Tuesday is the new Friday

Today is Tuesday...but it feels like Friday because there's not school tomorrow. Ahhhh.....I need a few days off which aren't really off. I will be cleaning and cooking and painting and about a million other things. Tonight will be a long evening, staying at school until everything is done and my room is organized and grades are updated.

Last night a friend came over and helped me prime my living room...Cody and I will put the paint on tonight. I secretly hope he does it while I am still at school, we have found that his better half is really terrible at painting. Imagine klutzy me meets not paying attention me meets hyper me holding a paint brush...it's a mess! I will post pictures of the finished product.

In the mean time I will be doing knife usage labs (salsa recipe is below), observing the habits of four and five year old indians and pilgrams eat Thanksgiving Lunch, assist the completion of a money management unit wrap up packet, assess the correct verbal communication skills of my spanish 1 students and then make Sally Lunn Rolls with the Food Science students.

I hope you all have a marvelous Thanksgiving. I am thankful the most in my life for the people around me--we had a great weekend and for those of you who could not making it to our weekend. See you in December!!!!

Fresh Salsa

5 Roma tomatoes

1/2 large onion

1/2 bunch of cilantro-mostly leaves

Juice of 1 lime or 1/4 cup lime juice from a bottle

dash of salt

Chips

Finely chop roma's and onion. Cut off ends of stems of cilantro and pull off any bad leaves or sprigs. Push all of the good pieces into the bottom (may have to do this in 2 segments) of a glass-like the kind you drink out of-and use kitchen shears to chop through them making them tiny pieces. Put veggies in a bowl add lime juice and salt, Mix together well....if you are doing this for a party or something you should leave it out at room temp for an hour or so the refrigerate left overs. This will keep for about a week. To keep the flavor nice you may have to add some more lime juice and cilantro. Store extra cilantro loosly in a ziploc bag that is NOT zipped closed.

salsa image is from a blog-original blog link is here: http://mexicanfood.about.com/b/2007/06/27/learn-to-make-salsa.htm

Going international again

Anja is getting married!! The first or second weekend in June Anja will be getting married so Cody and I will fly out probably the week before and stay 2 or 3 days after with her family. I am very excited for her and Andy, they will make a wonderful family. So far I have found round trip tickets with one stop each way in New Jersey for $980 each!! Only down side is that there is a long lay over in New Jersey but that will be okay, give us some time in case of bad weather or delays. Hopefully this time I won't leave my boarding pass on the back of the toilet in the terminal! It is exciting to plan this trip with some fun vacation activities. Unfortunately we will not have the time or the dollars to go to Paris and see Claude Monet in the Louvre, but we will go to the National Museum in Berlin.I read they have some more pieces added to the Impressionism exhibit.....can you guess how excited Cody is?? I am so lucky to have a tolerant and caring husband.

We are super excited to see you all this weekend and to tailgate, it's gonna be chilly but hopefully someone got assigned to bring hot chocolate!

I can't get no...consentration

BAH! Mondays..500 million things to do, only 24hours. Yes, it's 7:45 and I am still at school-went to the board meeting as a teacher representative and used my time between 4:00 and 6:45 to get some stuff done. Nothing exciting just reworking some classes hopefully. I have big ideas but with next years budget cuts I am trying to assess the risk..try something new that the state may not provide funding for but will be more beneficial to my students OR stick with the same ole same ole classes and try to make them work? Decisions decisions. On an up side (yeah I'm gonna brag) the school board president tonight told me he thought I was doing a good job and had heard good things from others also. I am hoping his approval gives me a little job security.

Glitter

This morning I was dreading going to school. I really like school it's just that I sort of dislike going there after a rough day. I believe us teachers have decided that Wednesdays are by far the least fun day of the week. Nothing in particular that is bad except that the students are rediculous, there's too much week left to be excited for the weekend and not enough week left to get everything done. AND there is inservice tomorrow which is like Latin for "hurry up and wait, and do 15 activities then rush to your room in order to get some stuff done before the veteran teachers start coming around and talking to you and you get nothing done with your 4 hour work day in which you wanted to get caught up on grading and potentially clean out a cabinet!" Okay, maybe not latin but definately spanish...I should know, I teach it also. :)

Back to this morning, so I was dreading school and then after turning off of hwy 75 and onto hwy 58 there was a slow moving grain truck. I am all for farmers and don't mind driving behind them as long as they don't throw stuff on my car and chip my windshield (visual: me in my car, hair wet with my arm raised in a fist shaking it as a rock hits my windshield-but no chip!!).

As we come around a curve I see something large in the road and a black plastic trash bag fluttering from one edge as if it is trapped underneath this dark slimy mess. Cramming the breaks as the grain truck soars over it (we were going down hill) the dark slimy mess is pushed up into the sky but the rear tires and I am immediately encased in a snow globe effect of red, yellow and gold glitter. The dark slimy mess is actually a trash bag of leaves that has fallen out of the back of someone's truck and has been torn open. The morning's rain has dampened the leaves so that has they are sent airborne into the brilliant morning light red, yellow and gold glitter falls upon me. Luckily I am still cramming my breaks because the momentary heaven ceases as the leaves plaster to my windshield. The wipers just sort of slide them around as the damp fragile leaves are torn apart and trapped under my wipers.

So I just smiled and held onto my bits of glitter and called Kel to tell her that Thursdays are always better than Wednesdays.

Lemon Pound Cake

Friends,
I am making a very amazing lemon pound cake for our christmas get together. Somehow a little bit of heavy pound cake with light sweet lemony finish is amazingly refreshing on a blustery winter day especially after all of the heavy Thanksgiving/Christmas desserts...and for you lemon-haters (yeah, you know who you are!) I am also going to make another dessert. I really need some baking therapy. If you have been craving anything let me know and I will experiment. I want to make something that will WOW! a crowd but I can alter so my students can make it. Thus I should get practicing!!