Butterflies

Although I could easily dedicate a full post to butterflies, those majestic creatures that inspire us all to soar in the direction of our dreams, this post is not about them. This post is about the butterflies in my stomach. As the winter session of my senior year draws to a close, I am now faced with what four years ago seemed so far away and insignificant, but now looms over me as towering obstacle: Student Teaching. Next Monday will begin 14 weeks of living the life of a teacher, minus the pay. Since I have never had much experience in front of a class I have always envisioned my student teaching to be a make or break experience. As anyone who knows me knows, I will have some major obstacles to conquer in order to become a good teacher, such as talking. Besides the decidedly difficult task of talking there are numerous other things I will most likely have difficulty with such as: discipline, spelling, hiding my dyslexia, reading aloud, writing on the board, not randomly meowing, not laughing at inappropriate jokes that the students make, remembering names, remembering anything that I learned in college, not cursing or using offensive language, using/teaching correct grammar, sentence structure, and providing a direct definition for irony. And that is why I am nervous to begin my student teaching. The best case scenario that I can imagine is that I get all these things out of the way the first week or two, and then I become comfortable enough to actually enjoy student teaching (the worst case scenario is that I fail at everything). I am truly excited though about the people that I will be working with for the next semester. I met most of my co-workers the other day and they seemed like a really good and helpful group.

Le Tour de Dyslexia: Hells Yeah

Ok, by now I assume everyone who would be reading this is aware of the not so successful and slightly embarrassing end to the tour. I don't, though, intend on dedicating a whole post to excusing our decisions and attempting to convince the reader that they would have made the same decisions had they been in our predicament.

I am now almost three months removed from the tour as well as the excitement, the pain, the thrill, and the disappointment; all of which I can no longer feel but only remember. Needless to say, I will never again truly exist in the moments of that tour, but I will forever have it as a memory. What specifically, though, will I remember about it? I will remember the anxiety, the excitement, the freedom, and the potential felt as we took our first few pedals out of the neighborhood, out of Delaware, and eventually out of the known. I will remember how great it felt when everything was going right, our bodies were fresh, and the tour played its planned role as an escape from the riggers and tedium of a life stuck in a daily routine. I will also remember the unexpected: the rain, the flat tires, the ruined tires, how long it actually takes to ride a bike with 40 pounds of gear on it 80 miles, and the hills that when only on a map didn't shout the obvious, "We are big, we are many, and we will destroy you!"

Was the tour as I imagined it would be? Absolutely not. It was far more difficult, stressful, and trying than I ever could have imagined, but in turn, it was far more beautiful, awful (solemnly impressive; inspiring awe), and fulfilling than I ever could have imagined.

Would I ever attempt another tour? Hells Yeah! Although this tour was planned to be the end-all be-all of tours, it turned out to simply be a learning experience, and learn I did. Hopefully with my newly gained knowledge I can avoid some of the more simple disasters of this previous tour. For instance I am now aware of every single way to pop a tire tube and can easily avoid most of them in the future. I also learned to expect the unexpected: there will be wrong turns, there will be five flat tires in two hours instead of the very reasonable one flat tire, there will be monster hills, and there will even be monster hills in heavy rain.

Will I ever go on another tour? Who knows? Right now with the start up of my final year of school I will, once again, be immersed in the daily routine. That makes my, most likely, next breath of freedom not until summer. But then what? At that point in my life I will, for the first time, no longer have an expected path to follow. I will be free to do as I please.

As I proofread this post I am struck by a, now all to obvious, parallel between the tour and my future. Recently, I have been experiencing sentiments that could be referred to as a "quarter life crisis", which mostly revolve around the question "What the hell am I going to do with my life after college?" I still do not know what I am going to do, but I do know what to expect. At first it will most likely be filled with a sense of anxiety, excitement, freedom, and potential as I venture out into the unknown. I know there will be good times and there will be bad times. There will be obstacles and there will be beauty. And without a doubt there will be the unexpected. There will be wrong turns and there will be seemingly unbearable setbacks, yet not all of the unforeseen is bad. Around every turn and atop every hill there will be new people, places, and experiences. There will be potential and there will be growth. Will I always succeed? No. Will I take in the journey and have a good time? Hells yeah.

Le Tour de Dyslexia: The Send-Off

Oh man, long time no post. My lack of presence on my blog for the past few weeks has been due to two things: no new developments of the tour, and huge amount of school work. The past three days have been full of planning and preparation. Out of those three days came some good news and some bad news. Ok so for the bad news, because of unforeseen work conflicts, Lexi will only be taking part in the first two days of the tour at which point she will take a small detour to her New Jersey home. The other bad news is that the direction of our tour has changed drastically and no will no longer take along the east coast. That brings me to the good news though. We finally have a route and I am pretty excited about it!

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The whole thing should take 12 days and will take us through the Delaware Water Gap, around and through the Catskills, and finally through the Amish Country of Pennsylvania. The daily average needed to complete the tour is not that much, only around 55, so we will be able to spend some quality time at the cooler locations.

We are leaving early Monday (tomorrow) morning and will be back for my boy Alex Gambogi's Grad party. I don't know if I will be able to get my hands on a computer while we are gone for updates but if I do I'll post them. Dan will be taking tons of sick pictures that I put up when we get back as evidence of us actually going on the tour. This will probably be my last post before the trip, so goodbye and remember that I love you.

Hugs and Kisses,

Nick

Le Tour de Dyslexia: To a Mouse Update

It looks like an out-n-back tour is inevitable. Train won't check bikes, Buses stink, and shipping our bikes back is to expensive.

Le Tour de Dyslexia: To a Mouse

"The best-laid schemes o' mice and an' men
Gang aft a-gley"

I was reminded of these famous lines from Robert Burns' poem To a Mouse when our plans for the tour recently went "a-gley" or as sometimes said, "awry". Today we (Lexi and I) began to look into buying the train tickets from Portland to Wilmington. We first learned that we would have to box our bikes in order to check them as luggage, a hassle that we were not too thrilled with. Upon calling Amtrak a second time we would receive even worse news. Apparently, even if we did box our bikes, it would be useless because Amtrak does not even offer checking luggage from Boston to Wilmington, meaning there would be know way to get our bikes back with us on a train. So now what? There are not too many other options, and I do not actually know what we are going to do yet. I think the next best option is to take a bus. I never really thought I would ever take a Greyhound bus for long distance transportation. Usually only runaways take busses to get somewhere. The good thing about taking a bus would be that it is a lot cheaper. Besides that I do not really know of any other options except making the tour a loop, which is not that desireable of an option. Oh well, trains arn't really all that cool anyway.

Lord Byron

Lord Byron was the last of the canonized Romantic poets. He was the first "rockstar" of poetry as well as a lady's man. I am supposed to be writing a paper about him right now but for some reason I would rather blog about him. His words and works were poignant and witty, making him a very quotable person. Here are some of his more humorous quotes:

• Absence - that common cure of love.
• I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.
• Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication.
• (In regards to the crude language that he used in one of his writings & "tooled" means to have sex) It may be bawdy, but is it not good English? It may be profligate, but is it not life, is it not the thing? Could any man have written it who has not lived in the world? and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a Gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? on a table? and under it?
• I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

Le Tour de Dyslexia: Test Pack

This past weekend I had some free time (not true free time, but free time that was made when I decided to not start work that I should) and so I decided I would test pack my bike. I got my packing list out, made my bed, which is slightly relevant, and began to get all of my gear laid out. First, I neatly organized everything on my bed so that I could see what I was actually bringing and so that I could take a sweet picture for everyone to see (see really sweet picture below).


That picture has almost everything that I had on the list in it. The only thing that it is missing is a few things that I still need to buy. Anyway, after I laid out all of my gear I began to pack it into my panniers and handlebar bag. Everything ended up fitting real easily and I actually have significant extra room. I tried to weigh all of my bags to see how much they were but the only scale in the house was very wrong, unless I got real fat. I would like my load to be somewhere around 30-35 pounds total. After my failed attempt to weigh everything, I continued to pack everything onto my bike for the first time and see how it would ride fully loaded. I got scared when the bike began to tip very easily as I was walking it to the road but as soon as I got on it and got it into motion, it became a lot easier to control. The only problem was that my feet were hitting my panniers every time they came around, so I had to adjust the panniers to sit further back in the bike. We are now only 20-21 days away from the trip. I just got word that it will most likely have to be pushed back an extra day. We still have to be back by the 13th though so that means we will have to put the same amount of miles into less days. I am not too daunted by that because Dan and I went for a 26 mile ride on Saturday and we felt really good, even though we will be doing three times that amount on the tour. That's about all I have to say right now. The following pictures are of my bike fully loaded, looking sweet.

And