Bookish Eclectic

 For several years, I have chosen a word to focus on rather than coming up with a New Year's resolution. Last year, my word was balance. I worked on finding a better balance between professional, hobby, and home life and learning to say no. I wasn't always the best at it. Work was especially difficult. To put it into perspective, now that I am leaving and moving on to another county, they are looking for three people to run the club I ran alone. Despite my requests for help, I was never given a reliable person to assist me, but apparently, it takes at least three people to fill my shoes. While that is kind of flattering, it does speak to the lack of balance that I had.  This year, learning a new position in a new school, I have chosen the word "develop." The word has several aspects, but it seemed especially fitting because I will be the teacher responsible for the Yearbook and the Media Center. The media coordinator before me took most of the photos for t...

 Wow, I really suck at blogging, or at least I did last year. I will not say that 2023 was bad, but I will say that a lot changed, and I did not do a good job of taking care of myself. My mother-in-law passed away, bringing a lot of new lessons and decisions for my significant other and me. My master's program was difficult and challenging in the best of ways. We had a new school librarian that I could learn from. I kept dancing as my troupe attempted to become a little more professional. I did not do a lot of crafting or creating. I struggled through the school year, but I did my best to support my students and gracefully (gracefully?) address school politics when they challenged my own moral compass. There are many quotes about 2023 being about surviving, and they really speak to how last year went. Writing was not one of my major concerns since I was doing so much with ECU, but here we are, starting fresh again in a new year. Neil DeGrasse Tyson shared a TikTok (find...

     Keeping a blog up and running while teaching and trying to keep my life together has been a challenge. To be honest, most of my writing in the past few months has been dedicated to lesson plans, recommendations, and the creation of resources for a new curriculum. Several things have been tweaked since January when I last wrote. The Hafla fell through for a lot of different reasons, though our troupe does have a new project in the works. Our play was canceled. The world around us has hiccoughed.      The exciting news now though is that I have officially been accepted to the Masters of Library Science program at East Carolina Univerity. It is the only university that is accredited by the American Library Association in my state, and the program is online so I can continue teaching full-time. I am excited to get started, and I am walking myself through the process to make sure I am as organized and pulled together as I can be.      I have ...

    This morning, the heavens dropped seven inches of snow on top of our heads. It started out as wind and rain that woke me up around three this morning. By six in the morning, when my alarm began blaring (far too early for comfort might I add...), the ground was covered, and I knew there was no way that I was going into school. Thankfully I work in a district that understands that driving to school means I am risking sliding off a mountain. We were instructed to come in if possible but told that working from home was also an option as long as we filled out a log detailing what we accomplished for the day. Needless to say, I stayed home.     There is something so quiet and still when you first step into snow that deep. Everything seems silent and still. But if you stay out just a little longer, you notice that the silence is misleading. There is a lot of movement under the surface. Animals start moving around, you hear birds hopping in the branches and a...