Posts Tagged ‘new year’
First, the news. We have shuffled along to Catonsville! I am returned to work, as a preschool language teacher at a Reggio Emilia-inspired facility, where my son has been graciously afforded an opportunity to thrive and grow alongside me. We live right on top of the Catonsville Junction, with all the Scittino’s pizza, Caffe Di [...]
I am all too aware that my consciousness is a small craft in a sea of chemicals. Sometimes the neurotransmitter tide swells, and waves wash over me, inundating this poor vessel. Other times the squalls clear, leaving dopamine-blue skies and smooth sailing. (I should go look up Horace and his ode to the ship of [...]
So, time to come back to things uttered in the fever pitch of self-improvement. As Chesterton says, it is the patient who is to be cured of an illness, but a man requires impatience to cure himself of his faults. (Sins, he says, but I have also no patience for that metaphysical shorthand.) To reiterate, [...]
It is a couple days before 2013 begins, and I don’t go in to school until the 2nd, but my vacation is over. It has been restful, explicitly doing nothing, though being sick has made that somewhat mandatory. And now I must do all the preparation work that I have put off while doing nothing. [...]
Well, I put on a good front, but the only true metric of effort is accountability. I made a number of vows for the new year, and I intend to follow through with them. So here’s a straight and merciless look at what I set.
The semester has already been going well. The structure alone has been beneficial. Unlike last semester, where half of my classes had nebulously-constructed assignments with only a few due dates, my classes have specific assignments due at specific times throughout the semester, and the instructors were very clear about how they were to be formatted [...]
I used to look at new year goals as a quick fix to my broken self. “These goals enumerated here,” I would say to myself, “will make me a better person, and I am going to do them right now.” Well, that’s obviously unrealistic, but that’s what young people do, I guess. I have a [...]
My main brewing efforts have been with my friend, the Unknown Lamer, since last October. We use a mega-burner (basically a turkey fryer), and since January it’s been an all-grain setup with the construction of a 5-gallon mash tun. Since June I’ve been doing this little stovetop side project, in part because I don’t always [...]
Today is another New Year, this time for many Iranians, called Nowruz. It’s a new one for me–I enjoy the absurdity of marking each new year as it arises, so it’s nice to have another one under my belt. Gregorian new year, Chinese new year (zhēng yuè), Nowruz, summer solstice, Rosh Hashanah, Ras [...]