Sun Devil

By the time I went back to school on Monday it felt like a lot had changed from the time I was there before spring break.
After spending last week in Arizona, I flew out on Thursday the 8th. I had a quick stop in Dallas that turned into a much longer stop. I got to my gate just as the plane was boarding. Everyone was in their seats and we were just about ready to go when the pilot announced that we had a flat tire. We all had to get off and it was supposed to take about an hour, but then the maintenance people didn't show up and it turned into over three hours. Malachy's grandma died last week, so he was in Dallas for her funeral, so I decided to talk to the gate agent and see if I could just stay in Dallas and fly back to Cleveland with him on Saturday. At first they said no, but then after the delay kept dragging on, they changed their mind.
I hopped in a taxi and met his whole family at a cool outdoor restaurant in Fort Worth. I'd only been to Texas once before when I went on a Brass Choir recruitment trip during my sophomore year. I kept trying to find something "Texas-y" to take a picture of, but it really looks a lot more east coast like than Arizona does. I did get to see Malachy's houses and schools and meet his brother and sister and nephews for the first time though, so that was nice.
We got back on Saturday afternoon pretty uneventfully and break wrapped up on Sunday with an OCMEA (the music ed organization) master class at BW. They invited me and Val and a couple other BW music ed graduates from the last ten years to come in be the panel for questions about what teaching life is like. At the end three sophomore girls came up to me and asked if they could come in and see my class which was cute. It's so weird that next year will be the last year there's anyone at BW that I went to college with.
The big news of this week is that Malachy is going to do his doctorate at Arizona State. It's been such a tough decision, but I think it's the overall best deal and that he'll have a good experience there. I have an interview for a job out there on Tuesday. I have kind of conflicting feelings about possibly leaving Cleveland so quickly. It would be nice to be around my family and friends out there, but when Malachy was taking auditions I just really didn't think he would end up at ASU, so I wasn't really planning on going anywhere next year. The job market is pretty rough in Arizona right now because the state is having a lot of financial issues and the area is not growing like it was a few years ago, so we'll see what happens...