One Year Ago

I meant to post this on May 20th, but I was too busy being lazy that day. Let's pretend it's May 20th.

A year ago today (after a lovely whirlwind trip to Florida) we signed the closing papers on our very own home. We both worked in Idaho Falls, but still lived in Rexburg, so we went to Olive Garden for dinner and then drove back to our little apartment above Porter's until Sunday the 23rd (?) when we moved in. We still had a week left of school after that, and then Chad's parents came to help us get settled in.

This year we sat inside (it was rainy or chilly, or both - I don't remember now) and drank Martinelli's to celebrate our one year anniversary of home ownership. There's still a lot we would like to do if we had unlimited funds (fence, extra bathroom, possibly an addition, garage, shed, patio/deck - wouldn't that be nice?!) but alas, our little home will have to do for now. At least we got it painted. The extra bathroom sure would come in handy though, because next time people visit, we might have to rent a Port-A-Potty. Although, I heard on the Today Show that adding a bathroom is never a good investment because you won't get as much for it when you sell as it cost you to put it in. Maybe we'll just add plumbing and put a toilet in the corner of our bedroom.

Right now we'll just be happy if we can conquer the dandelions that are rapidly overtaking our yard. In the scriptures it says that God cursed the ground with weeds when Adam and Eve were booted out of the Garden. I fully blame Eve for the abundant dandelions in my yard.

Anyways - here are a couple of pictures:

A year ago: (the lawn and sandbox look a LOT better)


Today:

... don't mind the dead Christmas tree laying over there like a beached whale...

We love our little home.

Explanation

... I know my complaining about my "job" must make me sound like a wanny (which apparently is not a real word).

And maybe you're thinking I'm sounding like many of my generation who think they are "entitled" to things.
But. I worked my butt off in high school. I got good ACT scores. I got good grades and good scholarships in college to graduate at the top of my class, magna cum laude, so I could eventually be the best teacher I could be. I never did anything if it was less than my best. I scored high on my Praxis test and received my state teaching certificate. So yeah, I feel like I am "entitled" to a little respect from a bunch of 15 year olds, and maybe even (heaven forbid) an adult every once in while.

Crazy, I know.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can

4 more days, including today.

I took Thursday and Friday off because there wasn't anything for me to be doing. There isn't anything for me to be doing right now either, but here I am at work.

On Thursday I found out that I officially do not have a job next year. You can imagine my reaction.

I took pretty much everything home out of my "office" over the last couple of weeks so that on the last day of school I can just leave. Also - a lot of it was stuff that I never used. I had my career portfolio, my student teaching portfolio, my resource binder (everything I need to know about teaching band) and a bunch of other things. So I took them all home. I knew my office would be used as a practice room (which it always is) while I was gone, and I didn't want there to be anything left that kids could possibly screw with. I was assured that if anyone was in my "office" while I was gone, they would be supervised. I knew that was a bunch of crap, because every time my "office" is used while I'm gone, kids find a way to make a mess. And generally? I like the kids I work with. But not when they're idiots. And for some reason, they spend a lot of time being idiots. Especially when there isn't an adult around.

These are the things I left in my office: My old laptop, in its case (it's passworded), a blanket, and an open sleeve of saltine crackers in the top drawer of my desk. I should have known they would be rifling through my desk. So when I came in this morning, I opened my drawer to find saltine crackers scattered and smashed all on the inside of my desk. Seriously? I was pretty angry. And since I know there won't be any consequences for anyone even if I did make an issue out of it, I can't say anything to them. What I want to say is, "Thanks a lot for smashing crackers all over the inside of my desk. Why do you have to be so dumb?" But my guess the response will be about like when, at the beginning of the year, I had to tell a bunch of idiot boys "Thanks for throwing a penny at my face. It's a good thing you missed. Who threw it?" (by the way, I knew who threw it - and they weren't man enough to say they did) and they all stared at me for a few seconds before the teacher, and the class moved on. Nobody was disciplined and the problem continued throughout the rest of the year. Just last month when a teacher covering the same class was also hit in the head with a penny, the students responsible got Saturday detention, or in-school suspension or something. Apparently I'm not important enough for kids to actually get in trouble for being jerks to me. THAT'S why I hate this job. I have no authority to do anything. I've been reassured that I would be backed up if I ever need to discipline anyone, but that has not been my experience. Mostly it gets ignored, or the students' word is taken over mine. THAT'S why I hate this job.

Let's ask any other teacher in the school to put 10-12 teenage boys in their office unsupervised for 90 minutes and see what they say. But I'm not a teacher, so why would I care? Like I have anything in my office I wouldn't want people to mess with. Except that I am a certified teacher in the state of Idaho, and if you give me a space and say it's my personal space at work, then I expect you to stay out of it. At least I had enough foresight to remove anything valuable (my clarinet, or guitar, and every other personal item) but I honestly did not even think saltines would be an issue. It didn't even cross my mind.

So, Hallelujah, I don't have a job next year.

I was thinking - maybe I don't want to post this publicly on the internet, lest a future employer find it and think I hate kids. But I think they would understand my issue with having them make a mess out of my personal things/space. I don't think it's an unreasonable request for students to respect my property.

Things They Should Bring Back

1. Planters PB Crisps - I had a dream about these a few weeks ago, and tried to describe them to Chad. He kept telling me I was thinking of Circus Peanuts. No way. I began to think I had just conjured them up in my childhood imagination, but after a quick google search, there they were.


2. 3D Doritos - Best. Chips. Ever.


3. Crest Whitening Expressions Fresh Citrus Breeze Toothpaste - They still make the vanilla and cinnamon kinds, but they discontinued the orange one. Aquafresh attempts to make an "orange" toothpaste, but it is gross.


4. Tamagotchis - I could really use one to soak up some of my boredom right about now. Nothin' like waiting for the little alien to hatch and grow up, and then cleaning the poop off of the screen. In 4th grade, our class had to be told to leave our Tamagotchis (not cell phones) in our backpacks and please turn the sound off so they wouldn't be beeping at us all day.

(I found this picture on a "Top ten terrible tech products" list. They obviously don't know what they're talking about.)

5. Warheads - Not that I really want some, but what happened to these? Do they still make them? We used to save up our allowance to buy them because you weren't cool unless you had Warheads. The lemon ones were the worst. Sometimes I'd rinse off the sour part and eat the candy.
(P.S. Remember when dipping your lollipop in water was the only way to eat a lollipop? Kids are weird.)



That's all I can think of. What would you add?

Stake Conference

A few weeks ago, we had Stake Conference. For any of you non-LDS people out there, it's just like a regional church meeting. They have a special meeting Saturday night just for the adults in the area. President Clark is our Area Seventy (Harvard guy at BYU-I) so he came to speak. He did sort of a discussion, as he was fond of doing at BYU-I as well.

He draws this picture on the board, and apparently I was the only one in the congregation immature enough to catch the giggles. He added "of Gospel" to the left hand side before I could get a picture. But it's still funny.



His point was how if we have high standards of our children, and we enforce them with low love, we get poor results. We only want to enforce high standards with high love. But for some reason he had to abbreviate "standards" to "STD's" which makes it a whole different kind of chart.

Wildlife

A few weeks ago, Chad and I were feeling the itch to get out of Idaho Falls. The weather was pretty good, so we went for a drive up and around the foothills east of Ammon (where a body was found last year around this time... right before we closed on our house...).

On our drive, we saw a bald eagle swoop down and pick at some road kill. Seriously! Right in front of us! It was pretty awesome. I have never seen one so close before (except maybe at a zoo or something)Then a couple of deer ran across the road right in front of the car. I told Chad I don't think I had ever had that happen to me before. We weren't so close that we had to slam on the brakes or anything, but we got to watch them bound across the street. The first one tried to jump the barbed wire fence on the other side and didn't quite make it, getting his hind legs caught before awkwardly tumbling to the ground, getting up and running off. The second one made it look like a piece of cake.

Maybe you should come to Idaho sometime to see for yourself!! If you go to Yellowstone, a buffalo might walk right by your window (as happened to us last summer). And you might get attacked by a bear, but such is the price of enjoying the great outdoors...

On our drive, we ended up in Swan Valley where there's a little gas station that sells scoops of square ice cream. I was not impressed with the ice cream - I don't know if it's something about the square scoop, but the ice cream was really frozen - like, had ice crystals in it. Personally, I like my ice cream creamy.

Doesn't Idaho sound like such a nice place to visit???

The Birthday Boy

(pictures to follow)

Thanks in large part to me, Chad had a pretty lame birthday weekend.

When he got off work on Friday, he had to drive straight over to a local middle school where one of the choirs was performing, and I had to accompany them. That took until about 7:00. We came home and Chad opened his gift from me (in the back of the Subaru because I couldn't move it). I got him a 12" compound sliding miter saw with laser guide because he has been talking about one for a long time. More specifically "one that can cut angles". I had been watching them since January, and this seemed like a good deal at Harbor Freight. So now he can build all sorts of who-knows-what. (Let me just say, I did not realize what a beast that machine is...)
Other awesome gifts Chad got:
The seasons of News Radio on DVD from his parents and Kari & Eric.
Something from my parents that has yet to arrive in the mail.
Lego Creator set from the couple we went out with on Saturday.

After that, we went to Outback Steakhouse for dinner, because Chad likes it and it's the only time I will let him go. He had a yummy steak and even yummier garlic mashed potatoes. (I may have sampled). I had fried "Fish 'N' Chips". I don't have nice things to say about my dinner. There may have been a Bloom N Onion involved, but just typing those words makes my stomach turn.

We got home and tried to watch a movie, but I promptly fell asleep. Chad woke me up around 11 or midnight when it was over. It was then that I remembered I was supposed to at least bake the cake of his birthday cake that night. I had completely forgotten about it. I wanted to bring the cake to Rexburg when we met up with some friends of ours, but if I got up early, I could still make it in the morning before we left. So we went to bed.

I got up Saturday morning, and became painfully aware that I was not feeling good. I watched the clock tick by the minutes and eventually pass the 8:00 mark which would have been the latest I could have started the cake to have it ready for that afternoon. I was sick all day, and blamed it on my unhealthy dinner the night before. Chad mowed the lawn. (It was a BEAUTIFUL morning.) Around 10:45, it was time to leave for Rexburg. We had been planning this outing for a month, and we had a coupon that expired the next day, so we had to go. It was really fun despite the horrendous stomach cramps. We went bowling at Fat Cats with our college couple friend whom we don't see very often since we moved. (They are having a baby in October!! They took care of PigPig several times while we were out of town.) Anyways, we got 2 hours of bowling, shoes, large pizza and two pitchers of soda for $25. It was really fun to bowl and catch up. My scores were pretty lame (70's - 80's), except my last game when I got a 146!!

I was feeling pretty good by the time we left Fat Cats (around 3:00) but the car ride back to Ammon didn't do me any favors. I slept most of the rest of the evening/night. Pretty much from 4 or 5-ish to 8:00 the next morning. Somewhere in there it was discovered that I had a fever, so it was decided I should stay home from church the next day. (Remember that whole "stay-out-of-contact-with-people-for-24-hours-if-you've-had-a-fever" thing that nobody follows anymore? Maybe that was just our school system, but it probably helped contain some contamination.)

We spent the morning being lazy and watching The West Wing. I tried to eat a few things, which made my stomach rumble. I don't know what's going on in there. We took Lady out to the park since she had been cooped up inside with us all weekend. When we got home, we took another nap, and then I took on the task of completing Chad's birthday weekend extraordinaire by baking his cake. I finally got it done around 10:00 and he blew out candles, ate a small piece, and went to bed.

I have been feeling pretty good, but then I'll eat something and wonder if it will upset the fragile equilibrium of my stomach. I have been really cautious because I'll take a bite of something and almost immediately get a slight stomach cramp if it doesn't agree with me.

So on a weekend when I should have been catering to him, he had to wait on me. It was pretty lame.

But I guess he still turned 31 anyway, so it was a success. (He thinks he's so old because he's 31 and doesn't have any kids yet. Most of the husbands out of our married friends are 24-26ish. He complains that kids he went to high school with have 2 or 3 kids by now. I told him he shouldn't have robbed the cradle if he wanted a honeymoon baby... I also tell him he should be grateful he's 31 but at least he has a house, a full time job and a wife - and eventually he will have kids running around breaking things and bugging him for money) Also - 31 didn't seem so old until I started putting candles on the cake. Holy cow.

In other news, Outback Steakhouse has officially made my list of foods I can't eat now because the last time I tasted them, they were on their way back up. I just barely tried hot cocoa again, after a near-10 year ban was lifted. However, flavored hot cocoa (raspberry, etc.) is still on the list. I have never eaten another of my mom's sugar cookies after I got sick eating them when I was 7 or 8. Boiled shrimp made the list Christmas of 2000 or 2001. Who knows how long this embargo will last. I don't know if I would be happy or sad if that happened to something like donuts. I really like donuts. More than I should. I don't know if I would be happy that I wouldn't swoon in the bakery section anymore, or if I would be sad to never taste another donut...

Anywho... So here I am at school. The problem is, I usually bring a lunch so I don't have to try to get home and back in the 35 minutes they give us for lunch. But, if I don't know what my stomach can handle, I can't anticipate what I'm going to want to eat for lunch. So I have to go home for lunch. Which is stressful because the parking lot is a mess (the kids can leave for lunch) and I have to rush.

Seriously, though, I feel like I slept all weekend, and I could've slept more if I didn't have to get up and go to work this morning.

Can you tell I'm bored? This has been a long boring post about my stomach. Sorry about that.

I hope this post finds your stomach in better shape than mine.

Neighborly Advice

Hello friends,

I have a question for you...

As you know, we got our little puppy last summer, and she is almost a year old now. We want to put up a fence so badly because she LOVES running around and being outside. She's a mini herding dog. We had to settle for a long tie-out leash instead, because we can't trust her to not leave the yard. (She ran half way down the block chasing a car the other day...)

I had her on her leash out in the yard yesterday because the weather was nice. We were just sitting on a blanket in the front yard, waiting for Chad to get home. Chad pulled up, and about the same time, a neighbor's dog comes running into the yard. Chad let Lady and this other dog smell each other, but the hair on Lady's back was standing straight up, so it wasn't a friendly encounter. Or at least Lady was threatened. So we tried to chase the dog off, but it wouldn't go. This is the same dog that has been in our yard several times before. Several times it has been right up on our front step, clawing at our front door. Several times it has run inside our house when we try to get out to shoo it off our property. This dog is probably about Lady's age, but is a much bigger breed, and is the kind of dog that would destroy your house. So we have not been happy with it.

But yesterday it runs into the yard and terrorizes Lady who's on a leash, outside with me. I don't know what would have happened if I wasn't outside. I grabbed Lady and took her in the house, and I honestly thought she was going to have a heart attack. She was barking and whining and making awful noises like she was dying. She was loud. Chad spent about 10 minutes chasing the other dog off. He eventually had to go to the person's front door (she's a few years younger than me) and tell her that her dog was out in our yard, and it's tried to get in our house a couple of times, and apparently he was pretty blunt about it.* (I would be too if I had to spend 10 minutes after I just got home from work chasing someone else's stupid dog around.)

* We had to say something a few weeks ago when the dog was on our front step scratching up our front door, and trying to get in our house right after Lady was spayed and could have hurt herself going crazy over this other dog. The response we got then was that the dog had broken off of it's leash twice that week. Okay, fine.

Her response this time was apparently an eye roll as if to say "Again?" and an "Oh - yeah, I thought I heard something..." But this time the dog didn't break off it's leash - she just lets it out and thinks it will stay in their (unfenced) yard. Then about 1o minutes later you hear her open the door "Honeeey? Honnneeey?"

This is the same dog we had to go canvas the neighborhood to find when it was a puppy because it wandered off. So this makes 7 or 8 times that it's been out running around the neighborhood that we know of.

So - we don't know what to do. We don't want to be the mean neighbors, but they should keep their dog on a leash when they let it out. What if I had had a baby on that blanket out on my front lawn? And here comes this giant bumbling dog.

Chad has now spoken to them twice. If it hurts my dog who is in my yard on a leash, wouldn't they have to pay for that?

Granted, theirs is not the only dog who regularly gets out and roams the neighborhood. A neighbor down the street has two little dust mop dogs that are frequently pooping in our yard, and the other day there was a little gray terrier I had never even seen before sniffing around on our porch. Last summer before we got Lady there was a bull mastiff in the yard.
(I don't know if you know just how big those dogs are - but here's a picture)


And maybe their owners would say "Oh, they would never hurt anyone or another dog" But how do I know that? When they come charging into my yard, or when they're big enough to put a saddle on, I'm going to be concerned. I watched a dog at puppy training class attack another dog while we were all standing around. The trainer got there in a split second and there was no physical harm done, but still. Dogs are still unpredictable. Big dogs even more so. And if you can't control it even when you DO have it on a leash, there's a problem.

I don't want them to have their dog taken away, and I don't even want them to get rid of it - but is it too much to ask to put it on a leash or in a cage?!

And there are cats ALL OVER the neighborhood. But that's a different story.

SO. What do we do? (There's a post on Craigslist today from our town advertising a very similar-sounding dog for sale - I'm suspicious that it's the same dog....)

"I Forgot My Teddy Bear..." ... "No, Really..."

There are many other things I have yet to blog about, but I want to put up pictures too, and currently my camera is at home.

So last night was my last choir concert with Hillcrest High School. I only played for 9 out of the 17 songs. We got close to the end, when I turned the page in my folder and realized I didn't have the music for the next song. It is published in a book, and I never made copies - I always just used the book. And I forgot to bring the book out on stage with me. And my stupid brain told me I needed my keys to get to where the book was (not true). So everyone had to wait while I got my keys from Chad and ran back to the choir room and grabbed the book. If I hadn't thought I needed my keys, I probably could have run and gotten it and been back before anyone even thought something was up. So that was stupid.

But it's over.

A few more performances this year -

• a Senior Awards Night tomorrow night
• concert with a community choir Friday night
• chorus concert on the 18th
• possibly Baccalaureate (non-denominational church service for the seniors) on the 20th
• possibly graduation on the 24th.

Then I'm done.

I'm SOOOO looking forward to this SUMMER!!!! I wish we had time/money to go visit Connecticut when it's nice out and not have to run to a wedding or reception and then fly back home. But it sounds like my family (or at least my mom) will be here for a good chunk of the next few months, so that will be fun.

In the past when people would ask me what my favorite season was, I could never decide. Summer meant free time and warm weather, but fall meant pumpkins and apple cider. Winter meant Christmas and family, and spring was my birthday, and the smell of plants and flowers. However, living in Idaho where there are essentially 2 seasons - cold and hot - has made up my mind. I choose the hot. (I'm still wearing long johns and sweaters pretty much every day - although we're supposed to be in the 70's by the end of the week!!!!!!!) Summer cannot come soon enough.

Also - neither the choir room nor my "office" have any windows.... that's depressing.

Picture

Chad's mom had this picture on her camera when she came to visit for Easter. We thought it was funny, so she e-mailed it to us when they got back home.

How often do you see a squirrel like this?

... Just sun bathing... :o)

... Riiiiight....

I just looked at the district's proposed budget cuts for next year.

As I've said, I've already been told I probably won't have a job next year.

However, the district information says they're planning on cutting 2 full time equivalent classified positions at the high school level (one from Hillcrest, one from Bonneville), for a total savings of $50,000. This will probably include me. I just calculated my annual salary and it comes out to a whopping $8,627. If they think cutting me is going to solve their problem, they're going to be about $17,000 short. If they cut my job, they're still going to have to cut another one to make up for how crappily I already get paid. I sure hope they're not paying $17,000/year for my crappy benefits...

Just sayin'. I wonder if anyone has even looked at that.