Category Archives: me!

Reading

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I am positively overwhelmed by reading material right now.

Last week, in anticipation of the beginning of school, I ordered Teaching Outside the Box by LouAnne Johnson. (LouAnne Johnson is the teacher who wrote the book that inspired the movie Dangerous Minds.) So far, it’s fantastic.

I also received a slightly belated birthday package from Stephanie, which included Dead Until Dark, the first book in Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire series, as well as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

I bought a few books at the Scholastic Sale that I would like to read, including an Anna Quindlen novel I was unaware of.

Rand ordered me some cool books from Canada–a series of YA novels by Sean Cullen. You may recognize Sean from Last Comic Standing.

Or, if you’re like me, you may know him as a member of Corky and the Juice Pigs.

At any rate, his humor is weird and utterly hilarious. I’m very much looking forward to the books.

On top of all the reading I’d like to do for fun, of course, I have the required school reading…among the books I’ll be teaching this year:

  • A Raisin in the Sun (familiar with, but have never read)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird (yay! one of my favorites!!)
  • Lord of the Flies (read, but it was a while ago)
  • Night (read)
  • Of Mice and Men (never read. saw the movie back in college)
  • American Born Chinese (haven’t read yet, but very excited about this!)
  • Romeo and Juliet (again, yay!)
  • Julius Caesar (um…yay?)

I did my master’s project on teaching Shakespeare to high school students, and just about every scholar agrees that Julius Caesar should be ditched from the high school curriculum. Apparently no one is listening. Ah well…I’ll do my best to make it interesting, and promise not to make them memorize and recite “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…” (which is the ONLY thing I remember about reading this play in high school. seriously.)

Hmmm…overwhelmed much? 😉 In all seriousness, though, I’m beyond excited about this job. And I’ll try my best to squeeze in some reading for pleasure among all the edumacational stuff. 😉

Well, I guess I’d better get to work!

Fridays dessert on runway plate

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Rand, John, Samantha and I went out to Friday’s to celebrate Samantha’s birthday. I ordered this piece of peanut butter pie (to share), and this is how they served it. We thought it was hilarious.

Sorry about the quality of the photo…I had left my camera at home, so this was taken with the phone.

Could we start again, please?

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Seriously, this day needs a do-over.

It started out just fine…except for the fact that I had a hard time getting to sleep last night, and so I did NOT want to get up.

I had a 9 a.m. appointment with the superintendent, where I was *officially* told that I have the job (of course, pending board approval…).

I don’t think I’ve talked about this online, but my provisional certificate expires at the end of January. I had to apply for an extension, but of course it will take weeks and weeks before it actually goes through. On the up side, I will be able to apply for my permanent certificate at the end of the year.

New York State certainly doesn’t make it easy to ask questions of an actual live human being regarding teacher certification. There’s a local office at BOCES in West Seneca, but they apparently don’t take phone calls. Or voice mails. One phone number directs you to another phone number, which directs you to an email, which takes a good week to get a response to. Sigh.

Where was I? Oh, yeah…after the meeting with the superintendent, I went into my classroom for a bit…I’m still trying to organize, and get some things ready for next week. As I was typing up my course outlines, I realized how strange it felt to be calling myself “Mrs.” to me, Mrs. feels old. Matronly. It made me wish that Ms. had caught on as it was originally intended…to be the female equivalent of Mr. and not have a married vs. unmarried distinction. Eh. Whatever.

Came home and decided to try a new recipe in 500 Cupcakes. I spent WAY too much time and energy trying to make this recipe work properly. Something about tempering eggs. Gah. I went through nearly a dozen eggs (counting the one I dropped on the floor) and wasted a cup and a half of honey.

Thankfully, the resulting cupcakes are tasty. I took some pics, and will share sometime later. And what the heck…I learned something new.

My afternoon brightened when I got a package from Amazon containing some birthday goodies from Stephanie! Yay!

I was going to blog a bit about the weekend, but I’m out of blogging energy. 😉

I have new teacher orientation tomorrow and Wednesday. Woohoo! Here’s hoping I’m well-rested and a whole lot less cranky!

Quick update

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Life has been busy lately, and I’ve been online for only short spurts of time…I keep having to read 3 pages worth of twitter updates at once, and I have 663 unread items in my RSS reader! So if you’ve sent me an email, or left me a comment and I haven’t responded, don’t feel bad. I’m just a slacky slacky slacker. 😉

I now feel confident that I can let you all know one wee bit of exciting news–I have a job for this school year! It’s a long-term job, filling in for a teacher who is taking a full year of maternity leave. Orientation will take place next week, but I’ve been going in this week working on prepping my classroom.

For those of you who read the protected post, I decided to drop the community college stuff, at least for this semester. I spoke with the department secretary, who told me to just let her know if I want to teach in the spring. I just felt it would be too overwhelming to try and do it all right now. Truthfully, I’m kind of relieved at the prospect of having my evenings free!

(Aside…I wandered off in the middle of writing this blog post. I swear, sometimes I really do think I have low-level ADHD…)

Today, after attending SmartBoard training (whee!) I went out to the Scholastic warehouse sale (goes through Saturday, I think) and bought $30 worth of books I didn’t need. 😉 I did, though, manage to replace my copy of Speak, which went missing last year. I suspect an 8th grader.

I’ve been doing a bit of reading here and there…if you follow me on twitter, you know that I recently finished Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, and that I loved it. Fantastic. I’ll have to do an update on what I’ve read since the last time I posted about what I’ve read sometime soon. 😉

Watching lots of the Olympics, of course. Some quick stream-of-consciousness thoughts:

watching the Olympics with TiVo is excellent

I love Bela Karyoli

I don’t love the new gymnastics scoring system

I cried when Nastia Liukien and Shawn Johnson won gold and silver in the all-around competition

I didn’t know synchronized diving existed until this year

why is there so much beach volleyball on prime time?

I realized that the last time I watched the (summer) Olympics with any regularity was 1996…y’know, Kerri Strug and all. Rand and I realized that summer 2004 was when we were first spending a lot of time together. 2000? I dunno. I might have been on vacation?

I think I probably had more Olympic-related thoughts, but they’ve flown away.

I’ll leave you with me, age 12, desperately wanting to be Mary Lou Retton (and not succeeding!):

eringmynast

RE: the previous post

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Email me if you want the password…it’s nothing deeply personal, but contains some info I don’t want released to the *whole*  world just yet. 😉

Protected: A (minor) dilemma

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It’s my birthday too, yeah

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Got this card from Eden, which was a lovely way to start the day. 😉

I’ve started it off by skipping my 9 am yoga class. I got halfway dressed, and then sat down and didn’t get back up. Sigh. Oh well. 😉

My big plans for the day? Uh…I plan on making myself cupcakes, and maybe doing some reading. Later, Rand and I are going to see Great Big Sea. I think it’s going to be a good day…it can’t top last year, of course, but it’ll still be good. 😀

Hope you all have an excellent day-of-my-birth.

Lazy, rainy Sunday

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Rand and I are sitting here watching women’s gymnastics. I’m having a hard time understanding this new scoring system…although I think they just explained it in a way that makes sense. Sort of.  😉

We saw our parents yesterday…they both came to Buffalo to visit, and we went out for lunch. We had a very nice day. My parents brought a CD with wedding photos, and I started working on uploading them to flickr. I still have *lots* more.

We also got a couple of CDs in the mail from Debbie, and I haven’t even begun to look at them yet. 🙂

Last night, Rand and I went to see Pineapple Express. It was funny. Extremely violent, but funny. 😉

Ok, enough for me…G’night!

New haircut and other stuff (with photos!)

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haircut-front view

I got my hair cut today. Since I was no longer worried about what my hair would look like for the wedding, I let my stylist basically do whatever he wanted.  Here’s the side view:

haircut-side view

He took A LOT of hair. I like it. What do you think?

And now, here are pictures of those cookies. (I’ll have to go back and add pics to the cookie post, too…)

ready to bake

Aside–these SILPAT mats are *magic*. Love them.

cookies

cookies

Mmm…don’t they look good? 🙂 Go here for the recipe.

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Inspiring story

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I graduated from high school with this guy…and back in the days when I was a reporter, I interviewed him for a story. The story got picked up by the AP, and they used the photo that I took with it. I got a little check for the photo.

To sum up, Craig Dietz–a Pittsburgh attorney who was born without arms or legs–competed in a triathalon.

You’ll have to click here to see the story.