It’s been a while. I’ve been busy and when I have had time to sit down and write, somehow I find my mind drifting to other things with nothing left to trickle from my fingertips. But Thursday was the first really gorgeous day of the year, and it was a day that made me feel like just about anything was possible, so here I am.

The last month has been full of changes. I slowly quit just about all of my writing gigs and downright abandoned this space here for far too long. I was sad to leave MamaPop; so many current and former writers are truly my blogging tribe, but I think the door is always open there should I determine I need more weekly time with the Real Housewives. I’m also cutting back on my shifts at the kitchen shop; I absolutely love working there and being around people who are really into food, so I want to stay on as long as I can. I just don’t have as much time, especially during the day, any more.

The tiny flicker of our school is starting to catch fire. We have a building, and we have an office up and running. We have actual students enrolled. Families believe in what we’re doing enough that they’re willing to trust us with their child’s education. We’re hiring teachers–exciting, talented, passionate teachers. And, most importantly, we have a neighborhood.

Friends who’ve been close to this process know I was in love with a building in Tower Grove South that didn’t work out for us due to circumstances beyond our control. Our Plan B was a temporary fix; an old Lutheran school sitting empty just two blocks north of Arsenal on the corner of Pestalozzi and South Grand. We can stay here for two years; hopefully we’ll outgrow it after that, and we’ll move to our permanent home. But I can already say with certainty that I hope we move somewhere close. We’re so lucky to be a part of the South Grand neighborhood.

We know our student population is going to be incredibly diverse. Our neighborhood is mixed-income and pocketed with thriving immigrant communities: Bosnian, Hispanic, Nepalese, Bhutanese, and Vietnamese, to name a few. Our office window overlooks Tower Grove Park. Within walking distance is sushi, Vietnamese, Thai, Afghan, Mediterranean, a diner, Italian, and Middle Eastern restaurants. There is a public library six blocks away. Health clinics. Churches. International markets. A bookstore. We are part of a real, thriving, diverse community.

I keep saying “we”, because I’ve accepted a position with our school. Two weeks ago, I started working on a contract basis with the school. I have a desk and keys to the building. My “stuff” is there: my files and professional books and such. As of last Thursday’s  board meeting, I am officially working as the Director of Curriculum and Instruction of South City Prep. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to get to continue the work I’ve been doing for over a year, but with an actual paycheck. Since then, I’ve spent a ton of time doing staffing. Processing resumes and moving forward (or not) through the hiring process is really time-intensive. We’ve had a very wide pool–no surprise due to the economy and the fact that almost every district is laying off teachers–but that pool has been much deeper than I initially thought it would be. I’ve talked to so many amazing people I would be privileged to work with.

Speaking of community, I am humbled by the outpouring of support we’ve had from our friends and family and even strangers who are just behind what we’re trying to do. Those aren’t just words. Our trivia night, which is the first fundraiser we’ve done, sold out in less than two weeks–without us even needing to put out the flier that Iron Stef designed for us. We’re at capacity for the venue. Almost all of our needs for the event have been graciously donated by friends, including so much from the food and restaurant industry here in town. Someone donated all staff and office furniture for the school. Another person donated tons of copies of Office. Organizations have approached us to provide our after-school and school break child care/enrichment needs at no cost. Over a dozen people came and canvassed businesses for us on a Sunday, an event that Jaelithe organized. My good friend Meghan has designed all our promotional materials. Other friends have graciously donated their time for whatever we need. Literally, multiple friends have said “I’m broke, but put me to work”. Friends volunteered to paint classrooms after construction. Another friend volunteered to paint a giant crest for our entryway. A work colleague wants to teach our kids how to cook and garden. All of our PR has been donated by Nick Sargent at Standing Partnership, who has taken us on as a pro-bono client. It’s just so fucking fantastic to have people believe in what we are doing enough to contribute, and my faith in humanity has been restored by the generosity of St Louisians.

Listen, I know this post makes me sound like I’ve turned downright optimistic. Where’s the outraged, pissy, sarcastic KBO of yore? Oh, she’s still here. Trust me. And my “boss” is down with the B-L-O-G because he’s also down with the Constitution. But I feel good. I feel like this is what I’m supposed to be doing right now. I feel like I did “before” depression. So in the face of asshole politicians kicking democracy in the nuts here and abroad, I’m choosing to celebrate the democracy we’re exercising by starting this badly-needed school. I’m sure I’ll rail against the patriarchy, evil corporations, religious zealots, and pretty much everyone else trying to keep the middle and working classes down again soon, but for now, I feel good.

I’m taking a J-Term class, the second-to-last elective I have in my program.  It’s on Paulo Freire, possibly the most important critical pedagogue who ever lived. My professor is an expert on him, and he’s incredibly intelligent. This means his classes are quite heavy on reading and theory–well over 800 pages for the month-long course. This also means I’ll be traveling north for two weekends this month.

We also have a grant application due at the end of the month for desperately-needed pre-operation money for the charter school, which we’ll need to have done well before that in order to revise after receiving appropriate feedback. We’re going to New Orleans for three days to visit high-performing charter schools.

I’m also writing five paid blogs posts per week and working at Kitchen Conservatory.

In short: I’m stressed.

I write this because this is my way of telling everyone I know “no”. I won’t be going out except for a very few pre-scheduled activities. I can’t do lunch. I can’t do coffee. I can’t grab a drink. If it’s not on my calendar as of right this second, it’s not happening. I’m not saying this to act self-important or snobby. I’m doing this because I have to put my head down and get shit done, and I can’t apologize for it. I just have to do it.

So I’ll probably be even more scarce around here than usual. I’ll be scarce everywhere except my couch, the library, and whatever coffee shop in which I’m working. But I still love you. I still love this space. But IS BIDNESS TIMEZ NAO. And I literally don’t have time to have a Jessie Spano-esque breakdown.

Send coffee. And cheese. See you in February.

1. The satisfaction that comes from checking everything off on one’s to-do list.

2. Our hardy little aloe plant, Malcolm, that survived Neko’s puppyhood with new growth all over.

3. The genius of this scene in Freaks and Geeks, from the episode where Bill’s (Martin Starr) mom (Claudia Christian) starts dating his gym teacher (Biff from Back to the Future).

4. My cast iron skillet, which is seasoned so well I’m proud every time it easily wipes clean.

5. A small chocolate flourless torte made by Kelly at work last night. Rich and velvety and slightly woody from rosemary ganache. Perfect late-night snack after work.

1. The work is straightforward. There is a list of things to do. I do them. While wearing Crocs.
2. I get to be around food and kitchen supplies. It’s hard not to ogle various pieces of Le Creuset and other tools I desperately NEED to achieve culinary greatness in my own home.
3. This is complicated by the fact that I get a nice discount. This is further complicated by the fact that Chris is adamant that I quit accumulating tools in the kitchen until we have more space.
4. I get to eat food. Generally, we get to eat whatever is being cooked in either kitchen classroom. During my first shift, I ate cheddar soup, stuffed peppers, cauliflower, shrimp and crab, apple pie, and four different pastas. I anticipate gaining back all the weight I lost in the last six months. We also get to take home leftovers.
5. We can take classes we’re not working for free. Which, um, AWESOME. Yes, I would like to learn how to butcher a pig.
6. I get to meet awesome chefs. Many chefs in St Louis teach classes here, and I will get to learn from them while helping them, as well as work with my many friends who teach classes here.

Yeah, I KNOW. It’s a pretty sweet deal, until someone my friends and I have offended comes in and uses every dish in both kitchens just to teach me a lesson about destroying businesses by tweeting about subpar food. The only downside is that most classes are on nights and weekends, which means less time with Chris, since he’s got work and school and it feels like he’s never home. I’m working tonight, he’s got his fake football draft all day tomorrow, I work Monday night, he’s got class Tuesday night, etc, etc. We’re like two ships passing in the night. <tear> I’m also waiting to hear back about another gig, so I might just be a working machine.

Anyway, I hope y’all get to enjoy gorgeous weather over the weekend. I’ll be heading to the Festival of Nations to get me some more tasty vittles. Because I love to eat.

It was a leetle tight pretty much everywhere and the girls decided they wanted to be part of the interview, too, but luckily I had a modest cardigan to keep things classy. Whether it was my spectacular ability to resemble sausage casing or just the sheer awesomeness of both our plan and interview, we must have done something right, because South City Prep just got its first funding. 30K, y’all.

I’m thinking I should change my kickball at-bat song back to this (NSFW).

I was disappointed to find out that our grants don’t come as giant checks. Would it kill them to make a giant check?

Right now, we are really, really close to finishing the document we’ll submit to the Mayor’s Office, DESE, and for the second planning grant worth a cool $220K. This involves creating a budget, outlining our vision for the school, preliminary curriculum planning, picking methods of assessment, designing a professional development framework, and various other “big picture” ideas. Once that document is submitted, we’ll start putting that plan into action. We’ll spend part of our first grant visiting model urban charter schools in Chicago, Houston, and Boston. We’ll start looking for additional board members and a facility, establish relationships with community members, continue refining our curriculum, and start a marketing campaign to recruit both students and teachers. While we do that, our plan slowly quits being just that and starts being real, meaning we start hammering out the nitty gritty of schooling 200 tweens in a way that guarantees that every single last student graduates on time and heads towards college.

I’m scared fucking shitless.  I mean, thinking about it keeps me up at night, even though we won’t open for over a year. I keep having random, relatively-unimportant-for-where-we-are thoughts, like “Oh, all our kids have to get library cards.  And watches,” or “We need walkie-talkies.” It’s well and good to have a plan, but then we actually have to make it happen. I mean, think of all the things that have to happen to make our dream a successful reality.  We’ve got to find amazing teachers, they have to want to work their asses off, and we have to do everything we can to support them so they want to continue working at our school.. In addition to stuff like, oh, finding a building and getting it to be the environment we need for our kids, we’ve got to create and execute a curriculum that will get all kids on grade level in reading and math by the time they enter high school, plus accommodate special needs students, plus challenge gifted students, plus engaged disengaged students. That’s the bare minimum our curriculum must do. Plus, we’ve got to make it culturally relevant. Plus we have to train teachers to teach in a rigorous, culturally-relevant way. Plus, we have to teach critical thinking skills. And cooperation skills. And academic skills. And media literacy skills. We have to identify and purchase curriculum in the areas where it is appropriate. We have to find a food provider for breakfast and lunch. We have to identify and cultivate relationships with community groups that can help support our mission. We have to reach out to families to forget positive relationships before the school opens. We’ve got to recruit enough students to make the school fiscally viable. We have to figure out what kind of technology we need and how we’ll maintain it. We need to have focus groups with families to determine how our school can serve their children. We need to find a way to bring social service agencies into our school to provide services for our students, like vision testing, hearing testing, basic health care, and translation services for non-English speaking families. We have to expand our board. We have to fundraise. We have to create a long-term development plan.  We have to figure out an information management system. We have to figure out how to get kids to school on time. We have to plan bus routes. We have to plan for inclement weather. We have to figure out how many teachers we can afford and how big classes will be because of that. We have to order furniture. We have to pick uniforms and uniform suppliers. We have to figure out how students who can’t afford them will get uniforms. I mean, THE NEVERENDING LIST GOES ON and it gives me insomnia. Dude.

Guess I better get back to work.

When I left my job helping unqualified people become underwhelming teachers (I KID, at least five of them were competent. Ashley, you’re one of them), I went to work with a friend, helping her with the small business she owned. When I started working with her, we set a three-month trial period, at the end of which either of us could withdraw from the arrangement, no hard feelings.  Unfortunately, due to a really crappy economy, she really couldn’t afford to keep me after three and a half months, which I expected. Therefore, as of Friday, I have no substantive incoming coming in regularly.

Which kind of sucks.

The Good News:

I have a fallback: I can teach. However, one generally doesn’t find teaching jobs in February, at least not for current employment. If I decide to go back into the classroom, overwhelming odds are it won’t be until August.

I was reading about this new film Lemonade, about advertising professionals out of work due to the shiteous economy, and how many viewed unemployment as an opportunity to pursue real creative projects. And I thought to myself, I’ve many times dreamt about various aspirations that I continually postponed to “when I have time”.

And now I have time. It’s about all the currency I have right now.

I’m still in school; two classes this semester, as well as snail-like inching towards the start of my dissertation process. This will be my Project #1, my main focus. But in the last two months or so, several opportunities have kind of floated my way that are leading to me inevitably taking tangible steps to make some of my  until-now only hypothetical plans come to fruition.

First, my friends introduced me to their neighbor, who is also in education and was in the beginning stages of starting a charter school here in St Louis.  He and I met for coffee, talked shop, and I decided to join his small team of individuals committed to founding a college preparatory middle/high charter school here in South City. We’ve been busy thinking, planning, and writing applications for both grants and various steps of the approval process. In just a few weeks of work, I’ve already learned so much about how the charter school process works and exactly what goes into each aspect of starting an institution.

I have ideological issues with charter schools, namely that they take resources away from public schools and also allow public officials to ignore the desperate need for public school improvement in cities just like St Louis. Unfortunately, there seems to be no end in sight to the problems plaguing the SLPS, not to mention the fact that their elected board has no power, and kids need good schools now, so this is why I decided to become involved in the project. So, yeah, project #2: I’m starting a school.

I was also asked to join a young professionals (snort…see introductory paragraph where I lose main source of income) board for Safe Connections, an amazing, well-established non-profit here in St Louis that provides various programs and services about and for victims of domestic violence.  We’ll be having a few happy hour-type events here in St Louis and I’ll be blogging about those events, as well as the work Safe Connections does, in the near future. Project #3.

Finally, I recently became friends with a couple our age who’ve turned their modest home into a working farmstead, complete with crops, livestock, and bees, all less than three miles from our house. Because of our shared interest, Justin from Yellow Tree Farm and I have been plotting and scheming, and we’re collaborating on a new venture. We will be putting in kitchen gardens at a few restaurants around town. We’ve got a few people we’re already working with, and we’re in the midst of planting and planning. Truth be told, Justin knows so much more than me about growing food, so I’m over the moon about how much I can learn from working with him and being around what he and Danielle have already done. Chris is excited because I won’t try to get him to talk about seeds and garden planning all the time. Win for everyone. Project #4.

And, of course, I’ll still be working on the blogs and Novice Foodie.

So while I’ll be incredibly broke, I’ll be incredibly busy doing things I’m passionate about. I’m feeling pretty lucky.

Monday started my new work situation.  Technically, it started Tuesday, because Monday was my new boss’s birthday, and when you are your own boss, you don’t work on your birthday.  Tuesday and Wednesday, I spent a good portion of the day with my new boss, working with her on learning all the new skills that come along with a new job.

What will I be doing?  I’m doing recruiting research.  This involves two main things: looking for candidates for jobs my boss is working on and looking for companies to be potential clients.  I view this as a giant internet scavenger hunt, albeit one populated by business jargon and acronyms and glittering generalities one might only find on an episode of The Apprentice.  Did I mention that my boss is awesome and we punctuated my first day working with her by going to the Royale for lunch?  I know, it’s a sweet gig.  So far, so good.

However, I fucking hate change.  I hate not being settled into a routine.  It increases my anxiety because I’m not sure what I should be doing at a given time.  Is this not a reflection of the realities of the American workplace?  Panic because I need someone else telling me what to do?  I’m sure I will adjust to THAT in about six seconds flat.  As it stands, I probably won’t be settled into a routine for a while, at least until I get over the hump of the learning curve for this job.  Then, I’ll be able to figure out how much time I have per day for dissertation work, household chores, “business” lunches with my other friends who work from home or work weird hours, new blogging projects, and judge shows on daytime TV.

Let me tell you what else has been keeping me from settling in: this untenable weather.  I haven’t seen the sun in days, and the incessant rain is keeping me from mopping my kitchen, a long overdue chore.  Why would I waste time cleaning something when my neurotic dog is just going to drag in more mud and probably poop (what’s out there that he didn’t already eat), testing my patience as he exercises his new-found freedom to go outside during the day.  Who can blame him?  In any event, the rain, mud, and clouds is getting old.  What happened to fall?  Why did we not have a fall?  And how will this impact Tour de Moose?  I’ve been looking forward to an all-day bike ride/pub crawl around the city.  Um, not when the forecast looks like this.

But honestly, even the weather can’t keep me down.  Despite the uncertaintly, I feel very free.  I can walk Asher every morning.  I can do yoga without feeling like I should be doing something else (pervasive guilt tends to ruin the benefits of yoga).  I can cook my own lunch from real food every day.  I’ll stop rubbing it in now, but I’m just so excited to be in control of my day.

If you didn’t see it already, check out this week’s Novice Foodie.  This week’s I went to Jay’s International Foods, which is always a fun time.  I mean, cock jokes, right?

Second, I promised on Friday some big news today.  That prompted e-mail from my mother threatening that if she had to hear from my blog that I was pregnant there would be hell to pay.  But no, I’m not pregnant, as anyone who saw me swilling beer at various Holly Hills establishments this weekend is probably relieved to find out.  I did, however, as of 9:12 this morning, put in my notice at work.

Didja hear me?  I QUIT MY JOB, Y’ALL.

I was fortunate enough that I have a friend who not only appreciates my big, sexy brain, but needs some help with her business (the details are intentionally cryptic; she asked that I not immediately identify her here).  She and I had casually thrown around comments about working together sometime in the future, and when this job begun to suck my soul dry, she made it clear she wasn’t speaking hypothetically.  This new job will allow me to work much more flexible hours…wait for it… FROM HOME.   I have the potential to make more money than I currently make, and while the job isn’t necessarily in a field that I’m passionate about, I know it is something I can do and do well.  I can help her make even more money than she already does and this can help me make more money.

It’s always tricky mixing business and friendship.  Fuck, I’m willing to drop a motherfucker if I get a candle party invite, ya heard?  However, she and I have been incredibly transparent with each other about our concerns.  We’re working on a trial period, at the end of which, either party can end the working relationship.  If it doesn’t work out, I’ll be able to look for a teaching job for next school year.  Hopefully it will work out, though, because a flexible job is exactly what I need to start work on my dissertation.  I’m doing (by “doing”, I mean I have a folder that has articles in it that I’ve printed out for my lit review, so take that for what it’s worth) the preliminary work right now, and my goal is to have sites selected and my proposal successfully defended by the beginning of next school year so I can collect data during that year.  A work situation like this would be ideal.

This person is a good friend of mine, and I admire her both as a person (she’s a badass) and as someone who has a wonderful work-life balance that I would like to duplicate. I’ve learned that I don’t deal well with authority (my mom just snorted and said “No shit.”) and that I need autonomy over my day.  In principle, I hate the idea of having to justify to someone else why I can’t fucking work today, because I have a life and sometimes the shit hits the fan and that life is much more pressing than any trivial thing that could come up at work.  I want to be able to work when I can, in a t-shirt and jeans, and stop that work and do yoga or walk my dog.  I’d also not to not talk to complete idiots every day who think they should be sharing their lack of knowledge with the youth of America, and this job has that perk.

I also want time to be able to work on some new blog-type projects I’ve been mulling over.  I’ve met so many fantastic people who I’d like to collaborate with, and having the time to do that would be priceless to me.

Obviously, there is risk involved, but any way I look at it, the risk is worth the potential reward.  In any event, it’s not healthy for me to stay here, and in two short weeks, I’ll be done.  Think of all the Law & Order I’ll be able to watch working from home.  The possibilities are endless.

So that’s my big news.  Please know that I am fully aware of how damn lucky I am to have this opportunity in this economy, and I’m grateful as all get-out.   Who wants to have a drinking business lunch?  I’m available starting October 11.