My final Reflections

I loved this class so much.  It is one I hate to see end.  I am sure I have mentioned before that I hated living here when I first moved here and after a while I settled in to acceptance, but now I genuinely like living here.  Knowing somethnig about the area makes me feel more like a part of the community I live in.  Makes it feel more like home.  I am sorry I missed the canoe trip!  If I could make any changes in the course, I might make it longer- like 2 semesters.  so much more to see, do, learn and be a part of.  I am sure not everyone would agree but it was an awesome experience for me. 
The only thing  I didnt like was all the various forms of technology we had to use.  I do understand it looks great on a resume, but I am afraid to put Wiki on any because I do not want anyone to assume that it is in any way an area I have mastered.   I love the blog and I think it would have been awesome for us to have jopined each others blogs to share thoughts and ideas.    I loved the Land Before Time.  I plan to keep the book and reread it again someday when I have time, now that I can actally visualize the settings as they would have seen it.  I struggled with understanding some of the hardships because I did not know what a land hammock was among other things.  I finished the book shortly after the semester started so I didnt have a clear memory of how it fell in sequence during the testing. 
I would toss the Colloquim reader out the door!  I say laughingly.  There were some things that I found interesting but some of the reading was so over my head or so dry that I needed a glass of milk with it to get it down.  I think I would have felt better about it, if I did not have to look up every other word in some of the readings.  It is hard to enjoy what you do not understand. 

I wish we could have went on a swamp buggy ride to see some of the wild life in its natural habitat.  I have to say laughingly, that I would add this just because I want to do it myself and I am sure that seeing the living nature would inhance ones appreciation for preserving their habitiat!

I am an Island!

There isnt too much left to tell about my family and very few people left to tell it, but I will give the readers digest version of what I do know and what I could find out by talking to my dad.   My dad's dad or my grandfather was Antonio Hernandez.  He was from Santa Somewhere Mexico- to many Santa to guess which and no one knows for sure since Antonio left that all behind when he was a teenager and fled to the US in search of a better life.  He got a job with the railroad.  This took him into the state of Kentucky where he met and married my grandmother, Mary.  They moved North with the Railroad and ended up in Rome New York where they raised 8 chidlren until Mary passed away. My grandfather remained a very illegal alien until he passed away in the late 60's.  He aquired some sort of wealth that he carried around in cash everywhere he went.  I guess he could not really invest in anything since he made his money raising, selling and fighting roosters.  He had a home in New York and a home in Plant City Florida that he would travel back and forth on a whim via greyhound bus until he passed.  I remember he would give me dollars for everything I could say in Spanish.  My older sister taught me what I knew.  Boy I wish I had retained that since it is so essential to be bilingual these days.
 My dad joined the Marine corp at a very young age, ended up in North Carolina where he met and married my mother.  My mother was originally from a small town named Blackhawk  or something like that.  I didnt know that until after she passed away in 1997.  Her father had passed away before I was born and her mother passed when I was 3 or 4 years old.  I never got to know my dads family because we live so far away and although I did get to meet, spend time with and love people on my mothers side of the family.  It has been a long time since I have given any of this any thought.  I am the only surviving female in my immediate family.  No one on my mothers side of the family lives beyond the early 50's.  I can not think of one person who lived to see 55 years of age.  Cancer has taken all the females and it didnt bother to skip a generation.  I lost my grandmother, my mother, my sister, my first cousin, and 90% of the remaining females in our family to the same cancers.  We were just a family that didnt have a lot of family events or attachements due to distance, decease and death.   To add to the distance, I am here in Fort Myers Florida with my 8 year old and we are all the family each of us has here.  We are a long way from what  family remains and well, it is hard to say where home is when your heart has been broken so many times over the loss of loved ones. 
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