on an Outdoor Education trip and talked with the director at the camp. They have been looking/praying for someone to help with the rockclimbing and high ropes adventure activities… hmmm… sounds like something I could do. The funny thing is… I had already emailed the director asking if I could do an internship for him before I found out they were even praying about who they would get for the summer. Interesting how God just drops people into your lives at odd times so that things work out oh so harmoniously? So I will spend about 6 weeks this summer doing what I used to do at Summer Camp up at Camp Blue Ridge for 4 years! Of course I won’t get paid for it BUT it’s just Monday-Thursday each week, 10-hour days!
My older brother and his wife came down a week ago, he said they were coming to visit us but I know better then that! We went down Friday to Chattanooga to the awesome coral reef store 5th-day Creations just south of Collegedale. There is a Christian musical artist who turned a hobbie into a business and is taking care of an awesome fish store. When Tommy is in town we go down and try to work some nice deals on coral/fish for our home systems. I am a bit envious since his wife let him buy some corals for his birthday and he got this very nice Croacea Clam that has the most gorgeous blues in it when viewed from above.
Our saltwater fish/coral hobby is a great one. We’re learning some great values on stewardship and husbandry of things God has placed on this earth. The reefs of the world are under major attack from pollution and human expansion and keeping a pristine fish tank is a way to help keep a bit of the reefs alive and well. Plus if you set up a propogation system, you can raise corals and sell them to other people so that we’re not taking as many corals from the oceans.
So far Tommy has about 2 tanks up and running, a 29 gallon small reef and hes getting his 75 gallon system up and running efficiently as we speak. He has accumulated a nice variety of coral, a few different species of clownfish as well as some fun little invertebrates.
I have an 8g system in my office, a 40g setup in the living room, and a 20g propogation system in my office closet. So far I have been able to frag (cut small pieces of coral off of larger mother colonies and get them growing on their own) quite a few different pieces of coral in the last 6 months of taking care of corals. They are mostly the soft coral kind like mushrooms, zoanthids, ricordia, and leathers as well as some Large Polyp Stonies (LPS) like frogspawn, hammer, and galaxy.
At school my biology students are supposed to be taking care of a 70g system but have had difficulty with access to the tank due to time constraints and that the tank is in the principles office. We have the typical “Nemo” and “Dori” clown and blue tang that all the kids want as well as a few little corals in there. Lack of funding is the biggest problem with the tank even though we have recieved quite a few donations.
I also have another 8g system behind my desk at work that houses a few corals and a mantis shrimp. If you ever want to see some ingenuity in Gods creatures, check out some of the videos of what mantis shrimp can do to a crab, snail, or human finger. They are the fastest feeding animal in the world and there is a great youtube video of a lady who has done some great research on these magnificant animals with the help of a BBC camera crew using some of the best high frame rate cameras.
My wife is enjoying the hobby a little bit even though it is rather pricey. She of course has her own hobbies. She enjoys her new Toyota Prius hybrid that has been yielding a great 50 mpg highway/city driving. Shes also been doing a bit of research on easy ways to be “green” around the house. So shes enjoyed recycling, energy conservation as well as some other hobbies like reading, bead work (sells bead lanyards at work for other nurses to hang their badges on), even cross stitch. Shes a very versatile young lady!
She has also been working 2-4 days a week as well as working on her Family Nurse Practitioners Masters online. These last few weeks have found her working on final exams since she was the first one done with her clinicals this semester. I am very proud of her sense of responsibility and eternal drive to stay focused on this Masters the last year or so. It hasn’t been easy and shes learned a lot of lessons in scheduling clinical hours through it all. We are both anxious for the day when she graduates in August and can get back to a more relaxing schedule for her that lets her enjoy some days off. Shes a very intelligent woman so I better be careful what I say!
It is now only 12:17 and I am starting to slide farther and farther down this sofa… the nap I took this afternoon for about an hour and a half didn’t help the idea of having to sleep tonight. The air is very warm and I am not a warm weather sleeper, I prefer it cold to the point of having to slide my head underneath 3 layers of down comforters for fear of my nostril mucous freezing and sophocating me to death in my sleep! Okay so maybe its not that cold but I at least like it cold enough to have a nice heavy blanket on me while my right foot is proped out from under the comforter for temperature acclimation purposes.
Ever wonder what it is to wonder and just write what pops into your head as you think it? Its kinda like speaking before you think, the kind of stuff that gets you into trouble at school when you were a kid but more fun. Especially if you can type just as fast as you can talk then its just like leaving foot prints in the sand as you run down the beach while large waves pound the surf spewing jellyfish in your way… you can see were you’ve been but can’t really tell if the next step you take will get you stung or not! I don’t know, senseless rambling is quite enjoyable at times.
In fact all that reminds me of the quote “Not all those who wander are lost” meaning that sometimes you just need to do something without cause, organization, thought, preperation, or coaching because you just feel like doing it. Like pulling the car over next to a park and just walking through the woods looking at only your feet. Or possibly sitting in the middle of a soccer field 30 minutes before a practice while you watch the butterflies flit across your vision of clouds skidding across the lazy blue ocean of a sky. Sensless ramblings and unpreped wanderings, I like the sound of that…
Reminds me of the portfolio I need to be working on for my Outdoor Education Masters, I have to sit down and try to synthesize my thoughts in an orderly fashion so that those issuing me my Degree understand where I have been, what I have done, where I am going and how I will do once I get there. The thing is I do’nt like portfolios myself even though I understand the importance of them. They are a great assessment tool for the classroom, professional development etc I just don’t like to make them! I just procrastinate too much with it. Its funny the things you tell your students to do because it’ll help them in life but then you don’t want to do them yourself.
Hypo… can’t spell the rest at this point and time so instead of misspelling it or looking it up in the dictionary, I just won’t complete the word but you know what it is. Amazing how we go through life with one viewpoint about how negative something is and tell people they shouldn’t do it etc and yet we do it ourselves… just funny how that is sometimes. Living your life as an example is not easy, not easy at all especially when you have people just waiting for you to mess up or do something wrong so they can shove it in your face. Humbleness is a great thing to have in those circumstances because you can accept that you messed up, learn from it, possibly teach someone about it while you’re pulling yourself off the ground, and then move on not letting it bother you anymore. We just like to hold onto things and take them very personal. I fail in that, taking it personally… it’s something I’m working on.
I enjoy Algebra right now… I’m actually teaching Geometry to my 9th and 10th graders but we’re in a section that contains a lot of Algebra and that is taught next year. So that means I have to teach the Algebra the same time I am teaching the Geometry… makes for an interesting class when you have a couple students not even on the same subject you’re teaching. So the question is can you solve an equaiton when you know that the opposite interior angles of an inscribed quadrillateral are supplementary and you know that the interior angles are 2x, 3y, 4x, and 6y? Lots of algebra to solve for a variable and then using that variables equivilant in a substituted equation to solve for the degrees is fun… just takes time to see it.
I feel very pastey and white… as in I need a tan. I spent a spring break a few weeks ago in Hawaii of all places and I look like a Beluga whale from the arctic at my darkest. My lovely wife on the other hand could be as white as ever and still be standing next to me and people ask if she is part native american! Dang beach babies…
Cachi is a Chinchila donated to the school, funny little thing that looks like a squirrel and a rabbit got a little tipsy one night and had a wee little one. Body of a rabbit, head and tail of a squirrel and ears of the culmination of two satelites that fell off a roof and got stuck on either side of the rabbit/squirrels head… softest fur in the world and just as cute as a button… or at least a button that looks like a satelite wearing rabbit/squirrel creature with soft fur…
Ramblings… have I mentioned how much fun it is to ramble…
12:34