Jobs that would be awesome to have

I am very dedicated to teaching and very grateful that I found out how much I love it. That being said, there are some careers that I think would be pretty awesome. Here's the list:

1. Acoustics designer- the job I was training for. It would be pretty cool to walk into a concert and know that you designed it.

2. Lounge singer. Preferably one who wears a red sequence dress and gets on the piano. Think they offer a degree in that?

3. I should start putting money away now to open a private school. Much as I wish to reform the public school system, it'd be quicker results to open a school and be able to decide the curriculum myself. (Ellen- make sure some of the money you save this year goes towards this one)

4. Photographer. This is probably the one job on this list I'm least prepared for (yes, I know that's weird considering the rest of the list), but if I were a famous photographer that would rock.

5. Most of all, I would probably take a sabbatical from teaching if I could be a speech writer for a politician I believed in. Political speech writers get to pull out all the stops of poetic devices and clichés in such awesome ways. Yes this makes me an English nerd. Deal

I think this list may continue some time...

Physical things I will miss about the midwest

Here is a list of the physical elements I will miss when I leave the midwest. This means anything that isn't about the people I will miss.
1. Being able to drive and be the only one on the road.
2. Snow.
3. That magical week when the trees all bloom on campus and the complete despair that winter has brought you to melts away with the sight of pretty flowers. (Note: Winter does not bring me to despair when it snows. It is when it does not snow that I get brought to tears.)
4. The blue sky.
5. Good thunderstorms that you can see for miles around you.
6. That when it rains, you never have to worry about the ground underneath you sliding away; it has nowhere to go.
7. Large grassy areas that aren't fenced off and aren't parks. I will particularly miss the ability to cut through large grassy areas on campus.
8. Watching the corn and soybeans and being able to comment on their progress in a relatively knowledgeable manner.
9. Did I mention the snow?
10. The relief of air conditioning after midwest humidity.

Probably some time I'll do a list of things I won't miss, but I figured this one took a bit of extra thought seeing as right now I'd really like to get out of town.

Let's Start

So I had a request to start a blog. I've tried before to keep one of these and just never could keep it consistent- I think largely because I had to come up with what to write and sometimes it was a lot and sometimes I had nothing.
To frame this one, I'm going to try to make every entry a list.

Reasons I should do this blog:
1. Ellen ordered me to. Since I read hers, I figure I can at least do this for her.
2. I do like journaling, but I don't keep hand-written journals except when I go on vacation.
3. My friends are splattering about the country and if this blog is any good, I'll share it with my friends.
4. This format allows me to cover both things happening in the world and things happening in my world.
5. I need things to do this summer until job #2 sets in.
6. Lists feel like they take less time to write. They may actually take more because they take some sort of coherence and give you certain constraints...