If you’ve spent any meaningful amount of time on a treadmill, hopefully you’ll get the following:

(For the record, I would never actually kick an actual kitten…)

One year ago this past Monday was the first day back from the Easter holiday, which I was able to spend with my sister and family up in Dallas. I got into my car after my last class of that fateful Monday and made the drive over to a strange, new place to discuss the possibility1 of starting over for the coming Fall. That was the day I paid my first visit to Round Rock High School.

It would be the first of a number of inflection points over the next three weeks of my journey. My visit would last for a couple of hours, and as I was getting the grand tour around the way, I remember how — with everything that led up to that moment and with everything that my mind would juggle in the weeks to come — that afternoon felt like a frozen moment in the stream of time.2

At that moment, the building that I now call “home” was little more than steel rods and concrete flats, and at that moment, changing allegiance to the Dragons would have meant no longer teaching AP Statistics.3 However, the thought of a much-needed reboot had me intrigued. Highly. intrigued.

I don’t remember much about the next couple of weeks,4 but this little, I know:

My mind see-sawed quite a bit. 5 And I didn’t get much sleep. Oh, and I was also in full-blown “pregnant-with-exam” mode.

I won’t lie: I may have had a moment or two where I’ve allowed my mind to take a glimpse at my life on the other side of those proverbial sliding doors. But in spite of the uphill climb that it has at times been, with two weeks-and-change6 to go until the big day,7 I know that I have been incredibly blessed8 with the way things have turned out.

Speaking of “pregnant-with-exam” mode, that is about where I am now. But with this being number five for me, it feels closer to “I’ve got this” and a lot less of “please put this zombie bovine out of its misery”. And that’s a good thing.

Multnomah Falls, just around the corner.

1. emphasis on the word “possibility“… nothing would be decided for another few weeks. [↩]
2. Hence the title of this post, for the very few of you gamers who will get the reference. [↩]
3. At that moment, the discussion was not for me to teach AP Stat, but for Algebra II or possibly Precal instead… maybe. While this may be a surprise to some, by that moment in the campaign in mid-April, I had already come to grips with the possibility that I was teaching AP Stat for the last time. Ever. That was actually something I had resigned myself to before the opening day of Season 7, which made me cherish every day of the journey a little more so than normal. [↩]
4. and there are also a lot of details that I am skipping for now… [↩]
5. Think: mind jumping back-and-forth between potential alternate realities, a la Chrono Cross. I really didn’t know if I wanted to say goodbye to AP Stat — which, again, at the time was not on the table for me in Dragon nation. [↩]
6. It occurred to me as I was typing that, that pretty soon, once we stop using physical currency, the phrase “-and-change” won’t make sense to kids anymore. #sadness #oldness [↩]
7. game day #5 [↩]
8. and quite fortunate [↩]