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A Brief History of Some Parts of My Life

We adopted a dog from a shelter last year, and he is very needy and likes to sit on our laps and put his arms around us even though he weighs 60 pounds. His name is Baxter, and he doesn't like most men, and he seems to be a racist as he doesn't like black people either, but we live in McHenry, so that's not exactly an everyday threat for him. When our friend Rick comes over, Baxter gets very anxious as Rick is both male and black, not to mention extremely tall, and we try to comfort Baxter by telling him that Rick's dad was a writer for "Good Times" and "What's Happening" in the '70s and that he really has nothing to worry about, but that does not soothe our dog who nearly breaks down every time he sees Rick and will probably one day collapse of heart failure at Rick's feet.

Because we were such a success in training our dog, we decided to take the next step and I am now pregnant with our first child, a girl, who we will name Quinn. I am due in October and I'm starting to waddle and itch and the whole thing has been slightly embarrassing and consistently uncomfortable. But we're excited and nervous and all that stuff that makes sense when you consider that we haven't had dinner at home in over a month and no one in the house can cook very well.

My post-college work life has been a festival of careers. First, I took my journalism degree and became an activity director in a nursing home, but when my salary topped out at $21,000, I decided to go back to school to become an English teacher. I taught English and journalism for a year at Carmel, a Catholic high school in Mundelein. I enjoyed the students greatly, but felt compelled to leave and spend a year at a public school, which was such political and hateful place that I fear I will need years of therapy or at least an underwater rebirth to forget about it.

I spent the next year plotting to get back into Carmel, and wiled away the months subbing at the local high school here. First I was just a regular sub, then they detected that I wasn't an arsonist or a lunatic and they hired me on as a permanent sub. Then I replaced a teacher who left on maternity leave, and this teacher left the year's lesson plans and curriculum information ON A POST-IT NOTE and her classes were full of hideous creatures who went to raves on the weekends and who emitted gutteral sounds every time the work "sixty-nine" was mentioned and they hated the fact that I wanted them to sit down and work and they threw my lunch out the window.

In February of that year, a maternity position opened up at Carmel and I ran, ran, ran far away from this local high school and back into the arms of the priests, nuns, and brothers I had shunned two years previously. And I stayed on through the next year--loving most of my students, loving most of the staff and administration, but hating the work load--until I retired from teaching a year ago. Simply put, teaching was just too much work. Too emotionally draining. I couldn't keep it up, and I couldn't be a bad, worksheet-crazed, free-period giving teacher, so I had to quit.

This past year I spent working at a trade magazine, which wasn't very engaging, to be polite, then I tried a web-design and freelance writing business, which was kind of a train wreck, and now I'm working in a temporary postition at Follett Software in McHenry (my husband works at the sister company 1/4 mile away) as an Educational Website Selector. Follett supplies books to school libraries, and on their card catalogue they provide links to web sites for all the different subject headings they have. I find the web sites and write them up. It's kind of a dream job, and I am very lucky to have it.

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