Year 3 - Day 213 - July 31

This is the last "family shot" of my older generation Mac products. In this picture, my laptop is the oldest (July 2008) followed by the phone (November 2008) and the iPad (December 2010). Tomorrow is new laptop day for real! It's going to be a MacBook Pro instead of an old school white Mac Book. I'm so excited!!

Year 3 - Day 212 - July 30

Ah, the Olympics. That special time every 4 years where I cannot LIVE without knowing who wins the kayak race!

Year 3 - Day 211 - July 29

My husband a newly-remembered love of flash fried eggplant, thanks to our crop share. This is eggplant-in-waiting. It's waiting for the sauce he made to be done. Well, it's what he calls spaghetti sauce, but I swear looks more like chili. (Mostly because it's 90% meat and 10% tomatoes, but I can totally get on board with that!) :)

Year 3 - Day 210 - July 28

I enjoy this author most of the time (other than the ghost story last year, which was 100% not my cup of tea) so I made sure to put myself on the hold list for this book early on. It's basically historical fiction, although one of the narrators is in present day and is a descendant of the characters during the historical time period portions. It wound up being more timely than he even intended, since Aleppo and Syria are in the news this weekend. The historical part of the novel is set in 1915. A just out of college young woman volunteers to go with her father on an aid mission to Syria. I feel bad for not knowing this piece of history already, but there was a terrible genocide happening at the time that the characters witness first hand. Elizabeth meets and falls for a Armenian (it isn't quite as sappy as it sounds) widower. Armen (Yes, he's Armen the Armenian) has to leave Aleppo and so some of the chapters follow him on his journey. Others follow Elizabeth during her time in Aleppo and the women she meets and tries to save. The current day part of the story is Elizabeth's granddaughter trying to figure out and fit together that time in her family's history.

I honestly had a hard time getting through it. A lot of the time it felt like I was reading a book for English class. But when it was over, I could appreciate it as a whole. I don't know why it happened that way, but it did. I had a really hard time with the names because they are all pretty similar, and I had zero working knowledge of that part of the world going in. That's just my own lack of knowledge though.

Year 3 - Day 209 - July 27

When we took the Duclaw glasses out of the TV room, I had big plans for the shelves. I still do. I just haven't done anything yet. :) The cat took advantage of all the empty space today, and curled up with my Mike Mussina picture and autographed ball.

Moments later, he threw the ball on the ground. Mike came running and saying "No, Moose! No!"

I was very impressed that Mike cared about my ball.

Then he said, "If you're going to throw something, throw the PICTURE!"

Sigh. :)

Year 3 - Day 208 - July 26

There are storms brewing out there tonight. They are everywhere around us, but not a drop of rain to be seen here...We could seriously use some!

Year 3 - Day 207 - July 25

I was supposed to go to my favorite PD today, the one where they give us our brand new laptops. Unfortunately I got sick and had to bump to next week's class. I'm disappointed about that, but I slept a lot of the day so I guess being in bed is what I needed. I did manage to get in 20 something episodes of Sports night on Netflix though.

The first season of this show was GREAT. I had heard of its existence, however, it was on from 1998-2000 so it's logical that I wouldn't have found it. #1 I was in college and we honestly didn't watch a lot of TV those years and #2 none of my college friends are sports people so we wouldn't have found it by accident. So many people from this show have been in other things since the late 90's. The two anchors are now on Good Wife and Parenthood, the producer was Felicity Huffman so she's a big star now, too. Tons of guest stars were recognizable and went on to other things: Cuddy from House, lots and lots of West Wing people (since it's an Aaron Sorkin show and he re-uses people a lot) including Teri Polo who eventually wound up married to Jimmy Smits on WW. I honestly didn't recognize her with the short brown hair (see above.) Her voice was familiar, but I couldn't place her until I saw her name in the guest star credits at the end.

The second season wasn't as strong. It looked like the writing was done by Sorkin and several other people. When an episode says 3 names and then Sorkin's, I wonder how much hands on writing he really did. It seemed like the second season was people trying to write in Sorkin's style, which never works as well. (see: lousy seasons of West Wing)

Year 3 - Day 206 - July 24

Today I ran my own Professional Development from start to finish for the first time in awhile. I had done pieces of this class on my own in the past because my partner is a parent and sometimes has things come up, but we have changed the class since then. It used to be a couple hours for 2 different nights after school and now it's 6 hours in a full summer day. Extending it those extra couple hours has been hard but at least there's a lunch break. :) Everyone knows that the most important part of PD is bringing candy for the tables. Of course I wasn't thinking about that until this morning, so they got a random selection of stuff we had around. I was happy to see that everyone found the day useful and that the evaluations were positive. It's different doing PD than teaching my college class, that's for sure.

Year 3 - Day 205 - July 23

I have no idea why a random office supply company would send me a pen engraved with my name, town, and zipcode+4, but I'll keep the gift. :)

Year 3 - Day 204 - July 22

These are the two cards we made last night. I didn't do either one exactly right because I was talking while I worked, but that's ok. They will do. :)

Year 3 - Day 203 - July 21

I helped my friend Sarah make a diaper cake today for a friend. It's pretty cute. Basically we started with an empty paper towel tube and rubber banded about 8 tiny rolled up diapers around it. Then we worked out from there and put a ribbon around the bottom layer. We repeated with the middle and top layer, and then decorated with some washcloths, bath toys, and flowers. Very cute! I've seen pictures of them but I've never helped in their creation.

On a grosser note, "Killer" didn't live up to his name this morning. At about 5am, he either found or brought a mouse to our bedroom and proceeded to chase it around and under the bed and dresser. I know he kept catching it at least a little, because the little thing was squeaking its unhappiness. Listening to it was awful. Eventually Mike was able to get the (almost but not quite dead) critter out of cat's clutches. Awful, awful, awful. Maybe last night's kill was an accident, because the cat seemed much more interested in playing with the thing than killing it. Once he had it cornered, the mouse would try to escape and the cat would whomp him on the head. Sigh. Of course I only know this because Mike was giving me the play by play while I was in the bathroom trying to avoid the whole situation.

Year 3 - Day 202 - July 20

Know what is in that plastic container?

A mouse.

It's alive, so I guess that's a "good" thing, but still. There's a mouse. That we found in our house.

More specifically, I found it in a bug glue trap. We have them in a few places to check for ants since our pest company comes out as soon as we see a couple after the big infestation that we inherited from the previous owners. But we have never seen a MOUSE.

Mike googled and found out that if you put the mouse & the glue trap into a closed container and put some vegetable oil on the trap/their feet, they can step right out of the glue. Turns out the internet was right! So we drove him to a field on the way to dinner. (Far away so he won't come back.)

Unfortunately, he was not alone. When we got back from dinner, there was a DEAD one in the hallway. The cat was standing nearby, but since my cat is scared of everything in the entire world, I didn't think too much of it. That is, until the boys picked up the dead mouse (ew) to examine it. They realized that it had been in the cat's mouth and it's neck had definitely been broken by the cat. (double ew)

So then they praised the cat incessantly. They want to make him a blue cape and rename him "Killer." Sigh. I have never seen a mouse in my house in 33 years, and now 2 in a day? I don't like this at all. The boys did a search of the basement but didn't find any more. I hope this is it.

Year 3 - Day 201 - July 19

In the past, the only time you really saw Girl Scout stuff was with the cookies. Then, Edy's ice cream started making Girl Scout Ice Cream. Recently, we saw Girl Scout inspired Nestle Candy Bars. But today was the most surprising. Lip Smackers is now making Girl Scout Cookie flavored lip balm and lip gloss. Thin Mint, Trefoil, Samoa, Tagalong, and maybe the other peanut butter one since there's an orange stick in the big variety pack. This is crazy.

Year 3 - Day 200 - July 18

Today's hands on activity was to make a shelter for Clifford the Big Red Dog using 100 (no more no less) straws and scotch tape. This year's instructor isn't quite as last year's with making the connections for WHY we are doing something. We kind of just do it. That doesn't make as much of an impact, but I am sitting with good people so we're making our own connections the best we can.

Year 3 - Day 199 - June 17

I'm at a state PD session for 3 days this week, and we do a lot of hands-on activities in preparation for changing the way we teach STEM activities. Today we first had to make an animal using playdough. Then we were given the task to make a tall tower using nothing but index cards. We could bend/fold/rip them, but that's it. Also, we had 50 cards but were supposed to go as tall as possible while being as economical as possible with our cards. Then one of our animals had to be able to stand on top without the tower falling down. Luckily, one of our girls had made an alligator out of her dough, so we were able to go higher since the weight was distributed differently.

Year 3 - Day 198 - July 16

I cleaned out my school bag in preparation for a work thing I'm doing all week, and found some end of the year gifts and notes inside. This is one of them.

Top Row: a picture of a book with a tree, complete with standard little kid style squirrel hole. (I used to do that too - I know that every tree doesn't have a big squirrel hole, but I always drew them) I think the 2nd picture is a house with a pool and someone swimming

Middle Row: Me (complete with glasses), another book of some sort, and a mini Smart Board

Bottom: A declaration that I'm the #1 Library teacher and the other box says "Awesome teacher."

Kids are cute. :)

Year 3 - Day 197 - July 15

Awhile back, two of my friends were discussing the Bloggess and I was unfamiliar with her. I am not sure how that happened, since it seems once you read a blog you hear about others and so on down the chain, but this one slipped under my radar. I spent some time back reading old posts, and finally got my hands on her book through the library. Some of the chapters in the book were lifted directly from the blog, but I figure when you're a blogger that is ok, since you've already written about the experience! Other stuff was new (at least to me.) She's pretty funny. I appreciate that she can laugh at herself because when I make a fool out of myself I choose to try to forget it rather than putting it in print for the world to enjoy. :) But she makes a good point in that when the life you live is absurd, you just gotta roll with the punches and laugh or else you'll cry. It was a nice change to read a grownup book, too. :)

Year 3 - Day 196 - July 14

We drove all over the state of Maryland today to see friends from everywhere! First we headed to Reisterstown to visit friends who are here from Texas. After a cookout there and getting stuffed to the gills, we headed back up towards the country where we celebrated a friend's birthday with a pool party. (Well, we missed the pool part, but got there in time to see everyone.) A fun day, but I'm exhausted! :)

Year 3 - Day 195 - July 13

Look who came to visit for Friday the 13th! This is Marley. He's a certified reading dog.

(No, he doesn't read) ;)

He holds the distinction of being the only dog I've met that I actually LIKE. I think it's because he's like a giant stuffed animal and sits really still and calmly at all times. :) He really is trained as a support dog. His owner brings him to school and to the library and kids read to him. The idea is that he's nonjudgmental (Cause, you know, he's a dog) and so kids learning to read can read out loud to Marley instead of their mom  or teacher for the 400th time. Since it's summertime he hadn't been to work lately, so his owner brought him in for the day while we worked on our curriculum writing.

He's a standard poodle AND HE DOESN'T SMELL LIKE A DOG.

P.S. No, he's not named after Marley the dog. He had his name first. :)

Year 3 - Day 194 - July 12

I don't know what it is with me and this year's BES chapter books. I'm just not clicking with a bunch of them. This one tells the story of Eliza's journey to freedom. The prologue tells you that she makes it, so that takes some of the suspense out of it. I was bothered by the fact that Harriet Tubman led her group to Canada, because although she's a famous face associated with the concept of the underground railroad, she obviously wasn't on every trip. Also convenient that this is one of the few slaves that reads and writes on a high level. They had a pretty uneventful trip from Virginia to Maryland to Canada, which was also a little sanitized.

Year 3 - Day 193 - July 11

While I always prefer to use my local (favorite) pharmacy, a few things I take come from a mail order place. They have a nifty way of certifying I received my meds. A day or so after FedEx drops them off, I get an email asking for an electronic signature. Usually electronic signatures consist of typing your name and checking a box. But with this software, I actually have to use the mouse to sign my name. It's kind of fun, because I'm a dork like that. ;) It's pretty decent too, because that looks a lot like the beginning of my name looks when I actually sign it!

Year 3 - Day 192 - July 10

Happy Birthday to ME! I woke up in a lousy mood and really couldn't shake it for quite some time, but it wound up being a really good day. At work, my boss asked how old I was turning and then got all embarrassed for asking. I told her it was fine, I have no issues telling people I'm 33.

But holy cow. I'm 33. In some ways, I don't feel old at all. But in others, I feel downright geriatric. When I was 27 and at my yearly doctor appointment, I clearly remember the doctor saying "If you are going to have kids, you're going to want to get on that ASAP." I wasn't even dating Mike yet, so I remember thinking the lady was crazy. But now I'm 33 and feel ancient in that aspect, so maybe I should have listened. :)

So, photographic evidence of 3 great things that happened today.

#1 - I had to work today. I don't usually have to work on my birthday, and I didn't mention it to the girls I was working with. However, 2 of them are my facebook friend and saw it in the morning. To celebrate, one brought me Munchkins! It was a super sweet gesture, especially because I don't work with these ladies very often and have just gotten to know them better over the last 10 days of curriculum writing. They rock. :)

#2 - We went out for dinner! I wanted to do Bonefish Happy Hour and get Bang Bang Chicken before heading across the street to Outback for steak. But after we sat down, I got lazy so I just ate steak at Bonefish. I found out that I *can* eat an order of Bang Bang Chicken, a few of Mike's chips, some bread, a salad, my steak, and a mere 2 or 3 fries, but I *shouldn't.* I was sad to leave the fries on my plate, but decided they were probably the best choice to not finish. The steak was the best one I've had at Bonefish. Kudos to them for figuring out how to make great non-seafood. :) (Mike of course had seafood appetizer and dinner, so he was happy too.)

#3 - Mike got me an ice cream cake from Coldstone! It's layers of regular cake and cake batter flavored ice cream, with cookie dough on top. :)

And I don't have photographic proof of my present, but my awesome husband found out that there's an Orioles Hall of Fame luncheon with the inductees the day before the O's HOF game in August. I was depressed in the morning (I guess that started off my bad mood) because it's on a school day in the first week of school and we're not allowed to take those days off. I was so sad that he had found the perfect present and I wasn't going to be able to use it. But the girls at work convinced me to at least ask the principal because the kids would survive a day without me. I asked, and she said yes. So score one for the hubby and score another for my principal. :)

On top of all that, we're watching the All Star Game and waiting for White Collar to come on. What a day!

Year 3 - Day 191 - July 9

This book made my brain hurt. I can't tell if it's written really well, or if it's just ridiculous. Perhaps if I didn't go in thinking it was merely going to be the historical fiction genre, I would have fared better. By the time I finished it, I was willing to admit that it was interesting but when we lept from historical fiction to sci-fi I was really annoyed and put the book down for quite awhile.

The original setting is just before and after the stock market crash. The boy lives alone with his father and they have an extensive train set in their basement. After the bank forecloses on their house, the dad goes went to California to find work and leaves the son with his aunt and cousin. A variety of realistic things happen until the boy finds himself in the middle of a bank hold-up. That's when all realism goes out the window. Somehow, (and I read the few page event several times without clearing up my confusion until later when I realized that I was SUPPOSED to be confused,) the boy winds up on a train bound for California. But when he gets there, it's 10 years later. What?!?!

By the end, I was willing to concede that it was just a "Back to the Future" story, with time jumps back and forth, but my brain still hurts.

Year 3 - Day 190 - July 8

Today was my family birthday party with us, Mike's parents, brother, uncle & my mom. We went to his parents' house and had a cookout while the Orioles lost. A pretty easy relaxing birthday.

This BES book is supposedly set in Baltimore, but I'm not sure the author has actually ever BEEN to Baltimore. One character leaves N.C. after lunch and arrives in Baltimore by dinner. That makes no sense. They explicitly say there's no subway in Baltimore (there is.) And the author acts like it's the arctic tundra for months on end. If they said the ice covered parking lot lasted for a few days, it'd be believable. But they definitely don't act like the cold weather is just a cold snap. Of course maybe she visited during the blizzard year and that's the only time she's been here. :) The basic storyline is that Jake lives alone with his mom. When she slips, falls, and winds up spending some time in the hospital due to that treacherous icy parking lot, he has to rely on an elderly neighbor to take care of him until the grandfather he barely knows arrives (in record time) from NC. Then when the grandfather gets there, everyone has to get to know each other. It was very short in length but also short on deep meanings.

Year 3 - Day 189 - July 7

It wouldn't be a visit from my mom if we didn't do some kind of home improvement project. This weekend she hung these shelves in the computer room so that the Duclaw and other assorted glasses could all be on display together (and off of the family room shelves, as seen here.) They really aren't as crooked in real life as they appear on this picture, which makes they look like they're going to tumble any moment. :)

Year 3 - Day 188 - July 6

I'll admit it, we ate lunch out again today. And it was good. Again. :) However, the soda was the most exciting part. (Admission #2 - this picture was taken on my computer screen later, because I forgot to take the picture at lunch!) We finally have a place nearby with the new Coke Freestyle Machine. It's so much fun! After you pick your base soda (Coke, Diet, Sprite, etc), the machine gives you a choice of 5 or 6 different flavors to tweak it. I had Cherry Sprite. My mom had Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. It was so much fun, and I wanted to try them all. I had a feeling I would regret that later, though. :)

Year 3 - Day 187 - July 5

I picked my mom up at a friend's house today where she has been staying for the first part of her east coast trip. We decided to grab lunch on the way home at the Annapolis Mall since her friend lives down there. I haven't been inside the mall in quite some time, but we happened to be driving by a section of mall with a few parking-lot-facing restaurants and I spotted a Potbelly! I really enjoy their sandwiches and their milkshakes. See? The milkshake straw has little cookies around it! They taste like Girl Scout Trefoils. My sandwich was delicious too - some kind of Italian creation with all kinds of salted, cured meat like pepperoni and salami. :) YUM.

Year 3 - Day 186 - July 4

Perhaps even better than watching fireworks in a driveway, is watching fireworks from the comfort of our own couch. :) We went to my (try to follow along) brother-in-law's parent-in-laws' house for the afternoon today to hang out, but we didn't have fireworks plans. Rather than fight the local town crowds, we watched DC and then NYC on TV. NYC's were vastly superior. I imagine they were computer controlled, because during certain songs the fireworks matched exactly. When the song said "heart" or "smile," we saw heart and smile shaped fireworks. Very cool. We could have watched Boston's at 10pm as well, but we were fireworked out. :)

Year 3 - Day 185 - July 3

We were supposed to go to PA to watch fireworks and see friends tonight but sadly that didn't happen. I'm bummed because they have the best view of fireworks from their driveway. The town sets them off down the street and you can go outside JUST before they start, watch them sitting on pavement (which cuts down on bugs) and then go back inside as soon as they're over and resume enjoying the AC. That's much better than the firework viewing of my childhood, which involved hours of being outside to stake out a good place, trying not to get eaten alive by mosquitoes and green head flies, and then dealing with the traffic and horn honking after the show was over!

This is another BES book. It took me more time than several of the others combined. I'm excited to have a book to give to my high readers, but I'm thinking this particular title would have fit better in the middle school group of titles. Maybe not though, because there's nothing completely inappropriate and I do always bemoan the fact that as soon as books get harder to read, they get inappropriate. This story jumps back and forth in time and has a couple different narrators which I'm excited to introduce to kids that don't often see that in literature. It's set during the civil war and while the main characters are a little younger than I believe is completely realistic, it's interesting to see them grow from their horrible experiences on the battlefield.

Year 3 - Day 184 - July 2

I ordered this last week in hopes it would come in before my friend's birthday party, but it just got here today. It's supposed to be like Apples to Apples, but the adult version. I can't wait to play it, even after just looking through a few cards!! :)

Year 3 - Day 183 - July 1

This was, by far, my least favorite BES book on the list this year. I honestly didn't find that it had a single redeeming quality. I haven't read the other May Amelia book in quite some time, but I don't remember disliking it this much. I know the author doesn't have anything to do with the cover selection, but the cover is wrong and that just sets the wrong tone. If you've established the late 1800's as a time period and have given basic descriptions of the characters along the way, you don't put a very 21st century looking girl in modern clothes with non-blond hair on the cover.