One class tonight, one class Friday night, one more volunteer tutoring gig on Monday, and then it’s basically over. I mean, there’s still that Tuesday-Thursday middle school thing, but all I really have to do for that is show up, do whatever I’m told, and write reflections. At some point, I need to teach 3 lessons, but I’m not concerned about that. I’m assuming that he’ll want me to teach an already-prepared lesson and that I shouldn’t have to write up a lesson plan.
Last night, 
grabbed dinner at Jimmy Johns, and as he frequently does, he brought me home a chocolate chip cookie. What can I say, he’s good to me like that. Well, last night’s cookie was kind of short on chocolate chips, but it was still soft, and it really made me want a peanut butter cookie. This led to my talking aloud about baking such cookies, and then deciding that I need to finish my new holiday apron before I can do this. laughed at me for this, but since he doesn’t have an apron (because I still haven’t made one up for him – bad crafty wife!), he doesn’t know how cool they are.
This is the one I’m working on right now:
I actually have three of these planned out with fabric already in my stash, but I seem to have lost McCalls 5825, which has some half-aprons and the oven mitts as well. Major bummer. (This isn't even the cutest apron planned, but the missing pattern forced me to do this one instead.)
I’ve got the bodice done except for attaching the shoulder straps to the back and the tie (the last apron I made with this pattern has straps that are a bit too long and continually fall off my shoulders in a very annoying way). I had to stop last night because I ran out of green thread. Like, completely. No green thread in my possession, in any shade or tone. Major bummer. All of the exposed seams have been bound using that red print for the oven mitt. It’s mostly a bunch of straight seams left, other than those ties (which are really long, but it’s a very nice feature), so it should go quickly. The other nice thing about this pattern is that it nearly meets in the back, so you get good coverage. Plus, it’s sized well (8-10-12 instead of S-M-L).
They re-imaged our computers at work over the weekend, but mine didn’t take, so I spent most of Monday morning watching it update itself. And then I temporarily lost all of my bookmarks (they’re back now – something about the sync key in Firefox that wasn’t matching up), so I couldn’t blog because I had no idea what the address to the editor was. Seriously.
Things seem to be mostly ironed out with that, other than the fact that I’m missing three major software programs and a mapped drive, so I can’t actually do a bunch of my work. Minor detail.
Yesterday at the school was not nearly as stellar as the other days, though I still enjoyed myself overall. I had a few difficult students, and couldn’t come up with solutions when asked by the teacher (strategies to use, ways to help them improve). After thinking about it the rest of the day, I have some thoughts on what I would do differently next time, and I suppose that’s all that’s really important (at least in terms of “reflective teaching”), but it was still disappointing to feel like I could have done a better job. There’s always tomorrow!
I am finding it hard keeping track of my online life while doing the school-work thing. This doesn’t bode well for the blog once I get an actual teaching job, but that would be a small price to pay to have a job I love. I think I’ll need to significantly cut down my subscriptions in Google Reader, and maybe even on Twitter (most of what I have there is news, but even then I usually have too much to read). And then there’s Tumblr and Pinterest and Facebook…. Good thing I’m easing into this spending whole days away from the computer thing, or I’d go into social media withdrawal.
I think the Christmas tree is going up tomorrow night, and lights should be delivered and installed this weekend (we had to order the lights we wanted online, since they were out at all of the Home Depots anywhere near us). I’ll have to forgo the garland on the fence this year, and try to get out to the stores super early next year so I can hopefully find something satisfactory. Also, I need to make my way over to the music store and buy some more sheet music; in particular, I need a solo piano version of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite (I have a water-damaged one piano four hands version, which is not very usable without another proficient piano player in my life).
Alright. Now I need to go be reflective. And summarizing. Would love to get some work done, but alas, I am missing some key things still.
