Year Five

Another year has gone by - a good year with few emotional stressors. We're having a quiet weekend at home this weekend; tonight we'll go out to dinner at Teppanyaki. I did get some good anniversary gifts: CCCP Cookbook: True Stories of Soviet Cuisine, The Oxford Companion to Food, and Insects and Flowers: The Art of Maria Sibyl Merian.I got Ed a molten sculptural bowl, a personalized hammer, a rustic wood sign, and "Be Thou My Vision" burned on barn wood, ("Be Thou My Vision" is an 8th century Irish hymn attributed to the Irish Christian poet St. Dallan. We heard this song at Mass shortly after we got engaged; I hadn't paid much attention so it but it caught Ed's ear, so I asked the guitarist who had performed it what the song was, and it became the song to which I walked down the aisle.) 
This is still my favorite wedding picture.

In July we went to Ireland for three weeks. We visited some of my cousins in western Ireland (in the Co. Limerick area), visited my parents (who live on the Co. Roscommon / Co. Leitrim border for part of the year), made our way north to the Giant's Causeway and Belfast, then drove down to Dublin for the last week of our trip. Early in our trip we were able to attend a Medieval Banquet in Dunguaire Castle which you can see in the background here. (Dunguaire Castle was the Hynes Clan castle; my mother was a Hynes, and when in Galway one can still see Hynes establishments. We therefore like to think of this as the family castle.) Just look past my dad photobombing an otherwise good picture.

From Ireland (2015)

Over the summer I had 13 job interviews, and I was finally offered a position at Copper Hills High School. (Lucky 13 - my interview at Copper Hills was the last interview and the only job offer. On a side note, I appreciated the very few schools that were kind enough to send me an e-mail telling me I wasn't a match. Most of the schools I didn't hear from at all.) This year I've been teaching 10th grade, 12th grade, and Concurrent Enrollment classes, which effectively means I teach the same things I would at Salt Lake Community College (Introduction to Writing) except I teach those things to high school students who are simultaneously high school and college students. It's going swimmingly - I like the school, my colleagues, and the students tremendously, and my official observations were very good - and I'll be back next year.

My nephew turned one in mid-April. It was just a little too far away for a weekend trip to celebrate Niall's first birthday, but we were able to FaceTime during the celebrations.

This will be a quiet summer; I'm teaching two summer classes at SLCC, and I'm not sure we'll do any traveling. If we do, it'll be domestic.

There's a lot of professional development ahead. I got two conference proposals relating to Concurrent Enrollment in high schools accepted, so I'll be presenting at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Convention in October (conveniently held in Salt Lake City), and the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2017 in Philadelphia. I'm also getting the related paper published, due out in Summer 2017. And with any luck, I'll be able to complete a Master's degree I started way back in 2007 but didn't complete.

Michelle & Ed's Wedding from Michelle Szetela on Vimeo.