Mood:  not sure

So it's the end of another year.

I've never been a fan of New Year's Eve, it seems like a stupid holiday to me, and just a reason for people to act like morons.  I don't get why everyone gets so excited about a new year.  It just makes me feel older and when I was young it made me feel sad.

I'll go to my brother's tonight, have Chinese food, watch a movie and go home.  Big whoop.  I'd like to totally stay home, but they give me a ton of grief about doing things like that, so I won't.  Don't want to be thought of as anti-social.

The good news of the weekend, is that the Patriots finished their season a perfect 16-0.  I know it's only the regular season, and that without the Super Bowl win it will mean nothing. Yadada yadada yadada, it's still a huge and wonderful achievement and I wish all those negative idiots would just shut up and accept what they've done as being impressive.

I don't know how I let these days fly by me, but I have.  I've done a few things, but not what I had planned.  I got distracted by doing things on the computer and created a couple of photo albums to have printed through Walgreens.  Only because I had a coupon.  It took forever to put them together, but both are nice.  One is of generations of my family, the other is on the author I am researching.

Now I have to go and fix my stupid vacuum cleaner - again.

Mood:  chatty

I am a huge fan of Christmas decorations.  I think they look really tacky in the daylight, but when night falls and the houses light up, I just love drving around to look at them.  Especially if there is snow on the ground, which around here has been plentiful this year.

There is an exception to the decoration thing though, and that's the giant blow-up deals.  One is OK, but it's the homes that have multiples that I just don't get.  They have about 20 feet of front lawn and there is barely an inch of room available because there's a giant snowglobe, a santa (or two), soldiers, snowmen, elves, and who knows what else.  It's even worse when they have them on the porch, and they practically block the door.  In some cases the decorations are even close to being as tall as the house.  I guess some people think it's attractive, but it's just not my taste.

I kind of long for the retro decorations from the 50's and 60's.

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!