From Master’s in Teaching candidate Lisa Cabias.

Those dear readers wondering “what happened to that adorable Lisa girl and her charming blog posts?” may experience a deep sigh of relief.  I have landed.  By “landed” I refer to more than just being on the ground in an aircraft, that took place ages ago! Instead I mean to express that life has settled to back to a reasonably solid ground status, almost.

My return from New Zealand, despite being meticulously planned, was slightly bumpy. I have a grand laundry list of various time-eating mishaps that all decided to descend at seemingly the same moment during my re-entry. All three of my gigantic checked bags were lost, and flights were delayed causing me to spend about five hours in the joyous LAX terminal trying to keep myself from sleeping on the floor or nodding onto the lap of some unsuspecting stranger due to extreme sleep deprivation. “This is all?” you are thinking. No, dear reader, this was just the flight.

I am fortunate to have been blessed with very patient and helpful roomates, and to have found my home in fantastic condition upon my return. Unfortunately, two acres of grass and weeds have a way of getting away from just about anybody who does not have a large tactical lawn mowing brigade on speed dial. Over the next few days, grass, I swear, tried to envelop and eat my house. I would have swiftly put this botanical menace in its place but my eccentric water heater also decided to fail at this time. No hot water in a house of three girls is an ISSUE. The day immediately following my return was graduation. I was determined to attend. One might guess I would have been quite tired for such a big brilliant event after travel mayhem but the virtues of a very cold shower are not to be underestimated.

Following graduation, and in the middle of the first week of my return to full time work, I prepared to stand in front of faculty and my cohort to present my master’s research and turn in my portfolio. This “not at all stressful” morning was followed up by a flurry of “not at all stressful” job interviews. It was time to go on vacation. One week after my arrival, and a mere few days after the delivery of my chronically lost baggage (yet unpacked at this point), I departed for a week in Glacier National Park. By “vacation” I refer to four days of backcountry trekking hauling a 30-pound pack and attempting with futility to keep pace with my mountaineer boyfriend John and his six-foot tall brother.

The pressures of everyday life tend to melt away in the back country. My stresses in this glorious place were far fewer and mostly related to my intense wish to trade freeze dried meals for cheeseburgers and huckleberry milkshakes and also to the fact that over miles of shale and snow I literally wore the soles off my hiking boots and spent the last part of the hike sporting a very technically advanced wrapping of duct tape over each one. To add to the high (altitude) of the mountains on this adventure, my darling boyfriend proposed at the top of Two Medicine Pass!

Once home again, life has settled down. Most of the Man Eating Lawn is mowed, I have clothes now and they are unpacked, and hot water has been restored!  The next chapter awaits as I search for the right job for fall but how thankful I am to have to time to reflect on my journey thus far!