GSA Chapter 2: Teacher's Retreat

After being at GSA for a grand total of approximately 15 hours, I met the other girl's assistant dean. Her name is Amanda and she comes from the Portland, OR area. We are getting along quite swimmingly, I think. An hour or so after she arrived we packed up and drove to Camp Ida-Haven, which is near McCall, ID for teacher's retreat. As soon as we arrived I noticed their fleet...FLEET of boats. There were four in the water and I noticed another two or three that were trailered. Three of the boats in the water were Master Crafts. It was beautiful. Another beautiful thing about Ida-Haven is that it's up in the mountains which makes it a lot prettier and greener than what I first experienced in the valley where Caldwell is. I like northern Idaho much better than the southern part.
I mentioned "teacher's retreat" earlier. What exactly is a teacher's retreat? Well, don't feel bad, I didn't know what it was either. Now I know and its one of those things where I didn't really mind not knowing.  Basically, this retreat involved lots of meetings that were all fairly irrelevant to me and because of that, dreadfully boring. I felt like a 15-year-old who walked into the wrong meeting. However, at the same time, I felt as though I was allowed to view the inner sanctum of teacher-dom. It was rather enlightening at times.
I got the opportunity to meet most of the teachers that will be working here at GSA this year. They are all a riot and I look forward to working with them this coming school year. I am very appreciative to Denise, the cook, who gave me some wise advice about chocolate and coffee.
In my down time (there was a surprisingly large amount of it) I laid on the beach and soaked up the sun. I may have soaked up a little too much sun however because I am now suffering from a pretty hardcore sunburn on my back. I also got to go wakeboarding a couple more times. I had a lot of fun and it just made me more anxious to get back to GSA and start the real work.
Today we got back with plenty of day to spare and so Amanda and I went shopping for various necessities to make our rooms more homey feeling. I purchased a very exciting pink floor lamp and an equally exciting but significantly smaller green table lamp. I also got the most epic little pink table ever! I can't wait to finish moving in and unpacking so that I can put the finishing touches on the room such as buying a chair (I already have a lovely green chair picked out that matches the green lamp) and putting things on the walls.
It has been a good few days. I'm excited to see what the next few days have to bring. For those of you who are curious about my life here in Idaho, I've only been in the state for a grand total of 6 days and most of those days weren't even spent at GSA. When the real work begins and the RA's and students start arriving (RA's arrive a week before the students) then I'll let you know how being a dean is going. For now, I have no clue because I haven't had to do any actual deaning. It has just been teacher's retreat and now unpacking and what not.  I can't wait to experience the next chapter of my adventure so that I can share it with whomever happens to read this. Comment if you made it this far. Love to all of my friends from GSA.
-Ashley