I got an email from an old friend tonight wondering if she had done something wrong that I hadn’t contacted her in so long, and it got me thinking – wow, I HAVE been pretty lame about keeping in touch. I don’t do MySpace or Facebook, I’ve all but left all of my Yahoo! Groups, and with my two teenagers sharing my computer and chatting with their own friends it’s so darn cumbersome to sign into the IM’s that I quit doing that months ago. I do have a blog … obviously! … but updates are extremely erratic.
I guess I started becoming anti-social early in 2007, when it was made very clear to us (for the second time in our married life we experienced thunder, lightening and a voice booming down from the Heavens saying “THOU SHALT!”) that we needed to buy a house in Casa Grande, AZ (between Phoenix and Tucson, right where I-8 branches off of I-10) and start a karate school to help pay the mortgage. We closed at the end of April, 2007 and Mike and Steven headed South while Kylie and I moved in with the in-laws in Oregon for the summer. I stayed behind to cram a year of Karate training into 6 months, and Kylie stayed with me to finish the 8th grade and go to Girls’ Camp with her friends. We joined Mike and Steven in our new home the first of August, a week before school started. But you probably already knew we had moved to AZ.
I still work for the same after-hours travel service that took over many of my previous employers’ accounts. I can’t believe I’ve been there SIX YEARS now – since September 2003, wow! I’m finally no longer on graveyard – you’d think I’d be able to sleep better now, but not so far. I’ve worked swing (until 11p or midnight during the week, 1a or 2a weekends and holidays, depending on the time of year) since last December but I often only get one night off a week and I can’t stand to turn the computer on those evenings. We did take a pay cut due to the recession and my hours were reduced to 33 per week, but I’m extremely fortunate – and grateful! – that I still have a job and hopefully the cuts won’t last too long.
I opened Kobukan Karate of Casa Grande in August 2007. I had been renting a room from the local fitness club until January of this year but didn’t have enough students to pay the rent so we converted our house’s formal dining room into a training room and I trained my handful of students from home through May. I had several full classes through the Park and Rec over the summer and had already begun making plans to go back into the fitness club this coming January, but the enrollment for my fall classes has left me re-thinking those plans. I haven’t decided what to do yet, still praying about that one.
For now I am teaching the Black Belt Academy at the new High School. It’s not a graded class or an elective … The students have 31 academies to choose from during the lunch hour; half the students go to lunch first then their academies, the other half goes to their academies first then to lunch. All of the students are required to attend an academy, and they can change academies each semester. Right now I have just over 40 Freshmen and Sophomores in my Black Belt Academy. It’s fun, even if I am not getting paid for it. There is a reason I am doing it, and one day I’ll figure it out.
My after-school classes are through the Park & Rec for the rest of the year, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3p-530p. I was supposed to have 3 classes but they had to combine two due to lack of enrollment. So far only two of my summer students have elected to continue this fall and none of my previous students (from when I trained at home) have contacted me to schedule a training time since we got back from our summer vacation. I guess I need to be making some phone calls!
I teach the CTR 7’s (kids who were born in 2002 and will therefore turn 7 at some point this calendar year) at church. I really enjoy it. We have a full class – twelve at the moment, all of whom attend at least once every month and more than half of whom come every week. Fortunately I have a partner so there are two of us (and often a member of the Primary Presidency STILL has to sit with us during Sharing Time) and we take turns teaching. I started out this year with the Sunbeam 4’s (kids who were born in 2005 and will therefore turn 4 at some point this calendar year) but didn’t really know how to manage them; after 2 or 3 weeks the Presidency decided the older class would be a better fit for me. On the one hand I feel bad that I “failed” Sunbeams, but on the other hand I am quite happy with my class – from my first week in their class I felt like I belonged there. I like to believe that the REASON I “failed” Sunbeams was so they would move me to this class because I BELONG with this class, and that otherwise I would have been just fine with the Sunbeams.
Sadly, I also frequently “fail” Visiting Teaching, another service program in our church. Theoretically, all of the women who choose to participate are divided into partnerships and assigned a handful of other women from our congregation to visit every month. Our job is to become their friends, share a short spiritual message with them in their homes, look for needs and assist them any way we can. We are basically their first line of assistance, whenever they need something they call their Visiting Teachers who either take care of that need or find someone else who can. It’s a great program, designed to ensure the spiritual, emotional and physical needs of each woman in our congregation are being met. I don’t have a partner to coordinate with, and I have only one person on my route – a gal I knew from teaching my karate classes at the fitness club who was baptized with her 9yo daughter two years ago and basically hasn’t been to church since. She lives within walking distance of my house, and yet I can’t consistently manage visiting her. I can never seem to reach her by phone, and I can’t seem to catch her at a good time when I stop by. I do pick up the newsletters for her each month, as well as any fliers or handouts that are passed around; I just don’t always get them to her. Shame on me!
So that is pretty much what is going on with me. I haven’t done any stamping (that “icky, yucky, crafty crap!”) since deciding to move. In fact, I still haven’t unpacked any of my stamp stuff. It’s all upstairs in our “crap” room and gets moved around now and again while one of the kids is looking for something specific. I keep telling myself, “One day … “ I did actually order some purple cardstock from Trish – thanks, Trish, the cardstock arrived today! – for my karate classes (each class’s attendance cards are printed on a different color of cardstock – the Dragons, preschool and kindergarten, are purple; the Ninjas, grades 1-3, are green; the Karate Kids, grades 4-7, are blue; the Black Belt Club, grades 8-12, are red; the Samurais, adults, are yellow; my Senpais, or helpers, are orange; the Black Belt Academy at Vista Grande High School, whose school colors are black and gold, are grey; and I’m planning a new class, the Sakuras, Japanese for Cherry Blossoms, for women who want to learn the techniques, socialize and get a little exercise but not necessarily to formally earn rank, which will be pink) because the local print shop doesn’t have purple cardstock and I couldn’t find what I was looking for online. OK, you can see where my attention is focused!
Michael is officiating ball games again. Right now he has football (his 3rd year) and fall baseball/softball (his 2nd year). After that is basketball (his 2nd year), and after that is spring baseball/softball (his 3rd year). It suits him, he can stay as busy as he wants and has the energy for. Between games he has transformed our back yard from a pile of dirt into a pleasant oasis. Seriously, he’s done a great job. We have a garden, fruit trees, a great deck and a couple of gazebos. If it weren’t 110 degrees outside, it would be my favorite room in the house. He takes care of his dad’s house around the corner and the neighbor’s house across the street; both are Winter Residents who choose not to stay in Casa Grande over the hot (-ter than he** summer months). We also have a couple of single, older ladies around us that frequently ask for his help with their yards or other issues around their houses. As busy as all that keeps him, he still frequently comes to the high school to help me with my Black Belt Academy, bless him!
Kylie is … you won’t believe this … driving now. Yeah. I still freak out sometimes when I go out to the garage for something and the car is gone, but it was really nice this summer when she could drive herself to early morning Cross Country practice. I’d wake up at 9a or 10a and ask if she went to practice that morning, and she’d say yes. Oh, and the orthodontist, and shopping, and YW, and pretty much where-ever she needs to go. We even “made” her go to a party last week because her brother would need a ride home from the same party (hosted by one of the Seminary teachers to give the kids an opportunity to just hang out and socialize once a month). She got her braces off in June, cut her hair, picked up her contact lenses and got her drivers’ license, all on the same day. She is quite the cutie patootie! She’s thinking now she may want to teach elementary school as a career, and her English teacher has told her that she could qualify for a scholarship for her writing ability. Yeah, I can totally picture her teaching kids and writing great things in the evenings! I think she has enough poetry to publish a book; I have actually included one in my karate Student Handbook. She enjoys running after school, even though she is having a rough start this season due to shin splints. In the fall is Cross Country and in the spring she runs the mid- to long-distances at Track.
Steven started high school this year. He goes to the new school, just blocks away from our house. So far it’s been good for him. He is in the Pifer Academy, their gifted “school within a school”. He has regular Freshman Health, but all of his other classes are either Pre-AP (honors) or AP (college-level) classes. Some of the boys from his Teacher’s quorum are in many of the same classes so he had friends going in; he’s also managed to make a few new friends – even some from my Black Belt Academy. He was quite determined to attend the school’s first football game last week (they lost 0-64), particularly to watch a couple of his friends play. He even decided to join the swim team, attending his first EVER after-school team practice this afternoon. We are quite amused by this – hmmm, Steven in a Speedo – but if he works hard and sticks with it, soon we won’t recognize our scrawny little runt of a son because he will have been replaced by a strong, broad-shouldered hunky guy. Oh, today we were talking about his musculature (specifically the fact that he has nothing on his bones but skin to keep him afloat in the water) and he quoted from a movie, “Forget a 6-pack, I have a 12-pack” (referring to the abs). I couldn’t resist telling him, “Honey, those are called RIBS.”
Since we moved here, our family has also expanded to include a ferret (Jillian) that we found on the side of the road last December and a puppy (Brandi) that we inherited from one of Mike’s brother’s girls who had gotten two puppies (sisters) that decided one day to fight over who got to be the boss and kept trying to eat each other. *sigh* And we still have the three cats we brought with us from Oregon. I wanted to put a sign on the door that says, “Beware of Dog – and Three Cats – and a Ferret – and a whole army of Dust Bunnies” but Mike thinks it reflects badly on our house-keeping skills, so I thought “Beware of Dog – and Three Cats – and a Ferret – and Two TEENAGERS” might work. Then I thought getting one of those generic “Beware of Dog” signs, crossing off “Dog” and replacing it with “Teenagers” might be easier.
There you go. My life in a nutshell. Perhaps you can see why I haven’t been as social as I may have used to have been. But I’m hoping to change that.
