Well, this weekend was both productive and entertaining… 🙂

Friday, Jen and I enjoyed some takeout from Fat Bob’s. We had talked about it the day before, and the temptation proved to be too much. 🙂 Fat Bob’s has the *best* garlic mashed potatoes ever. And the mac & cheese is pretty good, too. Sorry, no Atkins-friendly food here. Yummm.

I headed off to cheerleading class, which I thought was the last class of this session. I was wrong. THIS week is the last class of this session, and with any luck, the last class I will be teaching. My heart’s just not in it. I’m tired of giving up that chunk of time on Friday nights. I’m tired of all the annoying phone calls from the Y. It’s just not worth my time anymore.

After cheerleading class, I got to hang out with Debbie, who was in town for Eeriecon…

On Saturday, Rand and I both did some grading. “Isn’t this cute? We’re grading together,” he said. Heehee…then we headed off to Niagara Falls for the convention. Ookla was playing the Saturday night concert, which started very, very late. Ugh. The Fibs also played…these guys are very talented musicians, and lots of fun. I met some new people, as well as chatting with Mark O., who I had met a few months ago. It was good to see him again. Lady Turpentine came out for the concert, too.

Debbie spent Sunday at Rand’s, so we got to spend even more time hanging out. That was very cool. 🙂 We had a nice dinner at Trattoria Aroma. I actually *ordered* the scallops. I can hardly believe it myself. 🙂 It was a lovely meal, and lovely company. After dinner, we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas, mostly because Mark was absolutely incredulous about the fact that I’d never seen it. I did enjoy it…I don’t know why I missed it before!

I graded 8th grade English exams over the weekend…we had a unit test on clauses. They were abysmal. Really. Only 7 of them passed. A lot of them couldn’t even identify a clause in a sentence, let alone tell me what it does. Sigh. And what frightens me is that I’ve been going *slower* than their regular teacher.

And on that note, I’ve got to get back to work. Happy Monday!

In the news:

So they picked a new pope. I just can’t bring myself to get excited about this…it’s not as if this is going to change anything.

Ben and Jen engaged. (via Martinis, Persistence and a Smile) I still think she’s too good for him.

Tom Cruise sues The Beast. Snerk. I meant to write about this last week. He needs to get a grip. You can read all about it by clicking on the link.

In my life:

Grading, grading and more grading.

Watching Wonderfalls. (my Christmas gift from Jen! Love this quirky, funny, prematurely cancelled show.)

Grading.

Trying desperately to finish Breakfast of Champions. (I’m about halfway through. I like Vonnegut for writing in bite-size chunks!)

Grading.

🙂

That’s it for now…hope you are all slightly less busy than I am!

I typed a rather long post this morning, and it is gone…I actually don’t think it’s blogger’s fault this time, though. There seemed to be an internet issue here at work. So grr…and grr to me for not copying it somewhere else.

I received an interesting message this morning…one of my high school friends is finally making it official with her longtime live-in boyfriend. Small ceremony, with a party to follow sometime this summer. Congrats to them!

Traffic school was uneventful. I don’t even have any good stories. We finished at 3, and I found out that I do get the insurance discount. Woohoo!

Saturday night, Rand and I went to Nietzsche’s to see Greg Klyma along with Tom Stahl and Anais Mitchell. I’d already seen/heard enough of Greg’s stuff to know that I’d enjoy him (which I did, very much!), but I had no idea how much I’d like Anais. She’s got kind of an Ani vibe. I liked her so much that I was going to buy her CD, but then Rand bought it for me. 🙂 Afterwards, we had a late night snack with Greg and Anais at Towne. I had some sinfully delicious chocolate sundae cheesecake, which Greg and Anais graciously helped me finish. 😉

There was more, but it wasn’t all that important…

In the flurry of busy-ness, I forgot to mention that a couple of dear friends welcomed their daughter, Aurora Emlinn, into the world this week.

My heartfelt congratulations go out to them.

🙂

Just one more day until the weekend. Ach.

Tuesday was, uh, interesting. I had checked the TRD website for their “interview tips” and all such information. Some of it was helpful. Some of it was really, really stupid.

For instance, I took offense to the advice that women should wear “black, charcoal gray, navy or pinstripe” suits. (Mine was a tan-khaki linen suit. Perfectly appropriate for April, right?) Uh, whatever. But then when I saw what people were wearing, I understood.

Women were wearing floral skirts with jackets, mismatched pieces. One girl I saw was wearing black pants with white pinstripes (tight black pants with a low waist. These were not suit pants…) with a black/white pinstripe jacket that DIDN’T MATCH. Also, she had on a tiny little black top under the jacket, and there was about an inch of skin showing between the tiny black top and her tight black pants. Huh? How could anyone think this was appropriate for an interview situation? One woman was wearing black pants with a bright pink blazer. I saw girls in suits that were too big for them, too small for them, things that were clearly off the rack at Fashion Bug and *way* too informal for interviewing. I may have been wearing khaki, but at least I looked professional. (Oh, except that according to the website, my heels were too high.)

Sigh.

My actual interviews went well, I think. I felt very positive about the suburban district interview and the Catholic school interview (MMA, Patti). But this is just the beginning of the process. Even if they liked me, it could take a couple of months to get called back for a *real* district interview.

So I wait. And I keep sending. Please, please, please think positive thoughts for me. I really need to have a job lined up for next year!

I’ve been drowning in a sea of grading this week. I did get all the papers graded for my evening classes (which both went well this week. Yay.) as well as all of the book reports for 7th and 8th grades. I promised the 6th graders their reports by the end of the week.

I had one of my community college students express shock that I took points off of his essay because it wasn’t in MLA format. Uh, it’s in the objectives of my syllabus. This is something the college considers really important. I’ve been very explicit about these expectations. So you’re surprised that you’re actually graded on this? Sigh…his heading was wrong, the paper was single spaced, had no title, didn’t indent the first paragraph. This is basic stuff. Oh, and he didn’t follow the instructions for the paper either. He’s a nice guy, but man…following directions is a good skill to have.

I know that Hilary tagged me on a meme, which I do intend to get to one of these days…

This weekend, I have traffic court. Bleh. Don’t worry, I’m taking notes. But Saturday night, Rand’s friend Greg Klyma is playing at Nietzsche’s…I haven’t had the opportunity to see him play live (other than that one time in Rand’s living room), so I’m looking forward to that.

And on that note, I should be doing some grading…

This weekend, friends, I boldly went where Erin has never gone before.

I ate sushi.

Rand was interested in going to a Japanese place for his birthday dinner. He was worried about me eating, and I told him not to be ridiculous…that it was his birthday and we would go wherever he wanted. I also promised that I would try some things.

So we went to Fuji Grill and started off with some soybeans and fried tofu. Rand ordered some kind of roll (I don’t remember what it was called, but it has salmon, cucumber and cream cheese) which I ate some of and actually enjoyed. Rand says this is the beginner roll. 😉 He also ordered another one that had eel on it…I escaped this one because he said the eel was bad. We had some Tempura chicken and shrimp, and I enjoyed both, and finished off with some green tea ice cream.

Those of you who know me and my finicky eating habits know this is a huge thing for me!

After dinner, we watched some Live Aid (one of the birthday gifts I got for him…), and on Saturday, went to see Sin City. I wasn’t sure what I was going to think of it, but I did end up enjoying it. My favorite storyline was the one with Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba. Rory Gilmore as a prostitute? A little disturbing. And speaking of disturbing, holy creepy Frodo…Elijah Wood out-creeped the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.

I am slowly crawling out of the grading hole.

I have three interviews tomorrow during Teacher Recruitment Day. One with the city schools, one with a suburban district, and one with a Catholic all-girls high school. Keep your fingers crossed for me. 🙂

This time, it’s Rand’s birthday! I’d tell you to go to his blog and wish him a happy birthday, but I don’t know if he’ll actually see it. 😉

Happy birthday, baby!

I got Shredd and Ragan to play F. People on the air this morning as the “Long Distance Dedication.” That was fun. 😉

In other news…

I just flipped through my May issue of Writer’s Digest, and I see that Toasted Cheese has once again made the “101 Best Web Sites for Writers” list. Yay, us!

I’m off today…it was declared a holiday because of the Pope’s funeral. I suppose I should do productive things, right?

I did watch the season finale of The West Wing, and I thought it was fantastic. I was actually in tears. Sniff…I also watched Lost from *two* weeks ago. I’m slowly catching up…although I understand Lost is now really not going to be on again until May. Ah, television.

So yeah, that’s me today. Happy Friday to all. 🙂

Rather, the blogfriend of a friend.

Go over to Stephanie’s blog and read her post about The Moxie. It really does sound fantastic, and although I’m not in much of a position to help financially, I figured the least I could do was put up a post to help the cause!

Quick summary…this couple is trying to open a theater of the quirky-independent type. They’ve run into some problems with building renovations and are trying to raise the money to get it done.
They’re running an auction to help raise money for the , so check that out as well.

Thanks!

To say that this week has been insane would be an understatement.

I ended up showing my community college classes the film version of Hamlet (the Mel Gibson one) because I was too brain-dead to think about anything else.

I caught two eighth graders turning in plagiarized book reports yesterday. Copied word-for-word (or almost word-for-word) from sparknotes.com. Do kids really think teachers are dumb? I called their parents last night. Boy, was that fun…

I collected papers from the community college students and book reports from the 6th 7th and 8th graders this week. Let’s just say I have a LOT of reading to do.

Speaking of reading, I haven’t been doing much of that, have I? I started “Breakfast of Champions” and I’ve been reading The Invisibles series…but man, it’s just been hard to find the time. I’m two weeks behind on Lost and Alias. I taped last night’s West Wing, but haven’t watched it yet.

Ack…need to get back to class.

Thanks Debbie, for finally taking a decent photo of us.

(I’m still not entirely happy with how I look, but it’s an improvement! 🙂

More photos can be seen at Debbie and Allison’s pages. (Notice that I was able to give both of them the little asterisk on my blogroll, indicating that they are people I KNOW in real life. Yay!)

Just a few more highlights…

I got to spend a good deal of time with the very sweet and very funny Carla Ulbrich. Her music is hilarious, and she’s even funnier in person!

Here’s just one example…from If I Had the Copyright (The F-word Song)

If I Had the Copyright on the word ^%$%!
I’d say —- this job and yourself you dumb ~~~~
No need for hard work and no need for luck
If I Had the Copyright on the word ^%$%!

Now, this doesn’t quite translate without the visual…

When performing this live, Carla makes a big production of strapping on one of those Bob Dylan/Piano Man harmonica holders. But then, instead of a harmonica, she pulls out a plastic/cardboard noisemaker (such as one would use for New Year’s Eve) and inserts that into the holder instead. Every time the f-word would appear, she blows into the noisemaker. It is hilarious.

(Jam, if you haven’t heard her, you must. I thought of you immediately…)

Also met the fantastic Joe Giacoio. His stuff is a little more traditionally “folky.” He writes wonderfully insightful and moving lyrics.

(Oh, and Carla and Joe are a disgustingly cute couple. At one point, I looked at Rand and said, “They’re out-cuting us.” Heehee.)

Some others met and seen (not meant to be a comprehensive listing):

The very funny Tom Smith
Dandelion Wine
Steve Macdonald
Canadian SF and Fantasy author Michelle Sagara West (Michelle is a good friend of Debbie’s. I wasn’t previously familiar with her work, but she did a reading, and I will defintely check her out…)
The Boogie Knights (Fun parody stuff. Again, Jam…thought of you!)

I know I owe details and stories to a lot of people. Working on it. 😉