Moving up from plants

Previous goals for expanding our family included keeping a plant alive, keeping a fish alive and maybe someday to get a dog.

Well, my track record with plants with awful – pansies dead twice and violets once. I even failed at a vegetable garden last summer. I gave up fish in college after my goldfish got ick and died.

So, we decided to skip plants a get a puppy. Sophie, our 7 month old Jack Russel-Beagle mix is a little bundle of joy with way more energy than I ever expected.

As a first time “puppy-mom” I have had a lot to learn. My two favorite items in my house right now: Resolve and a green blanket. Resolve, obviously, is important for its incredible stain removing power. Sophie is *almost* house trained – I say almost because even though we haven’t caught her we did find two little stains on the carpet. The Green Blanket is a little more complicated. Sophie wishes she were a person in as much as she wants to sleep with blankets on the couch like I do. When I started letting her sit on the blanket – which used to be my bedspread in college – she immediately decided that it was the perfect place to sleep. In the last three days she’s slept almost every time I sit down on the couch and pull out the green blanket.

Her recent sedentary actions have been a welcome relief for us. Just trying to get her zoomies out after we get home from work is an interesting experience. Imagine coming home and having your pup (after a quick trip outside to potty) run insane circles around your living room for a solid minute before stopping, and then doing it again! After about 20 minutes of play time she’s a bit more calm, but she has to sniff the whole house everyday just to make sure nothing has changed. Play. Sniff. Repeat. Oh the life of a dog!

More adventures with Sophie to come.

Kinesthetic Learning

I’ve never prided myself on being an expert at teaching Kinesthetically, but for some reason, after three years of teaching the same subject, these strange hand motions and dances keep coming to mind that are *surprisingly* helping my students remembers the craziest information.

For example: once they learned (through hand motions) the powers of congress, all I have to do is make the signal with my hand and they shout it out! It also worked with the structure and jurisdictions of the judicial branch and how a bill becomes a law. Now all I need to do is come up with movement to teach all of US History…

They take the Unit test today. I hope they do well.

Being Domestic

Aren’t you proud? In the two weeks I’ve made bread twice, used the left over bread to make bread pudding once, carved a pumpkin, and finished all of my school work before 8. (shew, that’s a lot of work!)

I’m really enjoying the bread machine my Grandma Bea sent me. Just making regular whole wheat bread makes me happy but I’ve also tried peanut butter bread, yogurt corn bread, and cheese bread. The yogurt corn bread was one of the most recent attempts. I think I put too much corn in it because it fell a little while baking and  looked a little too moist while mixing. Regardless, It’s excellent with a little butter and honey. mmmm… maybe I should make some chili to go with it.

This is the first time Dave and I have carved a pumpkin together. While I don’t normally celebrate Halloween given the inherent evil nature of the holiday, I figure that some good ole’ fall cheer wouldn’t hurt.

So we carved “welcome” into the pumpkin and put it on our front porch.

 

A drive through the mountains

Angie and I decided, last week of course, that one day tromping around the Garden of the Gods just wasn’t enough. So, we packed some snacks and hit the road for an 8 hour drive/hike through the mountains. Our first stop was again, the Garden of the Gods. I think if I lived in Colorado Springs I would want to go biking here. The hills are manageable, but challenging, and the loop is a good length. This is my favorite shot ever of Pike’s Peak – it’s through the rock window of the formation known as the Siamese twins. Isn’t the mountain lovely? 

 

Our next stop was an hour or so away in a little town called Florissent. It’s home to a natural fossil bed, huge fossilized red wood tree trunks, and some decent hiking. I thought it was kind of ironic that the “pet exercise area” was located immediately in front of one of the grandest views of the back side of Pike’s Peak.

 

We wanted to go for a hike, and we did – a good three mile jaunt through the woods, up some hills, down a pretty steep bit and ended up in a lovely nook where a stream had carved its way through some huge boulders. You can’t tell in this picture, but I’m up on top of a 10 ft high boulder. And in the next two shots Angie and  I are demonstrating just how big these boulders were. I think they were granite.

It was a pretty grande walk in the park. And I just couldn’t get enough of the view of the mountain. Little did I know that the next 4 hours of our drive would take us into the heart of the Colorado Rockies.

Our 3rd stop was a kind of an accident. We came up over a hill, started to turn a corner and then all the sudden in front of us was the most awesome panoramic view of snow capped mountains I have ever seen. I’m pretty sure I said “WOW” at least a hundred times. So we turned around and went back to the conveniently located “visitors center” which had a tidy description of all the mountains and a nice little look out deck. Quite literally for the next 4 hours we would randomly pull over and take pictures. All the shots below are from random roadside vistas. Could you imagine the back up on the interstate if everyone pulled over and started admiring the view? ( I think more people would appreciate the awesome world around us if they stopped to take in the view more often.) Oh! and the one with creek was taken from behind a gas station. It was a long drive, but it was well worth it.   

Garden of the Gods

  Post 1 from Colorado Springs, CO. I’m out visiting my long-time friend Angie and today we made the most beautiful treks through the valleys just below Pike’s Peak.

The first trail we trekked went through hundreds of scrub oaks, yucca plants, weed-like cacti and was pretty smooth running. It gave us a nice view of the mountain side and some much needed exercise. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk  very far.” And that we did. We totally veered of the trail at one point, accidentally following a game trail. We saw a young buck picking bark off of the scrub oak and encountered more cacti and yucca. On the way out of Bear Creek Park we saw a Deer on the side of the road. It picked up its head and just stared at us. So, we took a picture. 

We took a little jaunt around Manteo, had some ice cream and then headed for the famed Garden of the Gods.

Just looking at the wonders of God’s creation makes me ask so many questions. Like, “How did he make that?” and, “How has that stood the test of time?” Pictures are the best explanations. Enjoy!

  

Fall Happenings

Whenever school starts up I tend to lose interest in blogging. That’s the price a pay for a job that takes up umpteen hours of my day.

That’s no excuse!

Luckily, we have arrived at fall break, which for my school means a week of blissful rest (or if you’re in my position, a week of crazy overtime hours trying to catch-up and maybe… just maybe… getting ahead of where we are now so that I won’t have to lesson plan day to day).

How is school, you ask? This has been one of the most stressful years ever. Adding two new courses that are almost but not quite the same has proven to be more of a challenge that I originally anticipated. The good news is that my students are rising to the challenge of the AP course and will eventually come to understand on a very detailed level what it means to take a college course. Despite the excess work which keeps me up way past my bedtime most nights (and most recently gave me a bloodshot eye) I’m enjoying reliving American History. There are so many good stories that fit right into the nooks and crannies of my curriculum. Like how John Quincy Adams was accused of being a pimp, and how Aaron Burr was an all around dastardly dude. Oh yeah, and we can’t forget worthless war that was the War of 1812. Studying American History and teaching certainly increases my appreciation for the level of freedom that we have… and makes me really angry when I see  how much we’ve let the government interfere with our lives. How complacent we are!! We are all frogs in the pot being boiled alive; we don’t even notice that the water is getting warmer.

School is back in session

For three weeks actually… plus the two weeks of teacherworkdaysallstrungtogether… makes for one very tired me (ALREADY!) I don’t recall being this tired last year, but I’m assuming that two new preps and an AP course are to blame.

Year Four of teaching means that this is my last year beholden to the state of North Carolina. It means that my “student loan” is almost paid off. It means that, if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have to teach next year. This is a very strange feeling to me.

The more I teach the more I realize that a) I really do like teaching b) I really do hate grading and c) I really am making an impact… at least on some of the kids.

My greatest struggles this year: finding time for myself; making sure all the papers get graded in a timely fashion; keeping up with the AP curriculum.

Already I see the time that I carved out for myself last year slipping away. Instead of hanging out with my husband at night I find myself grading and lesson planning until I can’t hold my eyes open. Instead of crocheting pretty gifts for my friends, I’m reading college textbooks. I know. It’s pretty bizarre.

And the papers! They just keep coming! It’s been over a week since some of my kids took their test and I’m not even close to being done grading it yet!!! This is a source of frustration for all parties involved, including myself. But I do have to blame myself, I chose to watch the State game of Thursday instead of grading papers. I wish there were some magical spell by which all papers would be accurately graded instantly. Oh wait, that’s WebAssign… nevermind.

On top of all that, just keeping up with the reading for AP US History makes me feel like I’m in college again. Mandy and I sitting in the living room – she with her structures book for the architecture exam, I with my history book. Once again, a very bizarre feeling. My one point of joy in the immense amount of reading is that at least the narrative is good.

Oh yeah! and my Birthday was last week. Now, while setting up and cleaning up is always a bear of a chore, we really had a great party. And on top of having fun watching Mandy make mixed drinks in the blender, we raised over $100 for charity:water!! So, being 26 isn’t that bad when you can do great things with your time.

And so I will end with one contemplative moment (since I seem to have found a whole hour to myself this morning)

Psalm 138:8
The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me;
       your love, O LORD, endures forever—
       do not abandon the works of your hands.