Almost Thanksgiving

My favorite day of the year is only three days away.  I'm making brussels sprouts (tripling the recipe below because I love them so much).  Thanksgiving combines my two favorite things on the planet: food and family.  The addition of football into the mix certainly doesn't hurt.  Happy almost Thanksgiving; I wish more people had as much to be thankful for as I do.

My brussels sprouts recipe:
-1 pound brussels sprouts, washed, trimmed, and halved at the stem
-4 ounces pancetta, chopped
-1-2 shallots, chopped
-2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
-few tbs of olive oil
-salt and pepper
-pinch nutmeg

Preheat oven to 425 degrees.  Cook shallots and garlic in a bit of olive oil for 2 minutes.  Add pancetta and a bit more oil and stir occasionally until cooked through.  Add a bit of nutmeg.  Blanch the sprouts for 2 minutes (timed carefully, and then drained and rinsed in cold water).  Add the sprouts to the pan with pancetta and shallots and stir all together. Transfer to baking dish and roast in the oven until the leaves begin to blacken and the pancetta is crispy, 20-30 minutes.

YUM.  If you don't eat pork use turkey bacon, they come out almost as good. Don't fall prey to the nonsense myth that Brussels sprouts are gross, because they're great.

Eight

As of today, Mike and I have been together for eight years.  That's two away from a decade, and amounts of one third of my life so far.  Pretty nuts.  Eight November 18th's have now come and gone and I still think celebrating anniversaries is dumb unless you're married.  I mean really, to commemorate the awkwardness of a high school conversation a la Zach Morris and Kelly Kapowski?  Dumb.  ("Wanna go steady" was not, thankfully, the exact wording that was used.) What's certainly not dumb is everything that has happened since.  Or that in this eighth year we'll be getting married.  I still couldn't care less about the date or the anniversary, but eight is going to be a pretty awesome number.

The way I see it...

When you love your job, you love your life.  Ten years ago if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I probably would change my answer every couple of hours, or simply say, "no clue."  I'm amazed daily by how happy I am at work, and how much better I can cope with craziness than I could two years ago.  How does someone like me, with great academic promise but little direction, find their vocation immediately after finishing college?  No clue.

Here's the scary part though; I realize that I will probably never feel like a great teacher, and that I will fail on a daily basis as long as I remain in the profession.  I also realize that it's actually this exact sentiment that's one component of good teaching, but I'm not the type to be able to sustain it for an entire career.  I'm not that resilient (and quite frankly I don't think many people are that resilient...hence the surplus of bad teachers who are allowed to slip by in their laziness or lack of work ethic).  Ten more years I can probably do...and try to do well.  But twenty or thirty or, holy cannoli, forty...no way.  The whole career change thing, years in the future though it may be, is daunting.

I frequently refer to teaching as my vocation, rather than my profession, because it feels like the only thing I can even consider doing right now.  I can only hope that when the time comes to put down the chalk, I'll find something else to love.  Because really...when you love your job, you can't help but love your life.