Cheers to Tennis (in February)

I am drinking some celebratory beer tonight for several reasons:

1) we got through a carnival of a workshop day in school . . . there were twenty teachers from area schools, various administrators and the associate director of the Rutgers Writing Program, all present to watch me and my colleagues teach the Rutgers Writing course; things went off without a hitch, partly thanks to our excellent and competent department chair and my wonderful teammates Brady and Strachan but mainly due to my charm and good-looks . . . a dozen adults sat in one of my classes and then one of my students endured an essay conference with ten random people watching; it was a wild and busy day made more interesting by the threat of a student walk-out and the news vans and helicopter hovering on the periphery of our school because our township decided to put armed police in every building, fueling a media frenzy (I should also note that on Monday-- President's Day-- after playing some tennis with the kids at my school, as I was driving across the empty parking lot . . . as it was a day off from school, a beautiful blonde woman flagged down my van, and so-- being a male-- I stopped to investigate and found that she was just as pretty I surmised, and that's when I noticed the CBS jacket and the microphone . . . I declined to make an official comment but I did chat with her for a while, just to look at her thick lustrous hair, pearly white teeth, and TV quality facial symmetry, I think her name is Natalie Duddridge)

2) despite some grim blood test results, our dog is still eating, walking about, and wagging his tail;

3) though my foot hurts, I taped it up and was able to compete a bit, but the beer might alleviate some of the pain;

4) I'm pretty sure my kids and I played the most outdoor tennis by a central Jersey family in February ever, in the history of planet . . . I played with my buddy Cob after school, Alex played his buddy Liam, then Alex played my brother, then I went out and hit with Ian under the lights, despite the fact that my foot hurt, because I know we won't get this chance again anytime soon.