Last month I posted about an election for two open seats on my college’s board of trustees, and…we lost. We managed to win one of the seats (Liddell — yahoo!) but we lost the other, and it was a real gut-punch.

I was in the doldrums for a couple of weeks about the loss. I felt crummy about my community and uncertain about the future of my college (will losing this seat mean another reduction in force? it’s almost certain.) I just doldrummed around for a while. Doldrumming. It was the pits.

And when I finally snapped out of it, I was swept up in grading student work and continued to neglect the blog. But now I’m giving it the attention it deserves and have decided to write a little post about some fun and happy things.

Here they are:

T. and I spent Easter with my nerd-tastic family, and we played around on Bo and Leo’s new jungle-gym. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

Leo was a huge fan of his bunny Pez dispenser.

He was such a huge fan, in fact, that he picked up every single Pez piece he dropped in the grass. Every. Single. Piece.

Even T. got into the action.

Next, we got to celebrate the upcoming wedding of these two amazing humans:

Jayson and Cristen are two of our favorite people on earth, and they’re getting married this summer — and we are very excited! I hung out at C.’s bridal shower last weekend, chatted up her wonderful family, ate some excellent food, and beat everyone at the couple’s trivia game. I owned that shower; I owned it!

Cristen, I forgot to tell you that I had all of my classes analyze your short film “A Big Top Dream” for an in-class activity we did three weeks ago. They loved it (not surprising). Hey, everyone should watch it. Here it is (it’s literally one minute long and totally great, so just watch it):

 

I also planted some flowers from seeds that one of my students gave me. She’s getting her degree in horticulture, and I get to reap (get it?) the benefits!

And last but not least, Roo got a snood and she hates it! Hates it! And we think it’s HILARIOUS.

She has this little scabby on the end of her ear that never really heals; she shakes her head and it immediately breaks off and shoots little blood droplets all over the place. We usually put a band-aid on it, but at her latest vaccination appointment the vet gave her some medicine to help with blood clotting and fitted her with this amazing head piece to help her ears from flopping around.

In about 30 seconds she’d shaken her ear free. So. Snood fail. #snoodfail

If you remember, last October Trevor and I hosted a visitor from the Netherlands as a scholar-exchange program through school. Well, it’s now time for the second half of the exchange, and I’m leaving for the Netherlands. Tomorrow!

I’ll have a lot more to say about that, so stay tuned. There will be posts-a-plenty and loads of pictures. Wish me luck!