UPDATE THIS BLOGDIGGITY SON!

This is the house we are currently "camping" in until we officially close on the house below which we are buying. We sleep on a camping mat with sleeping bags as our blankets. Our clothes are in duffel bags, or better yet, scattered around the floor.
Our new house. It was built in 1896 and has loads of charm.

Camping with Tracy's parents while house hunting at the New.

That's me climbing out of Summersville Lake on the overhanging cliffs that surround it. This lake is only 20 minutes from our new house.

Kayaking Saranac Lake. We are about 5 miles into our journey and just saw a row of baby ducks following their mommy. Little did we know that our serene trip was about to turn epic when the sky unleashed the fury of 50 mile an hour winds and waves that drenched us completely. I was loving every minute of it.

This is Tracy following the 2nd pitch of a route in the Adirondacks that we did together. It was a bit scary because this pitch traversed a good bit and didn't have the best of gear so if she would have fallen she would have taken a 30 foot whipper about 100 feet off the deck. Kinda spooky for her and a little nerve racking for me as well. She got through it ok and we finished the pitch (which was awesome) and topped out.

Hiking up to Rooster's Comb in Keene Valley, NY

Gina (my little sister) graduated this summer from JMU.

I climbed with old man Steve this spring for a long weekend where we climbed both the Glass Menagerie at Looking Glass (probably the best big wall route on the East Coast) and the Original Route at Whitesides.

Bodhi and Roxy became best friends while we were living with Tracy's parents immediately returning from Kosovo. Roxy became a good girl learning from Bodhi and Bodhi got some of his spunk back because both Daddy, Mommy, and the young Roxy were now back in his life.

I'm alive and doing well cyber geeks and geekettes, or anyone else who reads this ramble of mine. Anyways, it has been months since I've updated so let me fill you in on a few things and bring you up to speed.

We left Kosova and spent nearly a month in Northern VA with Tracy's parents looking for jobs and trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do. Remember we didn't have a car, job, a place to live, not even a bed to our name. But we had all the outdoor gear you would ever want, :) the important stuff. After a month of staying with Tracy's folks and eating all of their food I finally found a job in the Queen City- Charlotte, NC. I reasoned that Charlotte would be a good move for us because the city is new, housing is affordable (way more than NOVAs), great climbing areas, in fact some of the best on the East Coast, are within a couple of hours of Charlotte, and the job seemed to ideal. I would be teaching 6th grade world history at an IB magnet school. OHHH, that's sounds fancy and prestigous. Just to make sure that the school was ideal and lived up to my expectations, Tracy and I took the 6 hour drive down to Charlotte to meet up with the principal and tour the school. Well, Mrs. Dee Gardner gave us the grand tour showing us the ballet dance room, the old fashioned auditorium, even the high tech media lab, aka library for you old school folks out there. We were convinced that this was the place for us. It actually sounded too good to be true. WELL IT WAS!!!!

Within an hour of my first day at school I realized that this was gonna be another tough 6 months. My students (i found this out later on the first day) were all what they labeled "open" students. Meaning that they didn't belong at the school because of their test scores, reading levels, and general behavior record was not adequate but instead were allowed by Charlotte Mecklenburg (CMS-or politcal corrupto ignorantamus as I like to call them) to join the school with the hope that they would be heavily influenced by the strong academics and moral conduct of the other half of students who actually belonged in a magnet IB school. By the way, for those who don't know, IB stands for International Bachleaureate (didn't spell that right and too lazy to look it up right now) which basically means that these students are working towards an Internation based diploma with hopes to go to an international university. The cream of the crop so to speak. HA! My kids were the cream of the crop all right, the crop which is armed robbery at 17, dealing drugs and repeat offender by 18, petty car theif by night, and southern low ballin slingin gangster by day just trying to play the game. Most of my kids (and I mean most, like maybe 10 out of 120) were just plain horrible. Obviously we could go on forever about who's fault this was. The obvious answers of absentee dad, cracked out mama, older brother who is a bad influence, no place to live, no money, the white man, etc. but the point is that they were not fit for a public school environment and I had to deal with them on a daily basis. Spitting, stealing, fighting, cursing, and everything else you can think of was par for the course. Everyone of the teachers outside in the trailers with me was overly stressed out. We were a band of red eyed, red faced, constantly sick, frizzled hair, heart, and mind trying to, uh, make a difference. RIGHT! We had lost motivation and nothing was going to bring it back .

The coping mechanisms of my fellow teachers were hilarious at times, as I'm sure mine were to them. We had Mr. King who treated his job as a Math teacher as a prison warden would. He issued garbage detail duty to kids during lunch, held a cardio boot camp during recess for his most horrible students, and tried at all cost to keep his kids behaved and put on the facade that he in fact had these kids in control. The last week of school he was forced to leave early because of an incident in which he got into a student's face screaming at her. Nuff said. Then we have Mrs. Peterson who did her best, like me, but for all her effort was barely hanging on. Teachers we weren't. Behavior monitors, or better yet, guards we were. Then we had Mr. Carter who cared deeply about these kids but literally let his kids run all over him and his classroom. At the end of the day Mr. Carter's room looked like a bomb went off in it. It was truly unbelievable.

So... nuff said about my shitty Charlotte teaching job. At the end of the school year I told my principal I wouldn't return. She didn't care this was the norm for this school to turn over teachers every year, plus because of budget cuts I wasn't going to get a renewed contract anyway. Win, win I guess. Win for me for sure. Oh, I forgot to tell you that during this time Tracy was hired to teach at another middle school in Charlotte, but not a "prestigous" school like mine. Well, to make a long story short, Tracy hated her job. She came home in tears at least once a week and from what I saw in her it seemed as if her spirit had been broken. I tried to convince her to quit the job and that we could find a way to make it work but she wouldn't. She stuck it out like me. By the end of the summer we were fried and we were in desperate need of a good vacation.

But before I tell you about my vacation, I need to mention the good things about Charlotte. I met some new friends who rejuvenated my love of mountain biking. Thanks Ryan, Thomas, and Lance for getting me back into biking. Ryan and i sure had some fun, yet scary as hell for me, rides in Pisgah. Ryan can ride downhill at a speed that scares teh living shit out of me so just trying to follow him his a task in itself. He and the other guys influenced me to sign up for my very first mountain bike race, the Shenandoah 100, a 100 miles of backcounty trail riding with 14,000 feet of elevation gain and nearly as much descent.

So about our vacation. We left for the Adirondacks in upstate New York for some mountainization. We climbed at Spiders Web, the Beer Walls, Pitch off Chimney, and Chapel Pond. We hiked up to peaks like Roosters Comb and the Gothics, we paddled Saranac Lake, we ate the world's heaviest pizza in Lake Placid, and we met Pat and Mike at camp and laughed at their crazy noob stories where, "Man, we should have DIED today" started their conversation. They were great and I hope we get the chance to see them again.

While we were at the Daks (that's what cool people call them) we applied for teaching jobs in Fayette county, WV -home of the New River Gorge and best climbing area on the East Coast. When we returned to Charlotte we continued to look for jobs, interview, and figure out things as far as career goes. After many internet searches, interview in Brevard, cover letter and resumes sent, and numerous trips to Fayetteville to hound the Board of Education for jobs we luckily were both hired in Fayetteville. We currently are about to move into our first house (which is awesome) and we live in a climber's dream town. So things are generally good. Now only if get my students to care about learning and things would be awesome.