I accomplished a lot this week...

Well, this has been an interesting week. Last weekend I finished reading the new Harry Potter book. I liked the way the series ended, I guess I won't give any details in case any of you are planning on reading it still. The book was kind of how I guessed it might end, and I was happy with that. I am a little sad the series is over, but I will definitely be looking forward to seeing the new movies.

This week I also finished teaching summer school. This summer was challenging, but good overall. I learned a lot about how to approach the beginning of the school year in the fall. I don't begin work again until the last week of August, but I plan on going to three district trainings between now and then, so my summer seems way too short. I think next year, if we can afford it, I won't teach summer school.

More to come...

Harry Potter Mania...

Last night Gabe and I were walking around downtown LG and saw a bunch of kids in capes and everything waiting to buy the new Harry Potter book at Borders. We saw some adults too all dressed up. It was weird, it was like Halloween or something last night downtown, not just because of the dressed up people, but because so many people were out and about, even around 10pm. (Downtown is usually dead by 9pm.) Well, I pre-ordered my book, so it better be coming today. I woke up at 8am, half because I usually get up at 6am and half because I wanted to see if my book had been delivered yet. Unfortunately it has not, but that is ok because I have to take care of a few things before I settle down and begin my HP reading marathon. (i.e. shower, finish all my grading for the weekend, do some laundry, and start a couple projects for my night school.)

Speaking of which, I better go get those things done!

What I did today...

Went to work (the kids weren't too bad today), graded a ton of tests, wrote an essay and prepared a presentation for my night class, gave T-Bone a lift, made copies at the district office, bought some props for my presentation at the party store, bought lunch (and barely had time to eat it), built some polyhedra and other geometric solids for my presentation, went to night school, came home, ate dinner, and now it's time to go to bed. I had nooo free time today (except for the 5 minutes I am spending to write this ;)!

Tomorrow I am getting a filling at the dentist after work...

I can't wait until this week (and summer school) is over!!

I don't feel like grading papers

I have a mountain of papers I really really don't feel like grading right now. I also wanted to clean the house up before Gabe gets home, but I don't feel like doing that either. I think it's because I haven't been getting enough sleep, getting up at 6am every morning is too early!

Gah, I'm such a lazybones right now! I think I will try to go get some housework done, we'll see how it goes...

P.S. Gabe and I are going to get a new car since his is almost dead. We're leaning towards a black 2007 Nissan Versa. We're going to get a key-less entry system, built-in satellite radio, and a sunroof (among a few other things).

Jury Duty = Fun Times

Today was a looong day. I really did not want to go to work today, I can't wait until summer vacation (i.e. August). One if my students are pregnant so she had pretty bad morning sickness today and threw up at the beginning of class in the middle of the classroom. It took about 20 minutes for the custodian to come and clean it up, and the VP and I had all the students wait outside with us. After that class went on as usual. My students are starting to get louder since they are beginning to get to know each other better, but it's not too bad overall. I had to wait a couple of times today for my students to quiet down which was kind of annoying.

After work I had to go straight to jury duty near downtown (I get off work around noon since it's summer school). After waiting around in the waiting room for about two hours, my group of jurors were told our case had been dismissed, and so we were dismissed from jury duty, yay!

Time to grade some papers and then dinner, woo hoo!

I'm still here!!

Wow, I thought I would be updating this thing a lot more than I have been. My last post was around when I first started teaching! Well, the school year is over now, and I have a bit more free time than I did before!

This school year went by so fast and I learned sooo much! I had a lot of great support at my job, which helped me have a very successful first teaching experience. I was teaching a remedial algebra class, so about half my students got D's and F's (which is the status quo for these classes), but I feel like I really made a positive impact on a lot of my students. It was fun, but soooo much work! It is really hard teaching all day and then going to school at night. I will be really glad when I am done going to night school and can just focus on working.

One bonus to working full time is the money. This is the first time in my life I have worked full time and have made a decent amount of money. It's so nice being able to buy nice furniture and clothes. I have some debt from student loans and credit cards, but now I can start paying some of it back (and have enough money left-over to not be forced to eat only canned food at the end of the month, haha). Gabe and I earn enough now to just (barely) cover all of our expenses without using credit cards.

Next year I will be teaching 20 minutes away from my house instead of 40, which will be sooo nice! There is nothing worse than having a bad day with bratty kids and then having to drive 40 minutes just to get home. Next year I will be teaching at a middle school instead of a high school. I am still not sure if I like teaching middle school or high school better, hopefully my experience this coming year will help me figure that out. I will be teaching three periods of 6th grade math, and two periods of 8th grade Algebra. I worked at a middle school as a tutor for two years, so I have a pretty good idea about what to expect, we'll see what happens. This school is giving me a lot of nice perks like a laptop!, and a $4,000 sign-on bonus. A few people at my night school teach in the same district and seem to like it. I also worked at a middle school in the same district last summer as a tutor/teaching assistant and really liked it. The students are not all honor roll material, but most of them are nice kids and I'm getting pretty used to working with struggling math students. It will be so shocking for me someday when I teach an honor's math class...haha...I won't know what to do with myself.

Right now I am teaching summer school at a high school about 10 minutes from my house. I am teaching geometry which can be fun, but given the limited resources I have, it's kind of challenging. I don't even have a teacher's edition of the textbook, and we have no rulers, protractors, or compasses. I was told I could order some supplies, but students would have to share and orders take almost a week to process, and I cannot order anything until the end of the second week of summer school! My class and I have been making do with what we have, but I have had to buy a few things out of my pocket because I cannot teach without them, argh! Summer school is only 6 weeks long, and classes are from 7:30am-12:15pm, so I get out really early now. It's nice, I usually only stay after class about an hour to grade papers and plan the next day and then I can leave without any work to bring home. So that is why I have time to write this blog now! It's weird because Gabe just started a new job where he doesn't get home until around 5pm, so I am at home by myself a lot now. It's kind of nice having so much alone time with nothing to do.

Lately when I get home from work I will eat lunch while watching a streaming movie on netflix.com. They have a lot of good streaming movies. Since our computer is hooked up to our TV, I can watch the streaming movies on our TV. The movies are high quality (not blurry), and they have a lot to choose from. Today I watched the first episode of the American version of The Office. It was pretty good, but I'm not sure if it's something I can really see myself getting into. Maybe I need to watch a couple more episodes or something.

Oh, Gabe and I also got pet fish. We got a small 3 gallon tank and two freshwater tropical fish. We found out that when you first get a tank, you have to set the right PH and bacteria levels in the tank before fancy fish can survive in your tank. To set the right PH and bacteria levels you get more hearty "starter fish" that can basically survive any type of conditions in your tank. We are going to have our starter fish about two more weeks and then we will be able to get the fancier fish. We named our two fish Alpha and Beta. Here is what they (kind of) look like:


Anyway, I think that is about all that is new with me right now. I can't wait until the new Harry Potter movie comes out and the last book (I already pre-ordered mine at Barnes and Noble). I wonder how the series will end...I hope it's not a lame ending. (Like the lame ending in Gilmore Girls.)

Alright, I'm going to go get a snack before I have to head off to night school!

Ack!!

Ack!! I made this long post but forgot to save it as a draft while I was in the midsts of it and my computer froze...doh!

Highlights:

• New job teaching high school math...I start next week. (Which means some good $$$ for me!)

• I got my diploma in the mail yesterday, yay!

• Gabe and I have been cleaning the house and it looks pretty darn good.

• Lulu got hurt again playing Wii (she has a Wii curse).

• Google Reader is the BEST thing ever!!!! You can subscribe to your friends' Flickr pages and any blogs (including myspace blogs) all at one place and it notifies you when there are new pictures/entries so you don't have to check 10 pages for updates...it's so cool!
  

Homework....

It's harder to update this thing than I thought it would be. It always feels like I have hardly any free-time now that I work all day and go to school at night three days a week. I started subbing at the high school, and it has been really good. I have worked mostly with middle school and elementary school kids in the past, and high school is so much easier. (At least the two high schools in this area anyway.) I'm surprised that the students haven't been giving me a harder time, I thought for sure they would be trying to take advantage of the fact that I'm a younger sub. A few times when I have subbed I gave the class work to do and they worked on it in almost complete silence for over half the period. It's been a bit harder subbing when it's a block schedule day at the high schools. Students seem really ready to get out of class after the first 40 or 50 minutes (the periods are 95 minutes) so that makes it a little hard. (I'm ready myself to move on to the next class after the first 40 or 50 minutes.) I have gotten to teach a few math lessons (I'm one of math subs for the district...maybe the only one...I'm not sure) and that has been a lot of fun. I have to study some of the stuff before class though to remember the material. I could barely remember how to graph conic sections (parabolas, ellipses, etc.) when I was subbing an Algebra II class.

School is not bad. I have to write an essay before every class practically, but it's not hard. I actually have to work really hard today on a 10-page paper that's due on Wednesday. I'm so busy during the week that there is pretty much no way I would be able to do this during the week. In all of my classes we have to set-up observations of teachers in action, and it's so annoying to set these up. I don't personally know any high school or middle school math teachers, so I have been contacting and observing teachers from my high school. It has been a little weird seeing my old teachers and observing them as an adult, but it has been really interesting too. I had a lot of good math teachers when I was in high school. Maybe I should contact some of my old middle school math teachers, I wonder if they would even remember me! Teachers are so busy, I feel like I'm really asking a lot to even just set-up an observation of them.

Last night Lulu and Tony came over and we went out to dinner at Sonoma Chicken Coop. Gabe loves that place, I always have trouble finding something I really like there. I decided to try the personal pizza, it wasn't bad! After dinner we all went back to Gabe's and my place to play some Wii! Gabe bought a Wii about a month after they came out and he went out and bought a fancy flat-screen TV for it right after he got it...hehe. Our living room is really nice now. We got rid of a bunch of junk and bought a cool TV/media-center to help us organize our stuff. There is a lot more room in our living room now, which is ideal for Wii playing. (Even though Lulu totally slammed her finger in our new TV-center...poor Lulu!) It looks like this (our TV-stand, not Lulu's finger):
We played some intense rounds of Wii bowling and then tennis. We were all totally breaking a sweat when we were playing tennis. We played girls against boys and Lulu and I were having a hard time keeping up with Gabe and Tony. Gabe has played Wii tennis for soooo many hours by himself, I felt as though our skill levels were not equal! (I wish I ould put our Mii's up here, Tony's looks just like him!)

Then we played multi-player Wario-Ware. Gabe had to beat the game to unlock the multi player mode of the game so he was really good again, but I think we all did pretty well. The animations from that game are soooo random. Gabe and I have the DS version of the game, and it's just as random and fun!
Alright, I guess I better get started on my paper now, boo!

Whew!

Yay, Eid added me to her list of blogger friends. I guess I am now totally sucked into the world of blogging...I wonder if this makes me more nerdy...yes...I think it does...

So I just got all my stuff in to begin substitute teaching and I may be starting tomorrow. When I went in to the district office to turn all my stuff in, my co-workers all wanted to see wedding pictures from my trip. (I have been working in the district office since the summer while I was finishing up my BA. Now that I have my BA I can begin subbing instead of doing office work.) I had not even mentioned to very many of them that I was even engaged, so they were all shocked when I told them I was getting married about a month ago. Sometimes I wish we had had a big wedding ceremony and everything, but I am mostly glad we didn't. Since we were gone, I have so much catch-up homework to do. It's weird how each of my classes are only 6 weeks long, the compactness makes for a lot of reading and homework. Oh well, these classes are a lot easier than all the upper-division math classes I have been taking the last year or two. Other than school, I have been trying to relax. A few days ago I was feeling pretty anxious and stressed and I caught myself snapping at Gabe, and I think I made him feel a little bit bad. :( I have been trying to relax a little bit more and take better care of myself. A couple of days ago I did my first real workout on my new exercise bike. It's so nice and compact! I actually folds up like an ironing board. I have also been trying to eat better. I bought a lot of fruit last time I went shopping so I have been snacking on that. Another thing I have been doing to take care of myself is play my new DS Gabe got me for Christmas. It's so cute! He got me the pink DS and I got the Princess Peach game for it. My DS looks like a make-up compact or something, it's so cool! Sometimes Gabe and I play Puzzle Bobble together through our DS's.

Think I'll go get back to work.

Welcome to my new blog!

I got sick of using the MySpace blog since MySpace is down half the time. I think this more reliable blog will made things a little less frustrating! I'm going to try to update this on a more regular basis so you may want to bookmark this page. =) I got a new gmail e-mail account so I set this up at the same time.

So so so...you may have heard, yes, I did get married!!! Gabe and I tied the knot on January 17th, 2007 in Kauai, Hawaii, woo hoo! The wedding was exactly what we wanted, e-mail me if you would like the web address to our wedding website. Our website pretty much sums up everything wedding-related (after looking through the site you'll see Gabe made it...hehe). Thanks to Lulu, Eid, Joce, Olga, and Robin for two super nice bachelorette presents and for throwing such a fun party!

More to come sooooon!