Watch Where You Are Going!

Well, it is time for my quarterly blog. I feel a lot of pressure here. Perhaps if I blogged more often I would not feel the need to impress you, kind reader, with each entry. However, I remember long ago in my Freshman (High School) English class, Mrs. Steadman told us not to try to justify our work before we read it, and I think the same should hold true before I write it, so...onwards...
Tonight Evelyn, my daughter for those of you who have not met her and have failed to take the appropriate time to read the "About Me" section of my MySpace page, had a bit of a fall and subsequently has a nice big long bruise running down the right side of her face. I imagine that it looks much worse than it feels since she was dancing along to "The Backyardigans" within 20 minutes of her fall. When Evelyn gets excited she has a propensity to start running in the general direction she wants to go without looking where it is that she is heading. I am not sure if she believes that she has the ability to run in a straight line, something that I cannot do, or if she simply thinks that the chairs, tables, stairs, cats will get out of her way when she gets close enough. This often results in her going from giggling as she runs to suddenly finding herself on the floor unsure of how she got there. More often than not she will pick herself up, assess the situation and continue to run, again without looking behind her. Tonight was the exception with her actually getting hurt and causing a great deal of anxiety for her parents. She wasn't too happy about this either.
As some of you are aware, I am currently in the middle of a fairly extensive job search, sending out applications to just about every opening that I could find a posting for. For the most part, the search has gone pretty well so far. I have had phone interviews with three schools and believe that I will have another one coming up soon. I also have been asked to come in for on-site interviews for the three colleges that I have spoken to, so I am pretty excited that these people are pretty interested in me. However, as I sit here typing this blog (read: procrastinating from getting ready for my first interview a week from today), I wonder if I have been doing exactly what Evelyn does. I have been so focused on simply getting a more secure position that I have been somewhat blindly throwing my resume out there to see if it will stick. I am excited by the prospect of interviewing with each of these schools, but wonder if I am running along laughing and am about to trip and fall and smash my knees up.
I certainly am not complaining about these possibilities, I just am not sure that I want to work at these schools. Have I been so eager to get a secure job, any job, that I have forgotten to look where I am going?
As I set off on my two week jaunt around the country, with stops in Florida, California and Mississippi (okay, I know I'm missing some parts of the country, but still...) I am going to do my best to watch where I run because the worst thing that can happen would be to move my family somewhere smiling and laughing and suddenly find ourselves on the floor wondering how we got there.

Enjoy asteroid preparedness!