Life is Shiny

This past week was my third week teaching outdoor education, but only second on Catalina Island (I spent one week teaching in the mountains of San Bernadino). It turned out to be quite a blast. I had fourteen seventh graders from a prep school, and they were the best set of kids yet! I loved them. And because they were all such good listeners, my two chaperons were involved and helpful, and they all seemed so interested in everything I was teaching, each of my classes seemed to go almost perfectly!

This was my third attempt at teaching Fish Lab, which involves getting everyone into a wet suit and snorkeling along the kelp forests and rocky reefs of Doctor's Cove, apparently considered to be one of the best places to snorkel in the world. My last attempt was an epic failure. If you've ever attempted to put on a wet suit (especially a Body Glove one), you will know the potential for torture that attempt can be. It took almost an hour and one of my chaperon's knuckles were bleeding by the end, and then we only had about fifteen minutes in the water seeing almost nothing at all for all that! Needless to say, I was rather filled with trepidation at having to repeat this class and have the same events follow. Thank the Lord, it couldn't have been a more different experience! The wet suits all went on in less than thirty minutes and we ended up spending almost forty minutes in the water snorkeling because we had the time and there was so much to see. There had been a storm the night before, which had apparently brought a lot of living creatures that are usually out further in the sea up to where we were. We saw all sorts of fish, swam through hundreds and hundreds of tiny jelly fish and other see-through creatures, spotted a huge black and blue spotted octopus, and a vast array of other invertebrates including sea snails, urchins, sea stars, and crabs.

I keep pinching myself to make sure all of this is actually real. How in the world did I get so lucky to be blessed with all of this?! I live and work on a beautiful and almost certainly enchanted island. I get to work at a camp again doing what I love and am good at. I've made some wonderful new friendships as well as had two old friends come work with me here too. My boyfriend (who I met during training) lives and works alongside of me. And we both have shiny future steps waiting for us in the fall in the shape of grad school.

And to know that all of this was entirely God setting things in motion by a random phone call because of a resume I sent out into ciber space a year before is a thought that always leaves me speechless. I wake up each morning to the sound of the ocean at my side with joy and thanks bubbling out of my heart.