Official First Day of My Vacation

Tuesday, July 1st. My official first day of my vacation.

Quick summary of Monday before I go into details about my first day of vacation. Monday, I started to feel the pull of vacation. I was reluctant to get up, and I really wasn't in the mood to go to school to clean. However, I finally managed to get up and out the door. I arrived for more cleaning about 11am. Today I mostly had to relocate the boxes, and stack furniture and objects neatly. Since I wanted to be finished, I did not stop for a lunch break. I finished packing about 4:30pm. I was suppose to drop off my classroom keys, but no one was in the main office. The Principal's door was closed and the lights were out. The main lights in the main office were out as well. I guess everyone was eager to start their vacation. I labeled my classroom keys and left them on one of the secretary's desks. I also found in the mailboxes the official typed (tentative) new class list. I was expecting to have about 20~24 students. However, my new class will have...

Are you ready...

I will have 29 students!!! For those of you readers that are not familiar with classrooms. 29 is a lot of kids. Throw in a couple of hypers or personalities, and it is a powder keg waiting for a match.

Admin decided to make some changes. Ms. Across the Hall will be assigned a 4th grade class leaving myself and Ms. Down the Hall as the only two regular 3rd grade classes. The Talented and Gifted second grade class will be moved up to 3rd as a whole, and a second grade teacher will be assigned to teach that class. I'm assuming that because of budget cuts and a slowing economy, approximately 60 kids will be divided into two classes (giving each teacher about 30 kids) as opposed to dividing the 60 kids into 3 classes (giving each teacher about 20 kids). Very creative. :(

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School's out, I don't want to think about school for the next month and a half. So, onto my 1st day of vacation time.

I agreed to meet another epal. After hearing his voice, I felt it probably wasn't a good idea, but since I agreed to meet, I went. There was a slight drag in the sound of his voice, and there was a noticeable delay with his replies.

My plan was to take the 2:30p.m. MN train, but after a slow start, I missed my train. I took a bus that arrived about 3:02pm. Since I don't think the 2:46p.m. bus arrived, I either took a late bus or a 3 minute early bus.

When I arrived at the Bronx subway station (242nd station -- last or first stop on that train line), the train in the station had a couple of cars that smelled like they were used for a toilet, but that did not stop the train from leaving the station, even though there were about 5 or 6 transit workers (in cleaning attire)milling around on the platform. So what is the significance of the stinky train? As soon as the train left the station, no one, I mean no one wanted to sit in the back cars. About 3 or 4 stations away, the train is pulled out of service "due to unsanitary conditions". Before going into the tunnel, I'd sent a text message saying that I would be about 10 minutes late. However, with the train out of service that estimation was no longer accurate.

I arrived about 30 minutes late (29 minutes if you want me to be exact). I called as soon as I could get a signal on my cell phone. My epal seemed very understanding. Once I saw him, I got the impression that he was lonely and really was looking for company. He seemed nice. I did notice that there was a bit of delay in his speech pattern. And he seemed to moved a bit slow. Originally, my epal wanted to meet at a bar, but I'm not really a bar person, so I changed it to a walk in Central Park. He suggested Prospect Park, but I really did not want to travel out to Brooklyn to go walking in a park. I thought Central Park was a good compromise. At first, the conversation was fairly strained. I felt as if I really had to work to keep the conversation going. For someone like me who is not a social person, that felt like hard work. We walked through Central Park for a while, by the time we reached a placed called Belverdere Castle, the guy seemed to loosen up a bit. After walking for about 30 or 40 minutes, my epal needed to sit for a minute; we ended up sitting for about an hour. I learned the guy had a fairly interesting story.

After sitting, I told the guy that I wanted to buy him dinner as a way of making up for keeping him waiting for 30 minutes. The guy was a vegetarian, so the options were limited. He finally agreed on going to a pizza place. So he would be able to eat vegetarian pizza(pizza with vegetables on it). Since I was very hungry -- I only had a bowl of raisin brain cereal that morning. However, I did not want to pig out in front of the vegetarian. We ordered pizza. Unfortunately, my epal was having some difficulty with his pizza, I went to get him a knife and fork, and that helped a lot. I felt bad for the guy. The guy told me how (since he is a freelance worker) he doesn't get to get out to socialize. He mentioned how he enjoyed our walk and wanted to know if we could do something similar again. The empathy in me took over, I felt the guy was lonely, so I agreed to meet him again on Sunday. Having spent a couple of hours with the guy, I was able to see past...my "first impressions". The guy was actually a very nice guy. And I did enjoy myself. Besides (those regular readers of this blog know that I have nothing going on except eating and sleeping. The guy was suppose to meet a friend at 8:30pm for a drink at a bar downtown. Although he said that walking would be too far to walk to the bar, we did end up walking about another 40 city blocks to the bar. When we arrived at the bar, I got to see yet another side of my epal. He seemed very social in the bar, about 6 or 7 different people came up to say hello to my epal. I felt a bit out of place. I really didn't know what to do in the bar. It was crowded and extremely loud. I have a bad habit of stepping into a room and immediately looking for a corner to cover or a wall to hold up, but that bar was very crowded. Did I mention loud as well? There were wall huggers on every wall, and every corner was covered. There was nothing for me to do but follow my epal around like a lost dog. So what happened to the friend?

The friend thought my epal wasn't going to come so he had left the bar "to get something to eat", but he came back just to say hello, then left again. The friend seemed nice. My epal told me that his friend used to weigh 300lbs, but the guy looked like he had lost about 1/3 of that.

We left and decided to call it a night. I walked my epal to his train station, then I walked to mine. I stopped off at an ice cream place, I ordered a milkshake.

I made it back to the Bronx with a couple of minutes to spare to catch the 10:40pm train. If I had missed the MN train, the next train would have been an hour's wait.

I had a nice time, and learned the saying, "don't judge a book by its cover" is very true.

Next Sunday, we will be doing another walk. I suggested a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. And next Saturday, I am suppose to be going to the movie with NJ epal.

Below is a slideshow with a few pictures I took during the walk through Central Park.



Completion Date - Wednesday, July 3, 2008 12:10PM
Post Date - Wednesday, July 16, 2008 12:04PM