Luna's Baublebilities

May did not see a lot of postings because I have been consumed by other projects. I am about to branch out and start selling textile and jewelry supplies over at Etsy this month and we are trying to put in a bigger, better garden.

The garden has been very labor intensive. My husband is regaining the buff shoulders and forearms of his youth and I am feeling every second of my age in my lower back. A rather sad combination. We are putting in Biointensive double dug garden beds here in Fort Jackson. I recently ordered a book titled How to Grow More Vegetable and Fruits (and etc...) after doing some research on Mother Earth News' website about more efficient gardening styles. Considering that Fort Jackson has only about 10 inches of topsoil before you hit an 8 inch clay layer and then bedrock, we thought that a raised bed system might allow us to actually grow carrots and beets for a change. We are hoping that this year's garden will yield some serious food storage for us as the cost of living continues to skyrocket and Bryan's job is ending this month.

Which brings me to the next piece of news. Bryan will not have a job next year - at least not in the traditional middle aged father of two sort of sense. On Tuesday his supervisor told him that BOCES was giving him two options - take a position in Gouverneur (55 miles from our home on the other side of some of the worst winter driving conditions in the county) or go back to Job Coaching. This is the most hideously insulting offer they could have made.

Bryan started out Job Coaching and enjoyed some aspects of it, mostly working with the few sweet kids he was supervising. Job Coaching is a para-professional position which involves supervising handicapped students and adults at their job sites. Job Coaches barely make minimum wage and are often viewed rather as pee-ons by administrators and employers & other employees at the various job sites they have to attend. Often the Job Coaches end up doing much of the work that their students are supposed to do and actually make less money than the students! It is a difficult and thankless job and the people who stick with it are truly saints. Or desperate. Or both.

The administration really wanted to force him to take the Gouverneur position because it requires a teacher who is dual certified in Special Education and Secondary Social Studies. Bryan is the only person on their payroll right now who has both. It does not matter to them that he would have to travel at least two hours a day, leaving home at 5:30 am in the wintertime and spend almost half his monthly salary on gas to get to work. Putting him in that position would have saved them from having to search for candidates and go through the hiring process. They will probably hire someone who has one of the needed certifications and make that person jump through multiple bureaucratic "provisional certification" hoops until they finish coursework and testing to qualify for "Professional Certification" in the missing area. That is an expensive pain in the bum - thank you NCLB & NYS Dept. of Education.

Luckily, Bry has been contemplating going back to school to get his counseling license for several years now and had finally decided on Sunday that he definitely wants to do that soon. This insultingly impossible offer from BOCES makes it easier to walk away from the stability of having a traditional Education job. Now we just need to figure out how to get him into the program he wants quickly, how to pay for it and how to pay our bills for the next two years as he finishes school!

Well - We've been there before and lived through it. We can do it again.

I really didn't intend for this post to turn into a rant against heartless administrators.

I was going to say YAY! for me because my Bamboo scarf is currently being featured in a treasury titled Fabulous Fringe at Etsy. Check it out - there are lots of gorgeous things there. Buy something from my Etsy shop while you are there. We're going to need the cash! LOL!

Off to photograph some recent work (including what little I've done on May's TIF challenge), dye some silk and get some stuff ready for my new Etsy store - hoping open by June 20th.