Out with the Old, In with the New

Goodbye 2010!

Overall, 2010 has been a good year for me - although at times it did not seem like it. I finished student teaching, became a licensed teacher, and then sat around for too many months waiting to find a teaching job. Fortunately, many other employment opportunities came my way while my teaching dreams were on hold. I started the year the way I have for the past several years - working at my dad's tax preparation business. I won't be able to give my dad as many hours in 2011, but I expect I'll find myself assembling a few tax returns come March. Near the end of March, as the taxes were rolling into their final weeks, I was finally hired as a substitute teacher, just in time to take a trip down to Indianapolis to visit my quite-pregnant sister. I had my first substitute teaching assignment on April Fool's Day - a half day of school before a long weekend - and I survived somehow.

In May, I took a week off from subbing and headed to Indianapolis for the birth of my niece. On that trip Adele helped me shell peas from the garden, and even ate a few peas for dinner. She decided, without any prompting, that the large peas were "man peas" and the tiniest peas were "baby peas." The morning after her sister was born, Adele woke up and came down the stairs asking, "My baby sister came out last night?" We're not quite sure how she knew, since her mom was in the bathtub when Adele went to bed, and the baby was not born until Adele was fast asleep. We got home from the hospital around 2 or 3 in the morning, and I don't think anyone woke Adele up to tell her. However she came to find out about it, I am still awed that my sister allowed me to be in the room to watch the whole birth (except the epidural) and will never forget that the nurse mistakenly gave Anna to me before her dad had a chance to hold her. (In my defense, I did not realize that Brian hadn't held his daughter until she was already in my arms.)

In July, my nieces came to Wisconsin for a visit, and I got to have a very special sleep-over with Adele! She ate Memaw's raspberry jam, shelled a few more peas, and went for a walk along the river.

I was disappointed not to get three teaching jobs over the course of the spring and summer, but spent four hours volunteering at a booth at the county fair hours after learning that Michael's uncle had undergone a successful liver transplant, and ended up meeting a new friend and getting a job where I actually had the opportunity to do some teaching, albeit in a museum rather than a classroom.

Over the course of the spring and summer, my dad and I grew a fairly productive garden (although the tomato crop could have been more successful) and I canned and froze a substantial amount of produce, which has been a godsend in the recent weeks when I've been too tired to cook when I get home from work. Dinner is as easy as thawing out a container of grass finished beef and garden turnip soup I made in July.

As the summer came to an end and the farmers' markets and museum closed up for the season, I was fortunate enough to get another job (for which I had not applied) at a small law firm in town as my dad recovered from knee surgery. The weekend after I started that new job Michael and I headed to Indianapolis again - this time to serve as godparents for Anna Kate. We had to rush home after the church service, so I missed seeing Anna Kate dressed up as Raggedy Ann, but she brought the costume to show me for Thanksgiving.

Work at the law firm was fairly stress free, interesting, and manageable, but I kept applying for teaching positions, and was shocked when I finally got a call, many weeks after the interview, asking if I could come in right away to start a long-term subbing position teaching English an hour and a half from home. And later that same day, I was just as shocked to get a call inviting me to interview for another long-term substitute English position - at a school only 20 minutes from my house.

I am halfway through the six weeks in Beloit, and was hired to begin in Pardeeville at the start of the second semester - so I will have exactly one weekend (during which Adele will turn 3) between jobs.

2011 is shaping up to be a good year. I will be employed full-time as a teacher until the first week of June, I have resources about companion planting and food preservation (and a new rack for my water bath canner!) and I am excited about growing a years' worth of food in the upcoming summer.

Until the garden starts growing, I have a freezer full of fruit and jam, vegetables including peas, green beans, asparagus, corn, zucchini, and tomatoes, cupboards with jars of pickles, cranberry preserves, tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, and one last lonely jar of applesauce. I have many pints of chicken, beef, and turkey stock, much of which was produced using all or mostly local food.

I never got around to making resolutions for 2010, but I'm pretty proud of the way I was able to use local, real food sources for so many of my meals. One of my goals for 2011 will be to continue my efforts to wean myself off of processed, highly-traveled foods. I also want to be able to talk to other people in a coherent way about why I am making the food choices I'm making - not just so that I can be understood (right now I tend to ramble endlessly without making a lot of sense) but also so that I can introduce many of the people that I know to a much healthier, earth-friendly way of living and eating.

I am sure this post could use some significant editing, but I need to go get ready for this party! (My plan is to come back and update this post with pictures when I have time.)

Happy 2011 everyone!

Raspberry Jam Revisited

While I was inspecting my freezer earlier tonight to make sure I won't have to buy a bunch of processed food that comes in boxes while I deal with a long commute, I discovered many, many jars of freezer jam that have been waiting to be eaten.

That reminded me that I haven't posted a few Thanksgiving pictures yet.

Remember this little girl who had a big sleep-over at her aunt's house last summer?
I think I've discovered the key to making sure she'll come back again.
She allowed me to drape her with a towel on Friday so she could eat applesauce for breakfast, and the same technique worked for her raspberry jam on bread.

It didn't stop her from getting a little bit messy, though.
First she decided she was Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.

But then she turned into a clown.
Isn't she sweet?

Her sister's pretty adorable too!

Changes

Just when I had finally gotten settled into a routine working as a substitute teacher some days and as a law clerk the rest of the week, things had to go and change. On Friday morning, nine minutes before I had to be at work at the law firm, I got a call from the school district where I had interviewed several weeks earlier. The interview was so long ago that I had recently said to my husband, "obviously I didn't get that job." The assistant principal who called me started the conversation by thanking me profusely for the thank-you card I sent to her after the interview. (For the record, I also sent a thank-you card after my previous interview with this school district, and it didn't seem to help, since I wasn't offered that job.) I listened politely, planning my response to her inevitable rejection speech. She thanked me for a while, then told me the teacher who needs the long-term sub had had her baby, and then eventually got around to telling me that she was offering me the job. She wanted me to come in that day. I was sort of stunned.

Her desire to have me get in the classroom on Friday was slightly awkward, since the law firm was expecting me in five minutes. Eventually she indicated that it would be okay if I came in on Monday (tomorrow) instead. So I told her I'd be happy to take the job, and made arrangements to talk to the personnel department later. I went to the law firm, and awkwardly told my boss that this was apparently going to be my last day. (How convenient that I had arranged to bring in the leftover spice cake from Thursday's book club - what had been just a "Friday treat" could now be called a "going-away treat.") He was very gracious, and congratulated me on getting the job. (Basically my boss at the law firm was an all-around good guy who displays the complete opposite traits from all of the other lawyers I have ever worked for. Your standard, run-of-the-mill lawyer would probably say this guy gives lawyers a bad name 'cause he's not a complete and total jerk.)

On a typical day at the law firm, I would arrive to find my desk full of files covered in post-it notes reading, "See me on filing Complaint in X case" or "Legal Research on Economic Loss Doctrine." I would have a brief meeting in which he would explain what he needed, and I would get to work. On Friday, he started out in this fashion, but began setting files to the side in cases he knew I wouldn't get to in my last 8 hours with the firm. As he was starting to tell me about a task I could complete, my phone rang.

It was the personnel department calling to tell me to bring official transcripts, my social security card, and my drivers' license on Monday after I go to the Occupational Health Services for my drug screen, my TB test, and my physical.

For the record, I don't typically answer my cell phone while working, but I figured I should pick up on Friday in case it was the school district calling back about Monday. So when another unknown number called me a few hours later, I figured it was the school district calling again. I was partly right. It was a school district - a different district with a long-term sub position calling to schedule an interview. They want to interview me on Monday the 13th. I told the lady who called that I am planning to take a different position but said I'd be happy to interview for this position as well. She was not deterred so I went ahead and took the first interview slot she had.

The job I have been offered is an hour and a half from my house, during good weather and not at rush hour. I will be waking up at 4:45 in order to leave my house by 5:45 so I can get to school by 7:15-7:30. Just this week I though to myself how thankful I was that my job was within walking distance from my house, and that I did not have to wake up before 6 a.m. to be at work on time. Ha. The interview that I will have on the 13th (if I don't cancel it) is for a half-time position that is 20 minutes from my house, and I believe this position will last the rest of the school year, whereas the position I've been offered is only for 3 months.

Furthermore, there is an English teacher in town who is expecting to go on maternity leave sometime between now and April, and she has recommended me to the principal as her long-term sub. I've been trying to get a one-day subbing job for her for the last month (she's posted three but someone else was always quicker to schedule the job), and finally got one - for a couple of weeks from now, which I will likely have to cancel. In a perfect world, taking this current job will not mean giving up the opportunity to sub for her. In a less-than ideal world, I may have some hard decisions to make in the next few weeks. And that is something I have never been particularly good at.

To top this all off, it snowed on Friday night, for really the first time this season - just in time to remind me how hazardous it may be to drive those 85 miles to and from a limited term job every day. I've been a little bit stressed out, trying to figure out how I'm going to feed my family real, local, non-processed food while I'm doing all of this driving. I've really enjoyed being able to take nice homemade meals to work. But when am I going to have time to make these meals now that I'll be spending three hours a day in the car? I'm trying to remember what/when I cooked while I was student teaching, but I'm kind of drawing a blank.

I went out to check the freezer a few minutes ago. I have four six-cup containers of vegetable beef soup, two four-cup containers of Kale soup, two four-cup containers of early vegetable soup (turnips, zucchini, and I'm not sure what else), several cups of chicken stock, and two f0ur-cup containers of beef stock in the freezer.
Plus, I finally got around to making turkey stock from my Thanksgiving turkey today. (The carcass had been hanging out in my freezer since my dad carved it. I don't have pictures, but I did require my husband's help to get the whole carcass into my stock pot.) It is still simmering on the stove, but I think it will make a couple quarts worth of stock. I also have many quarts of tomato sauce and spaghetti sauce both in the freezer and in my cupboards, along with half a dozen bags of sliced zucchini, at least a dozen bags of corn, and an assortment of other frozen vegetables.
We are not going to run out of food, but we might get a little bit sick of spaghetti with zucchini and tomato sauce.

The main problem with doing any more (real, local) food shopping in the next three months is that the farmers' market that is open in the winter is an hour away. It is still possible to go, since it is on Saturday mornings, but I know that the absolute last thing I'm going to want to do on a Saturday morning is get up early and drive an hour so I can go shopping.

Clearly, I have mapped out all of the negative elements of this job opportunity. What I need to focus on, instead, is how lucky I am to have been given this opportunity! In the past few months I have received several great employment opportunities. I am grateful for all of them. While there are a few drawbacks to this job, and while I might be inclined to stick with my still-new routine, which has become comfortable over the past few weeks, I recognize that this is an incredible opportunity for me. I was so disappointed not to have gotten a teaching job this summer, when most of the people I went to school with did find jobs. I was told by a veteran English teacher here in town that I needed to add some long-term subbing assignments to my resume so that school districts would know I had experience writing units and doing long-range planning. Now I have the opportunity to do just that.

So tomorrow I go in for the health screenings, and by Friday I should be set up in the classroom.
If it doesn't work out, the attorney said I'm welcome to come back to the law firm any time.