March update

Since my last post, the weather has turned lovely (though currently dropped back into coolish) and life is looking up!  After a week's vacation from school I interviewed at Cathedral of Praise, the church closest to our home, for a teaching position in their preschool (infant-K3). They hired me that week as a substitute until a spot opens up in the older grade classroom. That's based on enrollment, which is changing slightly each week, so it's a bit of pot-luck... but I've had three days of work already in the last three weeks, have two more part-time scheduled this week, and two long full-time days in a couple of weeks. It'll be lovely when I get my first paycheck, and I'm having fun too!  The director indicated they may call me a lot for the last-minute things, since I live three blocks (or so) away and can get there faster than their other subs. So that's good. I've gotta get used to the early - and fast - wake-up though; yesterday she woke me at 7:25 and wanted me there in 20 minutes, so I took my breakfast with me!

The weather's been nice enough that I spent a couple of weekends on a new outdoor project, making a "house" for my garden. The last few years I've had trouble with critters eating the produce before we do, so this is a 7.5' x 4' frame with bird netting all around it.  I have to finish the door (it got cooler, and then we went out of town) and one panel of mesh that needs to be secured, and then it'll be finished and I can post a picture.  My seedlings are starting to come up... some folks on my garden email list suggested that some old seeds may still work, but so far none of last year's are coming up. I didn't know much about proper storage then, so I may just be out of luck, but we'll see.  I'm trying something new, working with companion planting (planting certain plants together that help one another grow better) so while I haven't added much more garden area than last year, I have a lot more plants. The tomatoes will be planted with carrots, green onions, basil, and thyme; the beans (trying soybeans and green beans this year) and strawberries are beside each other and may intermingle, and then I have a few from last year that are standing alone: blueberries, rosemary, mint, and a lilac (obviously not food, but something was eating it before it could grow to a hardy stage, so it's in the garden house now).  I'm also getting a free gift of "vine peach" seeds, which I hear are the size of a peach, the structure of a melon, and the taste of a mango. That should be interesting. I also got some of the flowers that are beneficial to gardens, whether they repel pests or attract pollinators. I'm looking forward to the weather warming up a bit more so I can go out there and finish things up!

We started attending Alpha at church. We each have our own reasons for attending, though for me it's mostly the peer pressure... people are unaccountably (in my opinion) overly excited about the Alpha experience, and it's mostly something I'd like to have over with so that I can know what everyone's talking about. Alpha is a program designed for beginners to Christianity, people struggling or seeking, and for cynics and doubters who want to know more. It serves a really important purpose within Christendom, and is a great tool for introducing the basics and (hopefully) pointing folks to tools for a solid relationship with Christ. I'm really not sure that it'll do anything for me as I'm definitely not the intended audience, but I do know that - in any area of interest - it often can be beneficial to review the basics on occasion. So we'll see.

Other than that, we're just reading a lot and watching movies and hanging out with friends. We spent the weekend at my parent's house just because we could, sat around with them watching television and just hanging out.  Our foster care social worker called yesterday asking to meet with us, but I had my phone off while I was teaching and missed the call, then I called back and left a message, so I'm waiting to hear back from her. I don't know if it's a regularly scheduled visit or if there's News. In the meantime, we ought to finish installing the gate and I need to tidy up a few different areas that we've been lax about. I'll copy this paragraph into the adoption blog, so folks who don't read both will be updated; sorry if you read it twice!

I guess that's it for now.