It's the Final Countdown!

I love working in a profession with a finite deadline. I think that the never-ending monotony of doing the same thing day-in and day-out for years on end with no foreseeable end in sight would drive me crazy, so as much as I hate my job some times, I really do like the summer break aspect of it. In fact, for those of you that don't know, that is the reason why I am a teacher. It's kind of a long story, so I'll try to be as brief as possible.
I did my student teaching Sept-Dec. 2003. I returned to school to take 2 more required classes (and 3 studio art classes for fun) in January '04 and graduated in April '04. I took summer classes (more studio art) to maintain my eligibility for my sweet on-campus job, so my graduation is officially listed as August '04, but I walked in April. After that, I swore that I would never teach again in my life and that I was done with the profession, because my student-teaching experience was one of the worst ones imaginable. Seriously. I know I'm dramatic, but I've talked to other teachers and mine was BAD.
That was no prob, anyway, because the plan at that point was to start cranking out kids and do the lower-middle-class thing while Luis worked whatever jobs he could find and while I stayed at home. I have many excited journal entries chronicling this tremendously exciting time of my life. We even bought a little house where we could stay and start raising our little family that we could entirely afford on Luis's salary alone. I quit my part-time job and actually was a SAH wife for like 3.5 weeks. After that, the boredom began to kill me, so I went back to the part-time job just because I was going crazy at home by myself all the time. I stayed at that job for about 6 months and decided I needed something more permanent, so I started working there full-time. By that winter, I was promoted above 12 other employees that were senior (experience and age) to be the manager of the facility. I doubled my salary ($14 an hour! Woo hoo!) and got a new car. I was set. This was in February.
Then May rolled around and the never-ending stream of non-stop drama, fighting, and power-playing between my employees started to get on my nerves. One day I was driving to work and saw my neighbor (who teaches middle school P.E.) out planting flowers in her yard and I thought to myself "why isn't she at work? it's like 8:30!?" Then I realized- she is a teacher and had been on vacation for a week already. I was JEALOUS. Oh, so jealous.
Around this time I got terribly ill. I had to work for an entire week while running a fever of 103 because my employees couldn't be trusted to do their job if I wasn't there, and my number 2 in command was often MIA due to a chronic drug problem. I thought to myself "maybe teaching doesn't sound so bad after all" several times during that week.
The week after, I got the most random phone call while I was on my lunch break. The man introduced himself as Taran from Dixon Middle School and he went on to say that he had been looking through the on-file teaching applications for Provo School District and had run accross an old one I had turned in about a year before. He wondered if I had since found employment and if not, if I'd be interested in coming in for an interview.
I sat there with my finger on the delete button on my phone for 15 minutes before deciding to call him back. I figured one interview wouldn't hurt, that it'd been almost 3 years since I'd been in classroom and maybe it wasn't as bad as I remembered, and that if I was ever going to teach it should be then because my license expired in less than a year. I went in for the interview and teaching audition. I went back a week later for an official interview with the principal. 2 days after that she called me while on her vacation in St. George to offer me the job. I accepted, but waited a week before I told anyone but Luis. During that week I remember making lots of pro/con lists, praying a lot, and driving by Dixon slowly in my car, trying to imagine what it would be like to be a middle school teacher. I waited over a month before I told my boss at Life Skills, because I STILL wasn't sure if I wanted such a huge change. I worked 6 weeks after I put in my notice because I felt bad for ditching them only 6 months after such a huge promotion. I started work at Dixon three days after my last day at Life Skills.
So, long story short, if I hadn't seen Carol planting flowers that day while I was driving to work, I probably would have deleted Taran's message the second I heard it and would most likely have been promoted to facility director at Life Skills by now (since that was what they were grooming me to do).
Life sure can take you strange places if you let it.