Teaching and petsitting and weddings, oh my!

It's been a busy few months, and as we all know, time flies. (I would like to point out that time flies whether you're having fun or not. Which is not to say that I haven't been having fun, but time would be flying regardless.) Anyway, Summer's here--almost over, in fact--and I've been a busy bee.

Starting in mid-May, I taught an ESL class at NVCC. It was Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 9:00-12:00. After class, I'd go straight to my full time job at PRD. It made for long days, but I LOVED my class, and it was totally worth it. The class was an advanced reading class, so I was teaching academic reading skills, vocab, and general college reading stuff. We went through two text books and a novel in 8 weeks. I felt sorry for my students, because they had so much to keep up with! The novel we read was Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying, which is one of the most beautiful & moving stories ever. Anyway, I had a lot of fun teaching. Class ended on July 12.

On July 3, I had a Very Important Event--Kara's wedding! It was beautiful, and a TON of fun. The weeks leading up to the wedding were busy, not surprisingly. One of the highlights was our trip to Doukenie Winery on the Tuesday before the wedding. It's a really nice place, and the wine was excellent (this is from me, a non-wine drinker). As bachelorette parties go, I have to say, this was a winner! It was a great day.

After the wedding, we had a small family gathering on the 4th. After the recent Big Events, it was quite lovely to have some quieter time. The evening of the fourth, I started a couple of pet sitting jobs (I pet sit through a pet sitting agency) that went through the next week. The week after that, I was on staycation, but had two additional pet sitting jobs to keep me from being too lazy. I've had pet sitting gigs consistently through the whole month of July (and it should keep going into August). Whew!

Now that life is slowing down a little bit (maybe), I've started some behind-the-scenes volunteering for Homeward Trails (that's the organization that Rachel & I fostered through when we roomed together. Rachel still fosters dogs with them). HT works with several shelters in the area, including King William County's Regional Animal Shelter. What I'm doing is reposting animals from RAS's petfinder listings to HT's petfinder listings (and then posting on Craigslist) to get the animals more exposure--and hopefully help them find fosters or adopters. It's a bit heartbreaking to see all of the homeless, helpless, abused, abandoned, etc. animals out there (and to know that many of them won't make it out of the shelter), but knowing that I might help a few of them makes it totally worth it. And frankly, it's easy. I just have to go to the library (or Starbucks, if I have my laptop with me), go online, and essentially copy & paste info. I hope I make a difference in some animals' lives!

So, that's me. What's new with everyone else?