It's always (almost never) sunny in Philadelphia!

So I recently moved to Philadelphia, into a one bedroom apartment with my girlfriend. We live on a quiet street in West Philly in an old Victorian that has been converted into apartments. I was starting to feel pretty hopeless about getting a job, and then all of the sudden, I landed two in one day. I am working at a cafe in Rittenhouse Sq. during the morning/early afternoon and then rushing off to Drexel Hill to coach soccer at a Catholic School there. During the end of September and the month of October I am mostly working twelve-hour days between the two jobs, but so far both are going well. I am the head coach of the "jjv" team which consists of 3rd and 4th graders-mostly boys. I am the assistant/goalie coach for jv (5th and 6th grade) and varsity (7th and 8th grade). I am also volunteer-coaching a 7 and 8 year old soccer team on Saturday mornings at Clark Park, near my apartment.

I wanted to start keeping a blog again because I see and hear so many funny and interesting things every day. Here are some from the past week or two that have been memorable.

1) I was sitting on the trolley home from work when a very young looking girl got on with her infant daughter. The baby was sleeping, so she draped her over her knees and opened up a binder on the babies back to do some studying. I looked over her shoulder and the reading material was on emergency contraception.

2) On my first day of coaching Clark Park soccer (7 and 8 year olds) we were scrimmaging at the end of practice. I had a little boy named Dayvon playing defense. I said "Dayvon, are you excited" and he said "yes." I said "I think our team is gonna win, I can feel it!" He paused for a second and said "I can feel it too." Then he paused for another minute and looked up at me and said "Ya'll got bats?" I said "no...do you mean like baseball bats?" to which he replied a simple and innocent "yeah". I said "You want to use a baseball bat to play defense?", and he looked up at me and said "yeah" like it was the most casual thing in the world. I tried not to laugh as a explained to him that we can't use bats in soccer.

3) I was on the trolley home and had waited 45 minutes to get on this particular car because there was some breakdown that prevented any trolleys from coming for a long time. The car was PACKED and I was cranky because I was going to have to rush to soccer practice, and I had planned on using the spare half hour I thought I'd have to plan practice. As we pulled into one of the stations, there was a group of kids who looked like they were coming back from a field trip. I recognized one of them as Lilly, a girl from the Clark Park team I coach. I figured she wouldn't recognize me on a crowded trolly, out of the context of soccer, and after only one practice, but hey eyes lit up and she started frantically waving. I saw her say to the person next to her "That's my soccer coach!" Then she turned to me and made sure to enunciate "Hi Sarah!!", all while keeping her hand waving at me wildly. It was so cute, and made the whole wait for the trolley completely worth it.

More to come from my adventures in Philadelphia...