Moments From My Weekend...

• Got my projector! She's beautiful! She hasn't been named yet, I need to spend a bit more time with her. She is an Optoma EP706.
• Also got a new vacuum. The Jury is still out on whether or not I like it. It's loud, that's for sure. Eva is afraid of it.
• Dan and I were struck by boredom last night. So we ended up going to:
• Changing Hands
• Trader Joe's
• Got lots of fun lunch stuff.
  
• Best Buy
• Couldn't find anything good
  
• Cost Plus World Market
• Got some foodstuffs, including marzipan. They already have their Christmas stuff out! It's not even Halloween yet!
• KFC
• Where we waiting in the drive through line for twelve minutes! My food was cold when I got it. :(
• XBOX died. We are sending it to Microsoft for repair. Dan is sad. I think that's why he was so bored on Saturday night.
• I started playing Final Fantasy XII again. Actually I started playing before the XBOX died. Played on my free time this weekend. I love that game!
• Went to lunch with Wende at Island's Fine Burgers. Talking with Wende was great, Island's was over priced.
  
• Watched "Memories of M*A*S*H" - Strangely I still love that show! Part of me will always have a crush on Hawkeye Pierce.

So...what did you do?

Walking the dog

Hobie is old.

There's just no gettin' around that sad fact. What makes it worse is that his will has not caught up with his body. He wants with a not so quiet desperateness to go for a walk. But once we're out, he poops out after about 100 feet. Then I get to feel like the most cruel person in the world as I drag him down the street to home. It seems like it's better to take him out than to never exercise him, but I have to admit, it's depressing.

I wish I could make him a young dog again. I wish he didn't feel pain every time he tries to get up or sit down.

My poor sweet Hobie

4 hours in...

Oy. I've been working on school stuff for the last 4 hours! And not even the fun stuff! Not the, I'm planning a cool lesson and researching stuff on the Internet. Nope. I'm trying to get my gradebook squared away. I feel I've been hopelessly wrong about this from the start. I've fouled the whole mess up but good.

Which, okay. I'm new. I'm learning. I will make mistakes in my first month of teaching.

But I hope that I'm changing all of that. Now that I will be toting my laptop to and from school, I've decided to transfer my grades to a computerized gradebook. No problems yet, but I feel like I'm missing some work. Which, well, it kind of sucks! Also, I now wish I had done what I originally planned to do, which was have each subject have a separate grade book. Now I have to split them up, which isn't as easy as it sounds. And really, I'm not even done transferring all the grades from the paper book. I'm giving myself a little slack on that - I can do that when I get home each night and just back date it.

Went to Prescott yesterday. Ostensibly to visit two of Mom & Mike's friends - Jim and Beverly. But we got to tool around downtown Prescott, have lunch, and drive up a butte/mountain, too. The weather was dreamy - in the 80's and overcast. At one point it even rained! I took a whole mess of pictures. Most of them were of the antique soda fountain that Jim and Beverly have. It's a pretty cool thing, I have to say. Jim made me the best hot fudge sundae that I've had in a long damn time. They were quite lovely people and I hope to go back some day.

I tried to upload about 47 pictures to Flickr from yesterday, but it errored out for some strange reason. It squawked about my API key, so I'll have to look into that. I'm going to try again later to get them uploaded. I need to burn a cd of some of the pictures on my computer. I don't want to clutter it up if I'm going to be using it for work, too. I really, REALLY need to get a bigger hard drive installed soon.

Frenetic Friday

Well, I made it through yet another week. This particular one seemed a bit more harried than others even though it was only four days long. Perhaps it was because it was only four days long and contained more than its share of oddball activities. Here's a rundown:

Tuesday: Fairly normal day, actually - only one special (right in the morning).

Wednesday: No specials, but we had our very first writing benchmark. I might add that I was given three days notice about said benchmark, thank you very much. To add to the stress of knowing that my students weren't very well prepared, I had to break up the test to preserve my reading block. Never mind that the fifth grade was allowed to move their reading block - for some reason that I'm unaware of, we did not. Not only that, not only that, but we also had a lockdown drill scheduled for that day. I knew it would be coming, I just didn't know when. I spent the day perpetually tense, ready to shepherd my students into the area of the room they are to go to during a lockdown. My back was killing me by the end of the day - I assume it was from the tension.

And no, Wednesday is NOT over. After school on that day I had to stay for DIBELS training, which I discussed in an earlier entry. I'll have another day next Wednesday, but thankfully it's an early release day, so I won't be SO late getting home.

Thursday: My mom came in for Science - which was a good thing, not it's opposite. The kids were crazy chatty, though, and driving me nutty. They are never outright badly behaved, they're just very ...social. Not a terrible problem to have by any means, just annoying.

Friday: Picture day. Yikes. I don't even want to see mine, but I know I'll not have a choice. After school I went to the district office to get my insurance card. When I came in they said that the person I was supposed to get it from was already gone as it was "quite late." Well, uh, sorry, but I left as soon as I was able - only 15 minutes after I'm even contractually allowed to leave. Not much I can do about that.

So, all in all, a crazy week. I'm going to try to implement reading centers next week. Wish me luck.

----------------
Now playing: Kelly Clarkson - Breakaway
via FoxyTunes

Late in the evening

I seem to always blog at this time of day. I can't honestly say I know why that is. What I do know is that it's a highly inconvenient time to decide to write.

I'm tired.
My wit has fled the building.
I feel pressured to get to bed (since I have to get up at 5:00 am).

All in all, blogging just before bed just seems more like a pain than anything else. Still, this is the time that I remember to write. This is the time that I tell myself I better put something down, just to keep in the habit. For when I skip a day, it breeds into two weeks before I've noticed the loss. I'd prefer to write something half delirious than nothing at all.

Due to DIBELS training, I didn't get home until rather late. I feel like I just got home and it's already time for bed. Those of you who don't know what DIBELS is, it's a test (of sorts) that we give to students to check their progress in reading. Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills - to be exact. It involves having students read letters, or nonsense words, or a short story. We check for understanding of words and how many they can read in a minutes time.

Can you tell how exciting this is? To me, although it's a good way to check progress, it's just wone more thing that I have to find time for in my already overcrowded schedule. Seriously, we're already jammed up like sardines - no need to throw a cat into the mix, too.

Okay, I think the deliriousness has sunk in too far now. Time to hie me off to bed.

----------------
Now playing: Various - GA.S3E23.Kate Walsh - Your Song
via FoxyTunes

A Night Full Of Grading

Oy. This is what you get when you put off grading. You get an entire night of sitting on your butt, grading papers, and entering them in your book. You also lose an entire evening that could have been spent relaxing and recreating.

I suppose this is where I say that I'll learn from this experience and grow as a person/teacher. Well, you can hold your breath but I'm not gonna. I think I probably need two more nights of torture before I actually learn the lesson. ;)

After these words of wisdom, off I go to bed, in search of my brain.

Blog Relocation Update

Yeah, that's gonna take forever. I had made it to 200 posts. 200 posts people!! I frankly don't have the time or the inclination to move them all! So...I took all of the last few months and then began selecting my favorites from there. At a certain point, even that was too much to deal with. I've backed up my old blog on my computer and am going to try to access it when I have free time. Other than that, I'm not going to worry about it. There were some gems, I know, but into each life some rain must fall.

So, now I'm behind in my prep for tomorrow. Gotta run!

Edited to add: With the exception of February 2006, I have saved all my posts. The old website is officially gone (which was kind of sad for me), but the posts will show up here over time.

Moving In

Having decided that there is simply no reason for me to PAY to blog when I can do it for free, I am moving in to this new blog site. I debated for a while about whether to use Blogger or Yahoo 360, but have obviously chosen to go with Blogger. I really have no good reason for choosing one over the other, except 360 irritates me on some level. It's a MySpace kind of level, although NOTHING irritates me like the clunky mess that is My Space. I will be moving all my posts from my old website over here, but that might take some time. I won't close out the old blog until that is done.

In the meantime, as is my wont, I will change things around and squeeze myself into this new space.