We made it through the first day of school. It is so much easier not being new but still exhausting. This year I'm teaching four middle school classes and one small group of third and fourth graders. The middle school classes are mixed grades, sixth through eighth. If you'd asked me two years ago what age level I'd be teaching I am pretty sure I would not have imagined it would be this age. I do like it, though. It turns out fourteen year olds are not so different than four year olds.

After school we treated ourselves to an early exit from school and a bike ride to the harbor. Many sections of the bike path are still impassable for all the trees that are down. There are crews cleaning up all over the place and all the roads I've seen have been cleared but it'll take awhile to do the paths. Picking our way through the branches reminded me of the big Halloween storm we got a few years ago in New England. After that storm Lee and I walked up the bike path in Simsbury and had to wrestling our way through tree branches and snow to get through the fallen trees. It was like that here except it's about 50 degrees warmer and many of the branches are from palm trees instead of evergreens.