A Long Week

With New Year's Day being on a Thursday we returned to school on Wednesday. You would think that a three day work week would be a piece of cake but boy was I glad to finally get to this weekend. Going back to work after a break is always an adjustment.
Yesterday was a very rainy day and the perfect day to reconnect with three of my friends for breakfast. We met at a restaurant in town, The Mad Hatter, that had moved from a very small location that always had a very long wait to a much larger location. Fortunately, our wait for this location was only about fifteen minutes. Breakfast was very good but even better was the chance to catch up with friends. I had taken the chance to send everyone a quick text in the morning "breakfast anyone?" and was thrilled to get positive responses back immediately. It's sometimes hard to get all of our scheduled to cooperate.
My friend Paula gave me a beautiful picture book as a Christmas gift. Being a librarian, everyone knows how passionate I am about libraries and books and this book portrays the importance of libraries to immigrants in particular. The author of this beautiful book is a Mexican immigrant who came to this country in 1994 with her two month old son. Knowing no English, they discovered the library.

"Where we didn't need to speak, we only needed to trust. And we did! Books became our language. Books became our home. Books became our lives. We learned to read, to speak, to write, and to make our voices heard. Someday we will become something we haven't even yet imagined. But right now... We are stories. We are two languages. We are lucha. We are resilience. We are hope. We are dreamers, sonadores of the world." (Dreamers by Yuyi Morales)

Today I am forgoing my weekly attendance at my WW (formerly known as Weight Watchers) meeting. Being the first week in January the meeting will be packed with lots of new people getting started on their New Year's resolutions. The crowds will dwindle in the coming weeks. Since meeting my goal last month I am only required to weigh in once per month to keep my Lifetime status which comes with the perk of never having to pay again as long as I am within two pounds of my goal weight. Thankfully I have three more weeks within which to fulfill my obligation. Hopefully that will be time enough to erase any weight damage the holidays may have done (it wasn't me, it was the holidays). Today instead I will work on putting away all of the Christmas decorations and getting my quilting area organized. I have lots of projects that need to be completed in 2019. Not a problem as long as I can keep from starting any new ones before the others are complete. 

Happy New Year 2019

Last night was New Year's Eve and although I remained warm and dry watching the very wet, rainy festivities in Times Square on television I did stay up way too late even beyond seeing the ball drop. Today is a day to start putting Christmas 2018 away and get ready to return to school tomorrow. It's always hard to set that alarm once again for 5:30 am but once I get back to school the past eleven days become a distant memory. The crowd of students waiting at the door to enter the library to get library passes for the day will be bigger than usual since we did not give out passes for January 2, 2019 before leaving on December 21, 2018. Students come to the library for many reasons. Some come to meet up with friends. Some come to do schoolwork or read. Some come just to have a comfortable, safe place to spend some time. Some students are easier to connect with than others and I look forward to seeing the "library regulars" return. On Sunday, at mass, I sat three rows behind a family. Part way through the mass I realized that one of the boys was a library regular. This boy was in the library every day last year when he was a freshman. He comes a bit more sporadically this year but he does still come. Although I know his name from seeing him regularly, he is not a student that I have developed a close relationship with. He is polite and quiet and mostly works alone on schoolwork. Sometimes when I meet students outside of school I'm not sure what their reaction will be. Some students may not want to acknowledge that they know the school librarian. Others are very vocal in recognizing me in the "real world". So as I passed by this student in church I glanced his way and had to smile when he looked up in surprise and gave a shy smile and a little wave. Yes, it truly is the students that keep me going back! Happy New Year!

A Week Undefined

The week between Christmas and New Year is like no other week of the year. After the whirlwind of getting ready for Christmas and the day itself is over it becomes a week undefined when you really do have trouble knowing what day it is. It takes a day or so after Christmas to realize that I am on vacation from school and should take advantage of the time to do all the things I never have time for when school is in session. Then comes the panic that the week is flying and soon I will be returning to school without having done all (or any) of the things I had been thinking of. This year I decided to try and just enjoy the time. I took the day after Christmas to just relax. I worked on a new puzzle I received as a gift from my daughter (picture below) and did some reading. The next day I had a lunch date with a friend that I have not seen since the school year began. It always so nice to catch up as we enjoy so many of the same things.
One book I was able to finally get to this week was The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo. It is a young adult book that has been receiving quite a bit of press. It received the 2018 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Written in verse it is Acevedo's first novel. Xiomara is fifteen and, faced with more than her share of teenage angst including first love and an overly strict family life, she is trying to navigate her life through her poetry. It is beautifully written and I already have a couple of students in mind to share it with when we get back to school next week.
Two days ago we took a ride to view the beautiful Christmas light display at The National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette in Attleboro, MA. Their Festival of Lights display really is amazing. I hadn't been to it in a number of years. Our unseasonal warm(ish) New England weather made it even more enjoyable to walk around and enjoy the lights.
The week has also included lots of eating. Tomorrow I will be back at WW to try to get back on track eating healthy to at least start the new year. Probably should try to get back to the gym sometime soon too. Although I've been pretty good about attending the WW meetings since I reached goal in November, the gym has been a distant memory. Might as well get a jump on the hoards of people who will be flocking back to both in early January.

My "Nevertheless, She Persisted" puzzle.

Christmas 2018 - A Blog is Born

Yesterday, I decided to start a blog. I have no idea why but it may have been because I had arrived early to Christmas mass, still a habit that stems from the memory of large Christmas mass crowds of years past, and had ample time to park, enter, sit and think. Being Christmas, and being ready for the onslaught of family expected at my house in the afternoon, I had time to think about all the things I am grateful for. I often write emails to people in my head that (probably fortunately) never get sent and I started to feel that my thoughts were like an email to myself. Or, maybe a blog post. And it suddenly popped into my head that I would start a blog. A blog would be a way to publish my thoughts but, unlike an email, edit or delete if necessary. A blog would be a chance to tell myself (and anyone else who may care to read) about all the things I am grateful for. I often think about how grateful I am to have received an education that has allowed me to make a couple of career changes leading finally to where I needed to be all along - a high school library teacher. Along that vein I am grateful to have had parents that supported this education even when I picked a college that may have been a little more liberal than they would have preferred but that helped shape me to be the person I am today. It was the right choice and I am grateful that they allowed me to make it. So this blog will include thoughts about being grateful for many different things. It may include thoughts about family, friends, pets, books, quilting or travel and often it will include musings about my interactions with my high school students who never cease to amaze me and continually remind me of how grateful I am for everyone and everything in my life that has led me to this point. For now I am grateful that Christmas 2018 was a wonderful day filled with good food and time with family. Though it was too busy to take pictures during the day here are a couple from the night before. Christmas Eve is always a peaceful night for me.