I don’t get easily embarrassed anymore. When I was a kid, though, I used to be shy, terribly shy…the shyest kid on the block! Anything and everything made me blush. But my shyness vanished overnight…once I began teaching. I was a first-year Ph.D. student then…

My first teaching job was teaching intermediate Italian to second-year university students at the University of Toronto. I was essentially handed a grammar book and shoved into a classroom, with no prior preparation. Eeek! I remember walking into my first class with a confidence I didn’t feel…but for some (lucky!) reason I had thought of bringing a small Gund bear with me, which really helped me break the ice with my students. I still have that little bear…But I digress…And that is another story…

Why am I mentioning this today? Because I am not embarrassed to show you my messy, unmade bed. This morning, you see, I found all my cats sleeping on our bed. Just like this. Now, it’s really unusual to find them all gathered together in the same place. So I took about a million photos and decided to put this one on the blog…

So here they are–all my sweeties! And my unmade bed. 🙂