Just Where I've Been and What I've Been Up To For the Last 24 Days

     Light moves at an astounding speed of 186,282 miles per second. We do not understand this type of speed. I am afraid we never will and that is fine with me. I don't want to live in a world without mystery or at least items to wonder about. I once drove a Volvo 240 DL with my older brother in the passenger seat 115 miles an hour over a long, flat road in Texas and felt as if I were flying and could barely feel the wheels coming into contact with the asphalt. I can still remember exactly how the steering wheel felt. I have flown in a commercial Air France jet liner and was told we were moving almost 500 miles an hour. And I have watched those same planes that move 300-500 miles hour get passed by clouds moving two or three times faster than that. All of these are almost too amazing for me to try and understand, so I wonder at them and hope to always to do so. So, I will know that light moves at 186,282 miles per hour, but I will never fully understand that. And life, I feel, is actually moving at a rate far bypassing that of light. I begin each week and before I have to time to gather my thoughts and get my grounding, it is Sunday and time to do it all over again. It is how after a brief moment elapsed my little baby boy is almost one. 365 days of life and it feels as if we've only had him a couple of weeks at the most.

     And so, I blogged 24 days ago, but it feels to me that only a few short days have gone by. And all this makes me remember a little room in Willet Science Center and an odd and  bearded physics teacher who spoke with a latin accent, but only when he spoke his name and our class discussions on how time isn't linear, but rather cylindrical and multi-layered and how it moves quickly at times while at other moments it moves slowly. I used to walk back to my little apartment room and think how he was crazy, but now I know he was onto something. Or how the earth is spinning 1000 miles an hour and when I come home at night the door of my home that I left from is around 9000 miles from where I left it. It has changed, but feels the same and so have I.  I still don't quite understand it, but don't feel I need to because it is like a work of art. I am no artist and certainly not an art critic, but feel I have no problem and no quams with knowing when I have seen one.

   Life is been flowing like a mighty and majestic river and I've been in the male storm and have felt it rage and wain. And here is what I have gotten to flow through, among, and over during the last 24 or so days.

     Each year, the school I currently teach at, Covenant Academy, takes its senior class on a class trip. The trip is suppose to be the final coming together of the class as they have spent the last 4-13 years together. They have taken the trip to a variety of places, but for the last two, they have gone to Disney World. Which is odd because I live in Macon, Georgia, but grew up 23 miles northeast of Orlando and each year for the last 5, I take a group of students down to the Sunshine State for some reason or another. And so this year, just like the previous four, I picked up a van, loaded it with kids gleefully ready to escape the confines of the school day and headed south. We stayed at a rental house, drove to a different theme park each day, and lived the life of a tourist for five straight days and then we loaded up again and headed north back to the confines of the "everydayness" of our lives. It was a good trip, but you don't get to blog when you are looking after 20+ seniors 24 hours a day. 

   Track season is here and it is full blown. My JV team is doing well for what we are. What we are is a small team numbers wise and small in stature. I have some kids with real talent and I have some kids with great hearts. We have a good little team. We've had two meets and come in 2nd or 3rd out of as many as 6  against some larger schools that have larger teams and practice at much better facilities. And my varsity team is getting better. We've also had two meets and they've gone ok, but that is all they need to be. Track is sort of like baseball in that way. You just have to keep moving along until you get to the later part of the season and that is when all the components need to come together and make the engine run. And so we are fine-tuning everything all the time. Putting together a winning track team is sort of like putting a puzzle together except you are cutting the pieces out as you go and never really know what you are working with until the end and hope you get it right. If this doesn't make sense, think about this: last year our best discus thrower was also our best discus guy. Or how my best female shot put thrower this year is also my fastest 800 runner. It is not always like that, but sometimes it is, so you have to be always looking in the oddest places to find what you need. But all this to say, when you are at track meets 10 hours a week or coaching 8 hours a week, you aren't blogging. 

     

     Few things are looked forward to like Spring Break is in a school environment. Students always wrongly assume that they couldn't survive without it and now that I've been on both sides of the spectrum, I can easily say that students should count their lucky stars that teachers get the break or things could get really ugly, really quickly come early May. I love Spring Break and always have and each year, I try to do something that is both physical and relaxing. I know Mel will disagree, but this is what I try to do. One Spring Break, Mel and I rode 200 miles on our bikes down the Natchez Trace. Another Spring Break we made a driving/hiking tour of three states' highest points. And another trip, we hiked on the Appalachian Trail. However, the last couple of years, we haven't done much of anything and I wanted to change that. And so we loaded up the Subaru Forester, all of our things, and this guy (see pic) and headed to the Lone Star State.  

   It took us a little over 16 hours to get to Waco, Texas and then a little over 22 hours to get back due to some very worthwhile stops (like Dreamland BBQ in Tuscaloosa, Alabama). And we got to spend the night in two different hotels and FH made the most out of the extra bed and the other amenities. The reason we went to Waco, Texas was not to pay homage to the Branch Dravidians, but rather to visit my older brother and his family. They have lived in the heart of Texas for the last 9 years and about three weeks before Spring Break my gracious older brother asked us to come visit them for our break and he offered to pay our way out there. It was an offer we couldn't refuse. I guess he is the Texas Godfather. We had been worried about the long drive and had visions of screaming and gnashing teeth due to an earlier little trip where we covered about 20 hours of travel in less than 50 hours where little, sweet, adorable Fordycakes had us going places mentally that Dante never could have imagined, but this trip, FH proved us wrong and did so well. He did get grumpy a few times, but who doesn't get grumpy while being in the car for close to 2000 miles. 

    We drove out to Texas on Saturday afternoon and stayed till Thursday and got home of Friday night. We had a great time and wished we could have stayed longer. We slept, we hiked, we ate some great food, we had some great talks, played catch, I went fishing, we visited the famous Baylor bears and where Dr. Pepper was invented, and Mel and I even went on a hot date (ALONE!!!) for the first time in 10 months. It was a wonderful time and I am so thankful we got to go. I wish that we lived closer to them. They are a great little family and live in a very beautiful place. I tell you all of this because when you are traveling with a 10 month old for around three days in a little car and then have a chance be in a larger place, you do not want to confine yourself to a keyboard and get in some screen time. And so, I did not put out a blog during that time either.

    So, as you can see, it is not too hard to imagine that 24 days could have flown by without a single blog post. It has been a good little bit of time and much good has occurred and we've made some great memories. But until the next post, you can think of me like the pic below. It is how I feel most of the time. I am always playing catch up even when I plan ahead. 

Happy reading and have a great rest of the week,

  David