Mood:  rushed

So, here it is, Christmas Eve, and I am so not ready!  I have no idea what I need to buy, what I have already bought, and where it is.  I've been looking for the wrapping paper that I bought last week for the last 24 hours.  I finally found it, leaning against the entry table.  Craftily hidden among all the stuff I've just flung as I walked in the door.

 I do have some of the cooking done.  The shrimp dip and the pickled knockwurst are done, as is the kielbasa (three different kinds this year).  I still have to get the onions ready for boiling so I can finish them with the milk and butter tomorrow.  Peeling those is a pain, and painful - I hate all the tears.

 At the moment I'm watching "Love Actually" on the television.  It's such a great movie, and full of so many good feelings.  I love happy endings.  Next I want to watch "White Christmas".  I always cry at "We'll Follow the Old Man".

I got a very special Christmas gift from the family of the child whose father plays for the Red Sox, an autographed ornament!  I was so so excited!  I almost cried when I took it out of the bag, I know that this is not something that he does regularly, and I'm the only teacher to have recieved one of these so far.  I also got one of their Christmas cards and a couple of other gifts from them. 

I got other nice things from the kids in my class, lots of baked goods, chocolate, candles, gift cards for books, coffee and I-tunes, and books (even one autographed by the author).  It was a nice day.  Now I have to get those thankyou notes done as well.

I'm really irritated that I haven't received a grade or the paper returned from the professor from hell.  The deal was that we were going to get them back by Friday, and we got a lame email on Saturday saying that wasn't going to happen.  She even said they might not be done before grades are due.  And this should be MY problem???

Guess I'd better go start peeling the onions.

Mood:  irritated

I took today off as a personal day, as I needed to drive 100 miles to go to the cemetery where my parents and grandparents are buried.  I needed to put holiday arrangements on the graves.  I do this every year and it's very important to me.  I don't do it on weekends because the drive is just miserable.

But I didn't go.

The stupid weather is prediciting a major, very fast moving snow storm, and I knew that I'd never be able to be up and back before the snow hit.  Besides that, I do like to spend some times stopping in a few favorite stores to do some shopping for gifts, so I didn't want to just rush my way through everything in an attempt to beat the storm.

It has started snowing up there, my cousin sent me an email saying that it had started and was snowing sideways and fast.  Both of those are not good things, and it would have made it a really awful drive home.

I don't know how or when I'm going to get up there now.  I thought that maybe I'd bite the bullet and go on Saturday, but there's yet ANOTHER storm predicted.  I know it's wimpy but I just hate driving in snow storms.  I'm not even fond of driving in the rain.

So today has been a waste of time.  I'm sort of just wandering around here, not really managing to get anything done.  I did sit and knit for about 45 minutes, but I even stopped doing that.  Maybe I can at least get some laundry done.

I have school work to do, but I'm feeling too jumpy to settle and do it.  I think that my system tends to react to changes in the atmosphere and storms coming in.  In some ways I hope we have a snow day tomorrow.  But then, in others, I don't want one at all this year.

I just looked out the window, it's now snowing, not too hard yet, but snowing.

Crud.

I think I'll go watch reruns of Red Sox games........

Mood:  bright

This was a mess of a drive kind of day, both coming and going to work. It started to come down as freezing rain at about 2:30 this morning, then it went to snow or rain.  So when I left for work it was sort of crunchy slushy, but some of the roads had been treated.  But the Hoity-toity town that I have to drive through doesn't believe in treating the road, and doesn't do much clearing the road to the pavement, so it's always like being on an amusement park ride when I slide through that town. I clench my teeth all the way through town.

We had indoor recess today.  That always is enough to make me want to cry.  The kids need an outdoor break.

 It started snowing again in the afternoon, and pretty much kept right on going.  It's still flurrying.  So the ride home wasn't much better.

 The cool thing that happened today was that the child in my class whose father plays for my Red Sox brought me a copy of the new World Series DVD. I was more than a little excited!  Every once in a while I feel the need to pinch myself.

Mood:  irritated

They are prediciting a mess for the commute tomorrow morning.  Rain.  Freezing rain.  Sleet. Snow. I wanna gag.

It's already snowed a bit, but just a dusting.  Apparently as the night goes on it's going to get worse.  This is the storm that has been marching across the country for the last several days.

 I do not want a snow day.  We're already getting out of school way too late in June as far as I'm concerned. 

Of course, on the up-side I could use the day to work on those papers that I need to finish.

 I hate writing papers.  I'm so far out of practice when it comes to this kind of thing.  I like to write for myself, but not for this pressure of a grade. The good news is that my typing is years faster and better than it was when I had to use a typewriter to pound these things out years ago.  Then I had a little white portable Olivetti that jumped when I had to pound on it to make the keys hit.  I couldn't touch type then either. 

I actually pretty much have one paper finished, just needs a few tweaks, which is a good thing seeing it's due on Thursday.  I still have to fool around with the lesson part of it that I have to present along with it.

I still have two others to get done by December 20th.  One of them is going to make me choke over having to do it at all. It is a waste of my time and serves no purpose.  At least the other two have a bit of a point to them... I think.

This weekend has just gone by too quickly, and all I did was work on this one paper.  Meanwhile, I still have things that need to get done for school, including my report cards.

I'm feeling swamped.

Mood:  rushed

Ok, in my true-to-form style I am realizing that it's going to take me forever to make any progress at all on these papers that I have to finish for the grad classes.  I'm so out of the "writing papers for college" scene that I feel paralyzed as I sit in front of the processor.  So I'm going to have to find a way to crank them out this weekend.

 I went to a friend's chorus performance last night, and it was pretty good.  There were several numbers that made me cringe because they were out of tune, but overall it was OK.  She really wants me to join this group, but I don't think I will, at least not for now.  Part is that I don't have time to add an extra night out to my schedule, but the other part is that I think I'll go back to the group I was with last year, I enjoyed it, and it's closer, and it's in the community where I teach.

 What was nice about last night was that there was a sing-along and after we finished the first song, the man sitting next to me asked. "Why aren't you up there singing in this chorus?"  That was nice, I don't get complimented for my voice very often these days.

They are prediciting possibly accumulating snow for the Boston area tomorrow night.  Oh crud.  I don't want it to start this early, and I certainly dont want a school cancellation.

I did an awesome, almost spontaneous lesson the other day using primary sources.  I sort of last minute planned it, and it was a huge hit.  I used the schedule that Bronson Alcott made for his daughter's daily routine and two diary entries for a young girl living in Massachusetts in 1836.  For whatever reason, it totally worked, and the kids will be ready to start our new book on Monday.  We're going to be starting a great story called Running Out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

Guess I should stop avoiding the inevitable.

Mood:  incredulous

Holy mackeral!  It doesn't seem possible that I could have forgotten to write about one of the most important events of this century - MY RED SOX WON THE WORLD SERIES - AGAIN!!!!!

This has been another one of those magical times, though not as heavy with emotion as it was in 2004 (hey, 86 years is a long time to wait!).  I didn't go to as many games as I would have liked this year - tickets are near impossible to get.  I did manage to get to my first playoff game, and that was the one where Manny Ramirez hit a walk off homerun.  That might have been the most exciting moment that I've ever been in Fenway to enjoy.  It even beat being at the game when Big Papi broke the Sox homerun records the year before.

It was even more exciting as I have the child of one of the players in my class this year, so we were all even more involved than normal.  It was great for the other kids to see their classmate on the field after the win, and then to see him in the parade.  The entire class was given a championship hat by the family.  That was a really exciting day.  I keep telling the kids that this is something they need to remember and pay close attention to, as it doesn't happen as often as it seems.

It was a wonderful baseball season, and a great fall.

Now it's time to watch the Patriots.  This has the potential to be another historic year.

Mood:  don't ask

I am a co-ed again.  Four of us who teach together have decided to go back to get our Master's of Education degrees.  I'm doing it for the pay raise, it's pretty substantial.  It's expensive to do this, but there are long term benefits, especially as I head towards retirement.

We chose Cambridge College in Boston, mainly because it has a reputation of being for the working professional, and that it takes into account that the students have demanding full time jobs.  For the most part, this has been true.  But not in the Saturday class from hell.

The person who taught this class (I refuse to call her professor, as that implies an amount of professionalism and ability to impart knowledge in the given subject area) was nothing short of useless.  The class was supposed to be about alternative assessments, yet she never spoke of any assessment and had no idea what the life of a public school teacher was like. There are many more things I could go into, but I don't want to relive the horror.  I still have a huge paper that I need to write for that class. And it's all about writing in APA form, has little to do with content.  More than that, I resent writing a paper for a class where I learned NOTHING!!!!

 The other two courses that I took have been quite good. One is on Accelerated Learning, and I've already started using those techniques in my class.  The other is a required Professional Seminar, and it's been useful.  That one is on going until I finish writing the big paper that's required at the end of all this (called an ILP). I have a short paper, and the first chapter of my ILP due for this as well.

There were ten hours of Saturday workshops to attend.  The first four hours were great, the last two were OK (relaxation techniques).  But the two on the middle were useless.  Something about using art in counseling (there were no education workshops available, so we had to take these to get the hours in).  We made things.

This is the most expensive artsy-craftsy project I've ever done, when you take into account what the price of the workshops was!

Mood:  irritated

I spent yesterday working on getting the bedroom and closet torn apart and put back together.  I'm still not done, and I really want to see if I can focus and finish it today. I still own way too many clothes, even though I continue to make donations of older items.  I can't fit all that I have in the closet. 

I am addicited to research.  Part of being a history geek.  I'm still researching my children's author and poet of the early 1900's (and now his daughter and her friends), and I continue to be obsessed with them.  But now I've added a new search.  I want to know who owned my recently purchased powder horn.

I want to see if I can track down the man who owned it and then order his Civil War documents to use them with my class.  But I'm not having any luck yet, and I don't know if the man fought for the Union or the Confederacy.  I sort of hope it was for the Confederacy, seeing my author fought for the Union and I have all his records.  It would be nice to have things that represent both sides of the conflict.

Guess that's all for now, I should get back to cleaning.  I've released a bad allergy attack in myself with all this, so I should just keep going until it's all finished and then I can take a ton of pills.

Mood:  surprised

Hey, two days in a row.  Maybe I really am going to keep this up.  I think that part of what I need to do is not pressure myself to write a lot in one sitting.

I spent yesterday putzing around, then met my brother for dinner.  That was unexpected as I had just planned to go and drop off some pastry that I'd gotten for him at Mike's Bakery in Boston's North End. (I was taking a class at the Paul Revere House and the bakery was on the way home.)  He mentioned going to a small restaurant near the house where we grew up, so I went with him.  Better than the two of us eating alone.

I came home and watched the Red Sox game (they won 10-5), and spent time doing some school work.  I've tried to do a lot of summer reading that might be good for my class.  I finished up the cover of a reading journal that I want to use as a model for what I'd like the kids to do.

I modeled the journaling for the novel The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs by Betty Birney.  It's a cute book, and one that we encouraged all the kids to read this summer.

I have many things I'd like to get done around here today, but I don't really know if I'm going to get even a tenth of it done, but at least I'm sort of in the mood to get going.

Now all I need to do is actually stop sitting at the computer and get to the projects.  Avoiding distractions is always a challenge!