Enjoy, more when we get back from Belgium which is part 2 of the wedding. We leave on Tuesday…..

Just the sweetest wedding song evah from 33 years ago!!!  Love you Specs and welcome to our family, CB!

Mom

I retire 13 days from today and I am becoming more and more emotional about it.

The last day of the semester was yesterday—Friday—and my students cried…I mean as I hugged each of them and their cooperating teachers, each of them gave me long tight hugs and cried. They said how much they would miss me, how important I was to them and to the Deaf Ed program, and they promised to keep in touch with me on Facebook…

And they cried…and so did I.

I cried as I drove up to IUP for a meeting with the person who will hopefully be voted in as my replacement…

I cried as I closed my door to my office to continue throwing ‘things’ out; I sat in my office chair and looked at the walls (not bare yet) and cried…I could NOT leave the office.

I’m sitting here crying RIGHT NOW as I write this…cause who would have ever thought how hard this would really be?!

Retiring is the right decision; I am ready…but, my heart is heavy right now.

Tomorrow is Commencement…which is actually defined as “the act or time of commencing; beginning; start.” (Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th Edition—Yes, I am a dork, I still use THE BOOK!)

I am going to have one long last cry tomorrow…I already know that and simply can’t and won’t fight it…but, it is also my signal for a NEW BEGINNING…one of my favorite songs is “Closing Time” and the line that every ending is a new beginning……

Oh, and let us not forget that it is now 3 weeks til Specs and CB tie the knot!  Another new beginning  

Our block classes are now over so I can dedicate my time to supervising my 29 practicum students….yep…29 of my angels are out there. One extremely positive thing, they are ALL doing well!  WAHOO…what a pleasure for me to walk into a classroom and watch poetry in motion. It is so much fun for me to watch these ‘kids’ applying everything we talked about in class. I just love being validated!

As for the retirement ‘thang’…we are down to  36 days

I have already started cleaning out my office and various working spaces.  It is almost embarrassing how many books I have and HAVE READ over the last 36 years. I easily have over $10,000 worth of reading materials…eaily and I read most of it…damn, I guess I am a tad knowledgeable about a few things!

I put 90% of these materials into boxes and am giving them away to our alumni who are returning to IUP this Saturday for a 30 year Reunion. I will post on that later. But, I could not fathom just tossing these precious materials without giving everyone a chance at taking whatever their heart’s desire.  Should be YouTube good…like BookZILLA or something—heehee.  Whatever they don’t take I am giving away to ANY STUDENT in Davis Hall who wants it.

My office will be clean and ready for the next occupant on May 21.  And that, too, will be another story.

45 days for Specs and CB…holy crap Batman, those 17 months sure flew by!

There is always a deadline, of course, when you send out the invitation, but I often wonder what is the motivation for people waiting to respond until the very last second.  To me, you either know you are going to go and make your arrangements (travel, child care, whatever) and then RSVP and be done OR you know you AREN’T going and you RSVP and be done.  I just don’t get the wishy-washy wait for the last second thing.

I REALLY don’t get and don’t appreciate those who “just forget” or fail to respond at all. It is just plain rude and I don’t give a rat’s tail what your culture is!

With that being said, I do want to thank the ENTIRE Belgian contingency who has already RSVPd and made all necessary travel arrangements and lodging arrangements and even hair and nail arrangements!

So, I guess I am thinking about the Americans who received invitations.  Mostly family, mind you, and some friends…our deadline is still several weeks away, but I can already guarantee you that I will be on the phone the last week of April making calls. How sickening is that?   Bless Spec’s bridesmaids…they all offered to do this for me, and I might just let them because given how I feel about the whole, not responding thing, I’d likely permanently antagonize a relative or lose a friend.

Have you had this lovely experience? Invite people to a rather large and expensive party and then grovel to find out if they are coming to share their ‘specialness’ with you?  How’d you deal with it? (tasers are acceptable to me ;P )

Better yet, if you are one of THOSE that I was talking about in this entry, might you kindly enlighten me as to your motivation for your behavior? WHOOOOOOO are you?  Who–ooo are you? I really wanna know!

Nine weeks to go…..which makes retirement 8 weeks to go…..

This was SUPPOSED to be an easy one. Teach my favorite classes, supervise a couple student teachers and say farewell. But oh NO, that was not to be.

Our new faculty person QUIT after only 3 days. Yeah, you read that right…the total asshat (love that term-Specs) showed up the first day, totally unprepared and then quit after the third day.  For fear of be held accountable for libel, I won’t mention the asshat’s name here but I will tell you that he lives in New Jersey and thinks he is ‘all that’…feel free to contact me for a name as i will be most happy to broadcast it whenever possible.

Anyhow, because asshat quit on us, we had to pick up all of his duties…so now I have 5 student teachers and 26 pre-atudent teachers to observe, and instead of teaching my three daysa week, I teach all morning everyday which virtually leaves me little time to observe those student teachers since I have to drive at least an hour to any of their schools.

Sigh….

And, I just found out that the union would not be able to ‘fight for me’ in trying to get sick leave pay-out because there was no precedent for my situation and they don’t think they can set one with me.

AND, then the state sytem is talking about maybe paying an incentive this year to get more people to retire, BUT, they won’t pay it to anyone who was kind enough to let their department know in advance that they were retiring…read that as ME.

12 weeks = 59 days and they can’t come soon enough…

actually, I have enough sick days that I am not getting paid for to have the rest of the semester off…what do you think folks…should I suddenly get a bad case of something ???

Anyhow, that’s why I haven’t been around…I am just too bogged down yet again and it has nothing to do with Facebook this time!

Ah well, thanks for listening to me ‘bortch’!

We have just received the greatest single snowfall in 63 years and more is coming….right now Allegheny County is in a disaster state of emergency… but what the heck…this is sooooo beautiful…when I looked outside, all I could say was OMG, OMG, OMG!!! I so wish I could go out and PLAY in it!

20 inches in my driveway and at least 5 more to come…