Ooohhh...spooky.

The Halloween party went well--a fun time was had by all, I think. D and I spent all of Saturday getting ready for it, making deviled eyeballs and finger cookies (so realistic looking, some people wouldn't eat them!) and decorating a bit. Our friends came all dressed up, and it was a fabulous time. I brought the fingers to school today to gross out my homeroom kids. I think it worked. Some of them ate a few.

I am dreading tomorrow. I'm thinking the kids will be wound up, either on a sugar high or a sugar low. Plus, we had a kid from the high school ride by our front door this morning and use a BB gun to shoot at a few of our kids. There's a warrant out for his arrest and hopefully they can get him before he causes more trouble. This stinks--our school has made so many improvements in the past few years and yet we still have a reputation for being a "bad school" because our neighborhood isn't the greatest. We do all this wonderful stuff, our 8th graders had the highest ITBS scores in the district last year, but I'm sure the media will play this incident like the most horrible thing happened here. This is ridiculous.

In the doghouse

I must publish this erratum, as per my conversation with D last night:

I did not make him promise to help get ready for the party, he arranged his trip so that he could be back early enough to help get ready. Sorry, honey. :-)

Speaking of which...I need to get to the dollar store to buy some cheap decorations. Fake spider webs, anyone? Also, a friend is coming over tonight to help bake cookies that look like witches' fingers. Mmmm. I think I will also buy a few pumpkins and have folks carve their own to take home.

Totally unrelated...I figured out how to program our programmable thermostat. It now goes down to 55 when we're not home during the day and 65 at night (70 when we're home and awake, any colder and I get the shivers). The program's different for the weekends, too. Hopefully this will save us a few bucks this winter. I hear the cost of natural gas is going to be high because of Katrina.

Alone again

• D is gone to a conference in Denver. It's his first poster session as a grad student, and he's the #1 author on the poster. I hope he's schmoozing with a lot of physicists; who knows when he'll meet someone who could give him a post-doc? Too bad it's not during the summer, I could have gone with him and seen my folks. Actually, my dad was here this weekend for a visit.
• Must do lots of preparation, cleaning, etc. for our Halloween party on Saturday.
• We FINALLY got our wedding picture order back. Now on to the sorting of millions of proofs!!
• Just sat through a half-day inservice. Somewhat interesting but I was just not in the mood to sit through such a thing today...I kept trying to hide my yawns. Just had another one, it must be residual effects of the inservice.
• D comes back on Friday. I made him promise that he'd help clean up before the party.

Strange but true...ravings of the less-than-sane

I am having really strong salt cravings lately. I just sucked down an entire (mini) bag of popcorn, and I've been eating pretzels at home like there's no tomorrow. Perhaps my brain is being used so much that the sodium-potassium pumps are running low on sodium.

Or perhaps I am just broken, one of the two.

My room at school is a MESS. My organizational methods have fallen through and I'm too tired to go around and pick up all the junk that is cluttering my counters. I need some people to serve detention so that I can get my room clean again. :-)

ITBS is almost over for the year, thank the Powers That Be. The PTBs have been kind to me lately--my life is finally settling into somewhat of a routine. D will be out of town again next week for a conference. So soon, you say? Well, yes. Luckily he is here for both weekends and so I won't have to find folks to keep me company then.

We are throwing a big party on the 29th...I picked up a Halloween costume when I was home for Labor Day and just decided that it would be an awesome idea to put it to use. Plus we have been meaning to throw a housewarming party for AGES. This is the first party we've ever thrown--in the years we were in that tiny apartment, the most people we had over was 4 (6 counting the kids). Honestly, I didn't want to invite people over because the place was so tiny and college-dorm-esque.

We went shopping this weekend for picture frames--we had art (souvenirs) from the honeymoon that we wanted framed as well as a few other things. We ended up having 2 pieces custom framed because they aren't anywhere close to standard sizes. The total came to over $400 (yipes!!) but well worth it as the pieces are going to be GORGEOUS additions to our home. Plus, it's a one-time expense...we can now put these on our walls forever. And we didn't buy expensive souvenirs abroad, so this counts as that too. (Rationalize enough and ANY expense becomes worthwhile...I'm getting scarily good at this.)

I should be grading papers or cleaning up my messy classroom...instead I'm killing time until my 20-minute chair massage. Aaahhhh. The sweet feeling of procrastination. What was that saying? Hard work and effort may pay off in the end, but laziness always pays off NOW.

Read the directions to yourself while I read them aloud.

They say...

1. Try not to use a sarcastic tone while reading the directions to the dreaded ITBS. (Another teacher suggested using a TV announcer voice to do it...amusing but against the rules. Monotone might be funny too, but I don't think I could pull it off.)
2. Endeavor (in vain) not to show your contempt for the exceedingly ridiculous law that makes these tests make or break our school. (School in need of assistance, my &*$%.)
3. Amuse yourself silently or get work done on your computer while your kids are sweating and praying that they know the right answers.
4. Encourage your kids to do their best while you curse the time and money we have to waste on these stupid high-stakes tests instead of using it for real learning.
5. Try not to think about all the things that you can't control that affect how the kids will test. Did they sleep enough? Did they eat enough? Do their parents give them love and support and help them with their homework?

When these kids reach voting age, will they remember what NCLB did to them? Will they remember the pressure, the time, the crazy high stakes? Let's hope they vote as soon as they can...and vote the party who did this to us out of office.

Funny of the day

The President is getting his daily war briefing. The final sentence of it reads: "Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed."
"OH, NO!" the President exclaims, "That's terrible!"
His staff is stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the President sits quietly, head in hands.
Finally, the President looks up and asks, "Just how many is a brazillion?"