I'm here. Now I'm leaving.

We have satellite! Despite the downpour that occured all day long. Hooray.

In other news, I had a crappy day. I had to lead a meeting where we had too little time to cover too many important issues. It was a rainy day, so the kids were squirrely. I have had a headache all week from the wacked out barometric happenings. Someone keeps leaving prank messages on my voicemail at school. Report cards are due to go home this week, so I am scrambling to get them done. I am required to call in every day at 5:30 to see if they want me for jury duty the next day. And it seemed as though every time I turned around there was some horrible emergency needing to be dealt with. Bleh.

David Wilcox is coming to San Diego in April, though. And I even know someone locally who would be interested in going with me. I have always wanted to see him live. So, it hasn't been all bad.

Oh. And if Amber is reading this:

I tried to post a message on your site and couldn't. I tried to send you an email and found I had lost your address. I just read about your loss and I want you to know I am very sorry. I hope your father is in a better place and that you and your family can be a comfort to each other. Peace be with you all.

Now, I am going to bed to try to sleep off some of this nasty migraine. Night-night.

A frustration and a success

I have told anyone and everyone who will listen about how wonderful my class is this year. I have an amazing number of dedicated, motivated, enthusiastic learners. We are having a lot of fun and doing a lot of learning. I wish I could take even a tiny bit of credit for the accomplishments of those individuals, but since they were just as wonderful last year, I don't feel I had much to do with it. If anything, I have spend more time telling these kiddos to relax and ease up on themselves. I had to have a long conversation with one little girl this afternoon explaining to her that four As and a B+ make for an admirable report card and that she didn't need to spend the whole evening crying about her failure to receive straight A+s. I especially feel her frustration, since she had 5 As before taking the rediculous district assessments. "A"s that she earned through hard work and dedication. Because of the "standardized" tests and the stress that goes along with them, she feels that she is a failure despite 12 weeks of amazing effort. Our final agreement was that we would ignore that B+ with the understanding that multiple choice tests like the ones we just took only tell me if they know how to take multiple choice tests. Since everything she did all trimester shows me that she knows how to learn and how to read, write, and figure math at an appropriate level, that is what we are going to focus on.

On a more positive note, I have one little guy who has been struggling for...well, basically forever. He has a challenging homelife, and his self-esteem is in the toilet. He used to sit in the back of my room and bang his head on the cabinets when he got frustrated by an assignment. Last week, I had to tell him that he was in danger of failing 5th grade. He had several Fs and his highest grade was a C-. I handed him a pack of assignments that had never been turned in (his biggest problem is not academic ability, but instead lack of confidence and a consequent refusal to even try) and told him that if he spent a week making academics his number one priority I thought he could bring all his grades up to at least passing. Although we have tried things like this in the past (always starting strong, but fading quickly), he put serious effort into it this time. He spent time before school and after school, during recess, and during lunch working on these assignments. He always chose to work in close proximity to me so he could ask for help when he needed it, but he did all of the work on his own. As of today, even with the district test scores, he had pulled every grade up to passing. Some of them are pretty close calls (60.9% close), but he is not failing anything. You should have seen the look on his face today when he realized that HE had managed to make such a difference. He was especially amazed at how relatively easy it had been. It wasn't the agonizing torture he thought it would be.

In a perfect world, he would realize that it made more sense for him to do the work when it was assigned, but I am not going to hold my breath for that. I would be happy if he just decided that he was, in fact, capable of succeeding when it came to 5th grade work. I know he can do it, and now (hopefully) he does too.

Tuesday

That's when we will find out if my lack of posting has really been because of the crappy internet connection we have or if that has all be a big, fat excuse on my part. Thanks to Daddy, we did some research into satellite internet access in this area, and we found a place with reasonable pricing and bandwidth allowances. On Tuesday, they will be hooking us up. I will be able to surf the net at speeds that have been unknown to me since moving out into the Boondocks. We will also be able to have numerous computers online at a time (or at all times, if we wish!), so I will no longer need to boot Mikey when I want to check my mail and drop y'all a line. Hooray!

Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Washington

Just in time to prevent me from total mental breakdown, we are rewarded with 2 three day weekends in a row. Lincoln and Washington - you are my two favorite gentlemen.

Yesterday, I plowed through a massive pile of grading. Today I did nothing. Well...I read, I took a long bath, I took a long nap, I played Elebits. Enjoying much and accomplishing very little. Tomorrow, I will go in to school to complete necessary planning and prepping and decorating. Next weekend, I will (hopefully) make progress on my masters class. With a little luck I will manage to do all this without getting sick (thank goodness for Airborne!) or going crazy!

Wii!!

Mikey finally got his Wii. (No, I'm not being vulgar. It's a game system!) Although I am not at all interested in playing a "typical" game on it, since using the motion sensitive remote for things like running around the Zelda world or driving cars isn't remotely interesting (haha. I am punny!). I do, however, like some of the more unique games available for this system. I am somewhat hooked on tossing rooms in search of Elibits and I am seriously addicted to the rush of saving lives in Trauma Center. I even enjoy the baseball, tennis, and bowling bits of Wii Games. Anyone else out there enjoying their Wii? (Okay, that time I was being a tiny bit vulgar.)

Perspective

It's all about perspective, isn't it? This evening I was walking with the dogs. It had rained all day and we were all glad to take advantage of a break in the clouds. I looked at our trees and thought about how unimportant I am to them. I looked at the huge gray masses slowing drifting across the sky and realized that they didn't care I was there. I gazed around the world and knew that I didn't matter at all. Little, insignificant me. I am nothing but a microbe in this gigantic universe.

Then Mia and Trooper ran up to me. As they sat in front of me, waiting for a kind word, a pat on the head, (who am I kidding) a cookie, they gazed at me adoringly. And I realized that I am their whole universe.

It's all about perspective.

Busy!

I'm a person who likes to stay a little ahead of the game. I can procrastinate like crazy when I have to write something (Apparently I can only write if there's a deadline hanging over my head. This is something I learned repeatedly in college.), but for the most part I get things done in a timely manner. It makes me nervous to let projects go undone for too long.

This is perhaps why I have been feeling like I am about to cross the stateline between Calm and Overwhelmed. For the last month, I have been working like a maniac to keep ahead of the deadlines that keep coming at me fast and furious. I have become involved in so many things - inservices, school projects, classroom experiments, observations, etc. - that I don't have enough time in the day to devote to all of them.

I suppose I should stop letting people volunteer me for things, but many of them have been out of honor. It feels good to get recognition and I like knowing that I am trusted and respected. Since I can't back out of anything I am currently involved in, I need to just make it to the end of these projects and then avoid starting up too many new ones. Hopefully that will be enough to keep me from moving across that dreaded state line into Overwhelmed.

I've got to run, though. Today is one of the many days recently when I have had to leave my lovely classroom for meetings and trainings. Don't want to be late!

Play!

Yesterday, we had our second annual Groundhog's Day party. It was a small one, with 6 of the 8 families invited cancelling for some reason or another. Never-the-less, a splendid time was had by all who did show, especially the 4 small girls, who had a blast searching for Groundhog shadows in the yard. For the first time in weeks, the sun was out in all its glory. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. Back in MN, I would have been worried, what with the threat of extended winter, but around here I am almost tempted to think this means that this winter weather is on its way out. I know, I should know better...what can I say?

Today, My pal "K" and I headed to Solana Beach for lunch and a play. We have season tickets at a rep theatre and so far, we have greatly enjoyed them. Today's play was a Depression Era drama by Eugene O'neill. It was well done, if a bit too melancholy for me. Any excuse to get together with "K" for conversation is wonderful, though.