Welcome, Readers!

Hello, friends! Here in my 30th year at Choate, now that I'm done with the paperwork for the end of the winter term (mostly), I'm setting off on my third sabbatical in my thirty years at the school. I'm very grateful for the time, and I intend to use it well.  During my first sabbatical, I spent most of the spring walking my children to and from school. It was pretty wonderful, and I continue not really to know what to do with my hands now that I'm not holding theirs to cross streets.

 A decade or so later, I spent just about the entire sabbatical, it seems, walking our first dachshund, Homer, and learning how to be an actor, as I started my adventure with Shakespeare that spring. I even got to wear a sword! The guy in the middle of the photo chased a thief down the street DURING A PERFORMANCE, caught him, and held him for the police without missing his entrance.

This time around, I'll be off for the next six months (as I'm not going to teach in the summer for the first time ever, it seems), and much of what I'm planning to do will revolve around writing, and I've learned over the years that I write best and most responsibly when I have a sense that I'm being read, so, that's the reason for this blog. Even if nobody reads this, it's a bit of a message in a bottle, written just in case someone stumbles onto it, and I hope it keeps me writing during the sabbatical and beyond.

There will be four threads in the blog, threads that will certainly become entangled with each other, but I'll try to keep them separate and take turns, posting every few days.

One thread, "Cooking For Lisa," will be about food and cooking and my adventures and misadventures in the kitchen, complete with photos and recipes.  This will begin on Friday night with my challah. 

A second series, "Cornered And Kicked," will follow the what happens to my 53 year-old body when I subject it to exercise and competition, ranging from simply staying in shape (or getting into shape, to put it more specifically) to the tales of the North Branford Legends, the over-50 soccer team I play for. The season begins next month. 

Thread number three will be a memoir, mostly about teaching and learning, and the fourth thread, and I hesitate to bring it up, will be a narrative one, furthering a tale that I began during a summer school class a few years ago. 

Will there be other topics? It's entirely possible. As for the title, it's a nickname that my college friends wouldn't stop using after they discovered, to their endless amusement, that if my first name had been "ear"...

Read. Enjoy. Share. Repeat.

dml