Antelope island

For a ward activity today we went to antelope island. It was quite the great adventure! we hiked to dooley's knob and could see both sides of the island. I was amazed at how shallow the lake appears. We ate tiedyed fruit rollups and took cell phone photos - what could be more celebratory?

My bed

It was about a year ago I bought my new bed. Now that i'm back from a difficult work trip I must say I love my bed as much today as I did this time last year.
At a get to know you activity I attended tonight we were asked to share an amazing thing about ourselves. Or the most amazing thing that has happened to us - something amazing. As my mind wandered I realized that at least once a year or more often I have something amazing happen in my life. I live an amazing life. I am grateful for a life so full of amazing moments that I couldn't come up with just one to share. I am the lucky one! I am grateful for all the amazing people that influence my life on a daily basis.

Tragedy averted

I know I said i'm on mini-holiday but truthfully it's been pretty tough. Today I woke up with a headache only to discover my students were having technology issues. Then, after lunch when my kids told me to go take a nap (apparently they noticed my grumpiness) I discovered i'd lost one of my favorite earrings. Argh talk about sadness. I texted the kids who were still back at the lunch table but they never answered. So I went back an did my own searching. No luck. Finally I met up with the kids in class and asked if they'd seen my earring at lunch. Apparently before lunch, as I was putting away the laptop, my earring fell in the laptop case. It was still there! Hooray!
(i know that wasn't a terribly riveting story, but it's been a hard day.)

More holiday

As you know my summer holiday began with a trip to nantucket. After that I enjoyed a staycation that included a ton of mosquito bites. This week i'm in logan - not that far from home and certainly not much of a holiday - but I AM staying in a hotel and that's always a kick in the pants for me. I'm here with a bunch of yearbook students. This photo is from tonight's ropes course activity. We did pretty well and I got to build some trust with one student with whom I needed to. It's beautiful weather up here, i've got a good staff, we've been pretty productive, and now i'm ready for bed - happiness.

I've been marked!

My neighbor kid likes to come over and play. Play consists of having me read to him or help him write words or just do yard work with him. He's 5. This morning I noticed he's left his mark on my house - not to mention the four toys still sitting on my porch. Sigh.

Bye bye nantucket

You may be surprised to leaen that nantucket airport has 3 gates. These are numbers 2 and 3. I never saw #1 but i'm guessing it was the one the little cessnas use that don't require security checks. I think there were about 5 full time employed people present to check me and my bags. Oh, and those of the other 6 people on my plane. The I'd checker was funny. Apparently he just got glasses for the first time. He said I was the very first person for whom he had to don them to check my I'd. He paused a few seconds to properly appreciate the significance of the life change he was going through.

School

As I mentioned, I visited marshall's school while I was there. I took this photo as I went to meet him at the end of my trip. He borrowed a co-workers car to take me to the airport. That was much appreciated as i'm convinced my bag grew in weight while I visited. I only picked up 3 books while I was there.

Whale!

This is a tiny part of the huge sperm whale skeleton on display in the whaling museum. Good times it was! Made me almost miss reading moby dick. Was that book a mere 600 pages? The one i'm reading on this trip is 800 - dickens' "our mutual friend." I find it funny that it is lynn's fault i'm readin this book and it was years ago that I mocked lynn for reading "bleak house" while on holiday. At least i'm enjoying the book!

Lighthouse

I left the house a bit earlier than I needed to for my planned excursions so I decided to add a walk to the local lighthouse while I was out. It was rather small I thought. The beach was too. But I liked the wild roses growing on it. In general the walk was great - I passed tons of quaint places to stay.

Black tar

I ate well on this trip. For dessert most nights we had black tar with ice cream - also known as hot fudge cake. This morning I helped kirsten bake chocolate chip cookies. The best treat may have been some boston baked bread we had last night - 3 grains and buttermilk is pretty much the extent of it.

Oldest house

I know - you can't see the house - but this is the only photo I remembered to take - it was while we were waiting to get a tour of the oldest house on the island. The house was from the late 1600's and was built as a wedding gift for the marriage between a coffin and a gardner - those were their names. Their marriage marked the end of the half share revolt. Apparently, early in nantucket history only 10 (or 12?) families were full share owners and so they had more legal rights than those who came later for only half shares. Coffin was one of the big full share names. This house was a veritable mansion in its day and managed to survive even in 1987 when lightening hit and exploded the brick chimney knocking off the roof - the walls moved about a foot but that was all. It's 3 stories high. All very fancy.

Field trip

Kirsten and I joined the botany class on a field trip to a marsh managed by umass in boston. I took a sneaky photo of our tour guide and the ocean that borded the marsh. I also got a photo of kirsten consulting with a student. The green thing in my hand is pickle weed. It had a fancy name I can't remember but tasting the pickleweed was the purpose of actually venturing out into the marsh itself. We also learned how to tell boy hermit crabs apart from girl ones - there's a mark on their bottom sides. Boys have a lighthouse and girls have a pyramid. We ate some other plants while we walked about. The most shocking part was on the way back to school when the teacher let one of the students smoke. Sheesh.

pretty purple flowers

This post is for my mother - she loves pansies. These are miniature ones that appeared to be growing like weeds, busting through cracks on the sidewalk. These are in front of the restaurant where we ate - the sea grill. They had great food but little servings and bad service. Vanya (my friend who now lives in chicago) would have hated it because they took away our plates the second we appeared to be finished. Just made us feel rushed. The water guy, when we were basically done with our food, asked if we would want more water - instead of just keeping the glasses filled - it was like he wanted permission to stop serving us.

Walk

Tonight we walked to kirsten's weaving place. It was cool. She even let me try a bit. Unfortunately I failed to photograph the moment. I did remember, though, to take a picture of the middy road we traversed. This place is pretty sandy everywhere you go. It truly feels like an island. Everyone is pretty friendly - I can imagine it would be fun to be a part of the community.

Bedroom

Here is where I sleep. Smallis room. The whole apartment is just over half the size of my house - but it's perfect. I really like the set up - great place! You'll notice the contents of my wallet on my bed. Remember how I got rained on for half my walk home? The wallet was soaked throug.
today I went to school with my brother and gave a lecture to his students about the importance of setting a purpose - for reading, learning, and for life. It was pretty good if I do say so. After the lecture while they worked on a review guide one kid asked me for help writing essays. That was fun and made me feel smart. I also spent some time visiting with the journalism teacher there. It's an award winning paper and since i'm feeling nervous about my responsibilities next year to teach journalism I really wanted some good tips and/or suggestions s which she gave me! I'm excited to try some of her ideas and methods! All in all today felt pretty productive. Now to read my book, "our mutual friend."

Resting

In this photo you can see the trail and the cars that are on the road next to it. I came across this bench next to pretty flowers where I decided to take a break. All along the trail I saw beautiful plants! Bright yellow ones that reminded me of forsythia (but were different), lilacs - but little ones, azaleas, and bouganvilla (sp?) that looked like huge azaleas. All so gorgeous! The color was great because if you're not seeing gray on all the buildings then you're seeing green from all the plants.

Walking through nantucket

My walk from the airport was mostly on this wide trail that went alongside the main road - kind of like a frontage road. What cracked me up were the various stop signs on the trail - as if it was like a real road. This intersection was also interesting for its large collection of mailboxes. Other sidewalks here seem to be made out of brick or asphalt - rarley have I seen any concrete.

Airport shot

It doesn't show well, but in the background is the watch tower for nantucket airport. It's a small place. There were a few cessnas and then our little jet that had 10 people on it. The airport worker collected us at the bottom of the stairs of the plane and then walked us to the building. I wish i'd taken a photo of their baggage collection area. Basically it was a wall of windows - i'm guessing they take your luggage and pass it throught the window thing to let it rest on a metal shelf - much like the moving metal collection areas at real airports, but this one didn't move. anyway, the whole place was cute. Since I walked to my brother's from the airport I thought I should get a photo of the place - I remembered right as I left the parking lot. It wasn't a terribly long walk - maybe an hour is all. Too bad it began to rain about half way through. It's nt sunny here - the whole place is grayish.

Freezing wait

It's raining in ny. We have a 2 hour delay before take off. I think i'll nap. Just wanted to report I resisited chocolate - I remembered I had shortbread cookies in my bag. Yum! By the way - i've been freezing since I woke up. Why is ny so cold? I blame the rain.

Food

I'm surrounded by the most delicious food options: dunkin donuts, sushi, starbucks, sbarro's, wendy's, etc. And i'm stuck eating celery, an orange, and some pizza muffins that came from the depths of my freezer. Call me cheap. What i'm really craving, though, is a package of m&m's. Not sure why. Was it the four hour nap I had on the plane? I didn't even feel take-off I was so sound asleep. Now to kill two hours without succumbing to the lure of fast food and chocolate.

Mystery solved

Ever wonder where the airport stores their wide selection of wheelchairs? Well, I found them. They're at the furthest end of the last arm of the airport - you know - for convenience or something. I'm waiting to board my midnight flight to nantucket. I can't wait to put in the earplugs and take the benadryl. It was a long full day and not as perfectly satisfying as the weekend was.

Lasagna leftovers

Today I made lasagna for dinner. I'm headed out of town tomorrow (hooray for summer break!) and knew I didn't want leftovers so I invited some old friends over. It was a great evening and i'm glad I did it. I like cooking and I like sharing my creations. You all might remember a time I made pizza and shared it with cindy and marsha. Do you remember that cindy? Remember how I couldn't figure out why the cheese wasn't melting? Upon closer inspection we discovered that I had been fooled into thinking the bag of hashbrowns in the freezer looked exceptionally similar to a bag of frozen mozarella. Well the frozen white food product fooled me again! My lasagna was perfect in every way except that the pound of mozarella turned out to be a pound of hashbrowns. and just like the pizza incident it wasn't all bad. The tomato flavor was a bit strong and it seemed a bit dry, but this was all that was left of the 9x13 pan after 6 people ate. Everyone was exceptionally kind about it and we enjoyed laughing about it. I'm just glad I had the good family type friends over instead of the new kinds you want to impress. It was a great evening and I have some yummy lunch for tomorrow.

parenting

so i often find myself reading articles about autism. every now and then i worry that my fascination is an omen that i'll wind up being the parent to an autistic child. the odds seem pretty high - i'm no mathematician but the fact that i read about it a lot makes my odds high in my head. anyway, i was reading an article today - it was an old one from the ny times that i printed off and am finally getting around to. a quote in there fascinated me in terms of parenting in general.

"i treat everything the child does as having a reason - to feel calmer, for example, or to feel excited," dr. greenspan told me. "often the parents have notions of what the child should be doing, so they're trying to control the child rather than build on the child's natural interests."

so what do you think of that quote? good stuff, no? i want to be the sort of parent/teacher/adult that doesn't control but insteads facilitates. (that was the best word i could come up with for what it sounds like he's describing.)

consequences

so, if you leave your car window open by accident over night you risk having things stolen - like your car. or, as in my case, you just run the risk of having rain get in there. yep, it was a heavy rain storm last night and my window was open. who knew? well, luckily i have leather seats so just the floor mat really appeared wet.

in other news... i saw a boy, who i know for a fact has a heart condition, walking around holding a 2 liter bottle of mountain dew. can that be good for him? the soda this generation is consuming boggles my mind.