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Hello again all!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving for my North American audiences and for the rest of you, I hope it was a productive Thursday. It has been a while since I've updated this blog, but events in my life have been pretty intense the past few months. I don't want to bore you with details but I'm going to anyway, so sit back and enjoy. Also, because this is somewhat of a refresh for me, I will take a break from the professionalism that is usually so prevalent in my writing. You can take that seriously or not, there's really no wrong way to interpret it.

Firstly, I hope you have all been enjoying this amazing gaming fall we've been having. Seems like there has been a great new release every week for the past two months. While I personally cannot afford to purchase them all, I do feel like the collection I've gathered will keep me both entertained and frustrated for many months to come. If you're interested, here are the games I've been playing: Gears of War 3, Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3 and Skyrim. I haven't been able to give MW3 my full attention because I was late to the party on it, but the other three games are must buys. Especially Skyrim. If you don't play games and have no intention of playing games, you should get it anyway. That good.

On the job front, I struggled as summer closed and fall began with the fact that I had not yet found a teaching job. Here I was, this fresh-faced upstart from NWLA out to prove to the world that I'm gonna be somebody, and no one was willing to give me a chance. Well, I take that back. A few people were but I wasn't a coach so they extraneous circumstances forced them to look elsewhere. (Its the south. Football is huge. Even at the middle school level which is a little weird.)

So, I did my best to get my resume out, attempted to find a job outside of teaching (Landed an interview at this sweet non-profit in New York. Sucks I didn't get the job but I fully support what they do. Check out DoSomething.org for more.) I landed a few jobs subbing, including one three week stint as a Spanish teacher and I have no experience in Spanish. The teacher who is actually from Spain had to leave short notice for a family emergency in Spain, so there were no lesson plans or anything available once she left. So I taught myself as I went and prepared lessons like any non-Spanish speaking Spanish teacher would and toward the end of the three-week stint, I think I caught the eye of a principal at a school in Bossier and was offered a position there as  Mild-Moderate Special Education teacher. Am I SpEd certified? No. But thankfully Louisiana has this program where I can pursue SpEd certification while teaching. So that's where I am. I love my administration, love my kids. I am very happy as far as jobs go. Now, to work on the angle of SpEd and games, which I gather won't be too difficult once I've had some  more time.

Finally, if you're eyes aren't strained enough and your head isn't tired of reading, on the life front, two big changes happened literally back to back. First thing is that I married the most wonderful woman on the face of this earth. We were married on October 22, 2011. As more pictures become available to me, you better believe more will be posted here. This blog may be about gaming and teaching, but by golly its my blog so I'll post what pictures I want.

And finally, as my local readers know, my sister Heather was diagnosed with cancer back in March of this year. A very aggressive form of cancer that they believe started in her breast but quickly showed us that it wasn't afraid to move around her body and re-emerge in placed where tumors were thought to be completely extracted. Well, my beautiful, vibrant, fun-loving sister Heather lost her fight with cancer the next day. She passed at 9:15am Sunday October 23, 2011. She was 38, and we miss her very, very deeply. Excuse the cheesiness of the photo. Heather is the blonde in the back, behind me is my sister Cheryl.

There you have it, the reasons why this blog hasn't been updated as much as I would like. I look forward to updating more as I get the hang of balancing married life, a full-time teaching gig and gaming, but I can assure that it will definitely be updated more than tri-monthly. Thanks and great gaming!

Gamer:Teacher