Northern Noise

In the past 4 years I've finished two masters degrees, started a new job, and got my principal certification.  Just the other day I got my diploma in the mail, so I guess its official.  Spent the weekend with an eerie feeling that I was forgetting something, but realized it's just that there's no homework hanging over my head.  Kinda strange. So the question now is, what to do next?  Do I just take it easy and concentrate on doing my job and hanging with the fam? Those aren't bad things, and they sound really nice right now, actually.  The thing is, if I'm not moving I'm just standing still and I don't know that's my style.  Even when I was teaching, I was always mixing it up.  Taking on new classes, writing pilot courses, starting a 9th grade team, being department head, working on curriculum - every year it seemed like there was a new professional challenge.  The plus side was that I love trying to do new things and improve; the down side was ...

In college, I majored in writing.  Not in literature, or general English, but writing. I liked writing "creative non-fiction," whatever that means.   The fiction I wrote was always based on reality.  I tried my hand at poetry, which I wrote with enthusiasm and little skill.  What was most important for me was the process, the practice of writing. Back in those days, I didn't have a computer.  I wrote by hand, in notebooks that varied from journals with fancy covers to spirals and 3 rings.  The process of editing and revisions was crossing things out, a therapeutic action, and drawing arrows from transition to transition.  When I first started "word processing" my writing, I saved it all on floppy disks, printing on these dot matrix things that made such noise and scrolled forward with perforated edges (what Urban Dictionary calls "kadoobies").  I remember writing workshops in college -  the good, bad and ugly.  Once an instructor accus...

If I didn't have a fear of heights, I'd build a treehouse for an escape, my own "she cave."  If I didn't have a fear of heights.