Happy, Nerdy Post

I spent the past three weeks hauling, shuffling and buying a bunch of stuff. The excitement and challenge of moving to a new city on my own had overshadowed the reason why I moved in the first place. Even though I chose  Northern Arizona University in a manner than falls just short of random, that choice landed me in a place I couldn't have purposefully picked better. While the rest of the nation roasts in 100+ temps, the weather in Flagstaff hovers around 80, with occasional monsoon storms for moisture. The summer climate here intices me to go for long walks and take bike rides that would be a chore if it were for the natural beauty of this place. I hear rumors that Flagstaff measures winter snow accumulations in feet instead of inches, but I will deal with that when it happens (Do they make chains for bike tires?).

I moved to Flagstaff to get a masters in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL). My experience as a writing consultant back in Kearney, and my subsquent adventures as a teacher in Cambodia and as an underemployed young person in Nebraska proved that my interest in language runs deeper than my typical six-month obsessions.

I ordered my textbooks for this semester online. I have received about half of them and I have already started peeking! How Languages are Learned and Principles of Language Learning and Teaching are just the kind of books I want to read! Teaching Composition, the text for my graduate assistantship, also gets my blood flowing, but more because I'm so nervous about teaching freshman composition.

What I'm getting at with all this blabbing is that I think I made a good choice. Several good choices, in fact. My interest in the textbooks assures me that I've picked a discipline I can live with (for now at least), and my enthusiasm for Flagstaff and its lifestyle is icing on the very delicious, from scratch, cake.