A Break!

This is the B&B we stayed at! It's over 100 years old.



All of us need a break every now and then. Especially the people who live in a highly social, intense environment, such as a boarding school. The last few weeks, we’ve all been a little more short with each other. The girls in my study hall have been messy and slacking off more and I’ve definitely snapped at a couple and banded food from our rec room where we study. The kids haven’t had as much energy lately, and walk around with these long, tired faces, desperate for a break of some kind. And now, we are sitting in this quiet dorm, waiting for the last couple of boys to leave, before we can all experience a little relief from each other and renewed energy.

Let me back up just a little, because I do realize it’s been ages since I’ve updated the blog, and hopefully this will offer you a bit of an explanation why. About a month ago, I was hired to work at the Boys & Girls Club of Windsor. (hurray! I got a job!) What a relief to have a reason to get dressed in the morning and get out of bed before 10 am! It doesn’t pay that hot, but hey, I get to work for a great cause, and it’s only 4 or 5 hours a day, leaving me time to work on my other projects. The work that I do there is mostly a kid-wrangler. We have 250+ 1st-8th graders and we do everything from tutoring them, to teaching activities, to entertainment, to mentoring. Actually, it’s pretty similar to our English Wilderness teaching jobs in Taiwan, only it’s half the day and we all speak the same language for the most part. I need to brush up on my Espanol!

About the time that I was hired, I also got a call to help launch the Healdsburg branch of Patch.com. For those of you who don’t know about Patch, it’s a hyperlocal approach to journalism, sort of like an online community newspaper. I was hired on as a freelance photographer and slowly started taking on more projects and am now a columnist! We launch Nov. 30, and I get paid to go to parties and events and take pictures!

I’ve also been helping the school with some articles and publication photography for the website as well as a future redesign of the marketing materials that they give out to prospective students. I’ve been trying to build my portfolio in order to launch my photo business by January 2011. (more of that later).

So wow, I have been so so busy! Aaron thinks I don’t know when to stop. Busy-ness is addictive and I love to say that magic word, “YES”, to all these great ideas that come my way. But I think I’m just about at my limit and I hope it starts to settle down a little. A few weeks ago, after a bit of rough patches in the dorm, Aaron and I decided to take a 24-hour vacation to the coast and we stayed at this Bed & Breakfast just yards away from the sea. It was so nice to be able to have no interruptions from people, and we had no cell service or WI-FI so we couldn’t be distracted by our iPhones. So peaceful. Now I hope this coming week off will bring a little more of that serenity. Because we want to give of ourselves to our kids here, but we need to be filled again to have the capacity to do that.