Another Fall Begins

Hello, I apologize for how long I've been incommunicado. It's been a very busy end of summer/beginning of fall. I got an ESL teaching job at a company in Koreatown from July to the end of September which was fun and interesting. The only problem is that I didn't have enough hours to keep doing it once the normal school year started. Yet the students were great, interesting and fun to teach. The photo below is a shot from one of my ESL classes.



My students were primarily from South Korea, Thailand and Japan. There were a few Italians, South Americans, and Spaniards as well, ending up with a fascinating cultural mix. Anyway, I met some cool teachers while working there also.

Unfortunately, while I was busy every day in Koreatown, my beloved San Gabriel Mountains in the Angeles National Forest were literally burning themselves to a crisp. It was the infamous Highway 2 Station Fire, which pretty much burned out all of my favorite winter backpacking ranges. Huge valleys, gorges, mountaintops, forests, campgrounds, wildlife preserves- all gone. By day you could see a gigantic mushroom cloud rising from the north, and by night once could see the fires on the tips of the mountaintops.



We could see the fire at night from our hill where we live- it was both incredible and depressing at the same time. I can see in my head all of the places where I hiked and climbed, slept out under the stars. But now it's a ragged moonscape.

So 3 weeks ago I told my boss at the ESL company not to sign me up again, and I started substitute teaching again for high school in the Alhambra Unified School District and for the Green Dot Charter Schools in south central LA. I've been working almost every day, and it's been interesting, boring, fun and completely crazy at times. I'll let you know when I get a full-time job, I've been interviewing all summer with no luck so far.