The meeting is now in order

I had an interesting night last night. I am currently teaching at a middle school, filling in for a teacher taking a sabbatical. This semester I will complete two classes and then after the necessary paperwork, I will be certified as a professional school counselor. I stayed at the school late, making phone calls to parents and was home for only a few minutes before remembering that there was a meeting with my city council representative starting in thirty minutes. I grabbed some food and ran out the door to the meeting. Getting involved in city politics is a little strange for me, since I have never seen myself as a political person. Okay not that much of one, but I guess we all are to a certain degree since we have opinions. The older people get, the more they think people are interested in what they have to say. It seems that the opposite might be true, which is unfortunate for the younger generations. Of course keep in mind that wanting to do things the same way because they have always been done that way is not a very logical train of thought when things are not going well. There were about twelve people at the meeting and also the city council rep. and a candidate for the state house. I was by far the youngest person there, but I am used to that I guess. The main problem with my city is that problems have been talked about, but nothing has really been done to implement solutions. The mayor seems to like to smile and wave, being a great face for the city, while things are not working around him. He isn't really doing his job and is putting the responsibility on other people. Pointing fingers is tacky and doesn't get things done, so I won't start. I don't know these people, all I know is what I see happening and not happening in the city. I just want recycling bins to be made available to the citizens at no charge and for my trash to get picked up on the day it's supposed to get taken from me, so the raccoons don't set up a home within my can. I guess this could get interesting.

Pandora internet radio is something my wife has turned me on to and now I am flooding myself with even more music. It is so much better than Launchcast from Yahoo! in that you can make several stations so that you can skip songs until you reach your limit on one, and then switch to another one each time you run out of skips. Initially, you pick a song or an artist and then the program actually matches other music by different means to what you picked, supposedly by comparing bars of music against each other. My Neil Finn and Sting stations have been great so far.

We have been doing planning for the London trip coming up in April and the cross-country road trip which will be taking place in June. Lots of places to see, people to meet, and things to write about...who knows how many books I could milk out of it.