I didn't check to see how long it's been since I've posted here;  it's been a long time and that's all I know. 

So where does a blog-keeper resume?  There are a lot of changes since back then.  Some things haven't changed, but they feel different.  Here's an example:  A couple of years ago I thought I'd been in my job with the kidlets too long to still be effective in it and to enjoy it.  I'd grown sour and stale--ugh!  that's not a very good way for someone who works with kids during their lunch breaks, is it?  Sour and stale.  It would be hard to tell the people from the lunch, true?  I'd become stern and short tempered, too.  I thought it was time for a different job.

The home group changed, too.  Jean was living in the wondrous city to the northwest year-round, and there were months in between hurried weekend visits home.  The Guys are The Guys.  They are no Jean, that's for sure.  I was lonely.

Friends were experiencing changes in their lives, too and with them some of the friendships changed.  Some of the friends changed, for that matter.  I would feel really bad about that, but I was experiencing such big changes myself that I understood why things were changing with them.

All I knew is that things were changing, not in the direction I wanted them to, but there were a limited number of ways I could deal with them.  I decided to deal with them and not to decline to experience change.  

I'm still in my old job, and once again I love it.  I have fun working in the midst of all those children, all of them different, many of them very "different", if you know what I mean.  I'm enjoying  being different, too.  This year the Toot of Appreciation I sound on my whistle for the classroom in each grade level that gets in order the fastest when it's time to come inside has a few variations that the kids really like.  One is the TrainWhistle of Appreciation, which the second graders particularly like, another is the Martian Chorus of Appreciation, produced with a long plastic tube which makes weird ooga ooga noises when it is shaken.  The kids will hear the the premiere of The ChaCha of Appreciation next Friday when the winning classrooms will be serenaded with shiny red maracas from the music shop.

This is all small stuff, I know, but it's fun and the kids laugh and I do, too.  I have a fourth grader who is a kind of art buddy to me.  We talk about what each of us is doing and we admire each other's efforts.  One day I told E that my painting class was fun, but my painting "stunk.  It's bad, " I confessed. 

"There is no bad art,"  the wise E told me.  "It may look different, but all art is good."  How could I not believe her and believe in her and in me, too?  I wrote her words in the front of my project book and they have helped me keep faith.

This is a disorganized post, I know.  I'm really just thinking as my fingers type on a keyboard with a stubbornly sticky 'b'.  I'll write more here another day, but for now I have to work on that NaNoWriMo trifle I'm working on.  I'm close to 3,000 words today, Day Two.  I wish I could figure out how to count the words in this post towards the day's output, but this post is 100% pointless.

So it goes.