March gladness

(That's a basketball pun.)

Things are looking up... outside the classroom anyway. (As far as that goes, my schedule and two difficult pointless classes are making my work life blah. And blah blah blah.)

But this is going to be a happy post, dammit!

Let me rephrase that...

Actually, a lot of little things are going very well right now. Here's my list of  Trivial Happiness Generators That Matter Not at All to Anybody but Me, in more or less random order.

THGTMNaAtAbM #1: I've been following Cornell basketball for nearly fifty years, and they finally have a terrific team; they've won the Ivy League three years in a row and have finally gotten some national recognition. (President Obama even picked them to win their first-round tournament game.) I think that they got a very unlucky tournament assignment in Temple, a much tougher team than the Big Red deserves to face, but till the game starts (1 a.m. Saturday here, and yes, I'll be up to watch it) it's all better than good. If they actually win, it'll be better than better.

THGTMNaAtAbM #2: Mr. Park, our director, asked each teacher to pick a poster representing our homes, and this is the one I picked, Taughannock Falls near Ithaca, near our one-time house.

The prints have come in from allposters.com, and they are gorgeous (or gorges). They're matted and framed, most of them three feet by two, and I love mine. Every time I come into the school lobby, where the prints are until they're put up on the walls, I stand and gaze at it and feel... what, nostalgic? Is that better than homesick? It's odd; it makes me feel proud to be from Ithaca, as if I personally designed the topography.

THGTMNaAtAbM #3: Cross country is purring along nicely; I have four kids who are into it (three girls and a guy) and two more girls who are basically in it to walk. Yesterday we went out in the wind and cold and within a few minutes small but insistent snowflakes began to fall. Once again it was the best kind of snow, the kind that blankets the trees and grass and melts off the pavement. The mountains are beautiful in the snow. But I'm ready for spring (and baseball season here starts in a week! [THGTMNaAtAbM #4])

THGTMNaAtAbM #5: I'm planning to run my first race in years, a 5K in the suburb of Bundang in three weeks. Susan, one of our teachers, is also going to run it and I think a couple of the CC kids will as well. I think I can still do it in a half hour, compared to my standard 28 minutes six or eight years ago. If it goes well, I may consider a half-marathon in the fall.

THGTMNaAtAbM #6. Yesterday Nikki, our new art teacher, and I were alone in the faculty room after my CC session and she looked ill. (No, that didn't make me happy.) She told me she's pregnant. That, or rather the fact that she and her husband are really happy, made me happy. What made me happier was that, even though we haven't known each other long, she trusted me with the information. Today she told everyone else. But I knew it first. Nyaaah!

THGTMNaAtAbM #7. Tug's a good little patient: he hops on my lap, I drop junk in his eye, he gets a treat. He asks for the medicine now and his eye's looking better.

THGTMNaAtAbM #8 is that I ordered some stuff from the States that finally came in, two running shirts and the world's goofiest baseball cap, which features a patch of Mr. Met running. (Mr. Met is the team's lovable/ridiculous mascot. His head is the same size as Kelsey Grammer's.) Here's the cap:

(Stylish, yes? At least it's probably the only one of its kind in Korea.) Also, I've ordered a book that has been listed for months as soon to be released: a 400-page opus about the writing and filming of Doctor Who. (Don't call me a nerd! Would a nerd wear a Mr. Met hat?! Ah, never mind...)

Also, I've been wanting to go to Jeju Island ("Korea's Hawaii") for the last 18 months, and apparently it's really on; we've gotten the school trip's itinerary, which packs the following into two and a half days includes a teddy bear museum, the columnar joing (I have no idea), Mt. Sanbang, the Japanese Cedar Forest, Seongeup Folk Village, the coastal area, Seongsang Sunrising Peak, the Female Diver Museum, Ilchool Land (?), the Maze Park, and Jeju Stone Culture Park. Dang, I'm exhausted just typing it. But count it as THGTMNaAtAbM #9.

In fact, so many little things are going well that I don't feel pressue to come up with a snappy ending to this entry. I guess that's THGTMNaAtAbM #10.