bustin' in

Well, I am relieved. For the past few weeks, each time I've arrived home I've expected to see that my house had been broken into. Last night it happened. All that's gone is my tv (can we say OLD? I bought that sucker in 1999 or so), dvd player (can we say CHEAP? I think it was $60 back in 2002) and some gold or goldish jewelry that had been sitting around in my bedroom since the 2006 Art Car parade (worn as part of my la chalupa costume). There was possibly a cc missing too but I called and canceled it this morning just in case.

So the most annoying thing is that they used a pry bar and therefore messed up my front door. Tapan is helping me figure that out since his car got flooded last night and he needs to get it dried out today. Yes, we had a lovely day all told.

The nice thing is that they left my Netflix movie behind and a lot of other things that it would've been a pain to replace, so I'm not overly upset, just tired and wishing I could take an early morning nap...

nothing much

So it's Saturday. I finished my first three days of school (well, 2 and a bit since I had a very strange but short-lived fever on Thursday) and I'm sitting here thinking about next week and looking forward to it like crazy. I hope that feeling continues. I was so ready for school to begin after 3 weeks of inservice. I was planned out!

At marathon training we ran 6 miles again this morning. Next weekend will be 9. I'm stilling having trouble working in three runs during the week but that may never change, at least while the weather is so hot in the evenings. There are only so many mornings I'm willing to drag my lardy butt out of bed at 5am each week.

monday bits

Last few days of inservice ahead. School starts on Wednesday. We had the kids in for an hour long preview last Friday which went well. I am still scared though!

Saturday's run was soooo rough. It seemed that way for a lot of folks. I ran only Monday and missed the rest of the week because of the weather, so I had lots of energy but we started out too fast and spent a lot of the second half stopping to walk for a minute.

I'm almost finished with Middlesex--about 40 pages to go. It got really interesting just about 50 pages ago. Although it was good all of the way through, it just was not intriguing until the end.

A couple of friends were in town this weekend and it was nice seeing them. We spent a lot of time hopping from one social eating event to another. The best thing I had all weekend was a strawberry shake at a sandwich shop across the street from the PIG's pen.

recovery

One of my colleagues called last night to make sure I was okay after yesterday's Tough Day. I was, but it took some emergency ice cream to do the trick. After some chat, I said that I had to go because I was in the midst of a dog circus. Three poochies romped over and around me, the PIG and our friend were using the interwebs to figure out where on earth it was hottest yesterday (my guess, Death Valley, appeared to be correct). Anyway, things are coming together today and I'm feeling back on track.

87:44

My seven mile time. Keep in mind that for the past few weeks they've said we've actually run a bit further than our planned distance, but even if we didn't, that's still a twelve and a half minute mile (according to my running buddy's fancy whatchadometer, we ran 11:50/mile). Not speedy gonzalez, but it is also August in H-town. I'm just happy that I've made it further in training already than I did last year. I guess taking a vacation and getting poison ivy right at the beginning did me no favors. This year I am even cross-training, or in other words, trying to lose some of the schlub I gained in the past year. I've given up trying to fit into old pants though and have moved on to buying a set of work pants that actually fit me now. And speaking of work, we have another week and 2 days before school starts. I'm excited about the projects we're going to do this year and the other teachers in my area are trying soooo hard to help me envision what we'll be doing and also making sure I get to team teach with them so that they can model, I can practice (their words). Apparently they want me to have an easier time than some other newbies have had. Again, I'm one lucky gal.

post hump day update

We started the process of course planning today. We got our groupings of kids and which hour we'll have them and now we're splitting them according to what they need while they're "back here"* with us.

It's cool to start thinking about a grouping of personalities and tasks that they can attack and accomplish in some cases, and how we're going to set off a group of kids that will have trouble together at first in other cases. By "set off" I mean provoking an emotional response in a controlled setting. Luckily in the places where that's likely to happen I am paired with a teacher who is much less conflict-averse than I.

In other news, I am struggling through marathon training at this point. H-town is finally in the Hot season. Because of the continual rain earlier this summer, we stayed cooler than normal, but now we're at normal temps. Normal, wilting temps. I need to be running in the evening for some very good reasons but it's so much cooler in the mornings that I have resisted changing. Also, evenings are when my trainer comes over and makes me do awful things like reverse lunges.

That is pretty much all I have to report.

*It's funny how often people refer to the area I work in, the Life Academy, as "back there" or "back here", depending on whether they're Life Academy folk or not.

warning: spoilers

Seriously, folks, spoilers about to abound up in here.

So, I just finished the last Harry Potter, or HP as we like to refer to it around the old homestead. Boy, was I disappointed. Talk about a Hollywood ending. Where were the poignant deaths? The end of the wizarding world as we know it? Oh well, I guess it is just a kids' book after all.

Harry & Ginny, no surprise. Ditto Ron & Hermione. Draco's wife was never revealed. Should've been that annoying Slytherin girl...what was her name? Parker Posie or something? Why didn't Harry die at the end? Seriously--there was a whole lotta splainin' done and it didn't make much sense. While I had been one of the Dumbledore's Not Dead proclaimers, I also knew that there was no way Snape turned bad, so I was half right.

So my overall feeling was that the book itself was good--very exciting and whatnot--but that the end of the series was a letdown. Too mundane.

jealous yet?

Thus far I've traveled through New Work Retreat and First Day of In-Service. All systems are go. In relating my experiences to the PIG, he seems to take for granted the things that astonish me. For example, the boss man has decided to change the way coaching happens. Coaching serves several purposes. It's a conduit for information about a child to his/her parent & other caregivers. It's a way for each child to have a formal and strong connection to one of the teachers and to a small group of kids. It's a lot of other things, which is why Boss Man decided to make the coaching teams a little larger and have two coaches per team. He picked the teachers to form each team, but it is up to us to decide how to divide the kids. The PIG says something like "Hmm, sounds like he wants to be inclusive in the way this decision gets made" whereas I am thinking "Hot damn, he thinks we're smart enough to figure out the best mechanism for creating groups ourselves!"

Also, every single teacher has gone out of his or her way to reassure me and to help me understand how things work.

Also also, when changes are announced or suggested, not a single person reacts negatively. They're all like "cool, can't wait to try that!" or "huh, sounds like that might work a bit better than last year". Know why? Because last year they talked about things that were problematic and Boss Man spent the summer going through proposed responses and changes and deciding which to implement. In other words, he listened to the group.