Busy, busy...

I've spent a lot of time at the computer lately, but none of it was spent blogging and I hope my "vast" audience (all three of you...) are still checking now and then to see if I've posted anything lately.

I started teaching the Saturday Instructional Aide Writing Academy. Every other Saturday my partner teacher and I are teaching 30 IAs about the Clark County Writing Curriculum in order to help them to be more effective in the classroom. Apparently they've had a Language Arts and a Math Academy for two years, and there is such enthusiasm for it by the teachers and the aides that they started a Writing version this year. I applied to be a teacher because I wanted the extra money, and--hey--I like to teach writing. We are allowed 20 paid hours for planning and we used a bunch of it in the last 10 days to write our overview and some lesson plans. The first session went really well. In fact, we didn't get through everything we'd intended to, so this week we're half prepared already from last week's left-overs! I'm much less nervous for this Saturday because now I know what to expect and what their response will be. And yes, I realize I said "alternating" Saturdays, but because of Nevada Statehood Day (Oct. 31) there is no school on Friday, Oct. 29th, and so they did not want to stick a class in there on a three day weekend.

There are also no students coming to school on Nov.1st because of staff development. And there is another staff development day on Nov. 2nd. At first I thought how weird this was, until I wrote it into my November calendar and saw that it was election day, and, of course, they use the schools for polling places, so they'd be in the way when it was time for lunch. That means our students will have five days off in a row! They'll be zombies when they return. But the good news is that the Halloween candy will mostly have had time to exit their systems by Nov. 3rd and we won't have sugared-up kiddos. Just tired, sugar-coma children who've stayed up late for days and days and now have to return to the grueling schedule of school.

In addition to teaching two groups of people, planning for two groups of people and correcting papers for 108 fourth graders, I've also been busy with church playing for baptisms and Primary program practice. Then, my neighbor had a baby shower for her daughter (I went) and I'm going to a meeting tomorrow night to write curriculum for a tobacco use prevention lesson series for elementary school. Again, I applied for a bunch of extra pay projects...got them all!

In the middle of this, I had a midterm for my graduate class. We didn't have to go to class on Monday night (yippee) but I had to complete and e-mail to her by then the answers to five essay questions from a page of 9 that she passed out two weeks ago. Each answer was about a page and half long and had to use information from our text to prove our point. I turned it in on-time. But, hey, that took a lot of typing and hours.

So, you can see I haven't been lying around much. But on the upcoming three day weekend (Halloween) I intend to do just that.

P.S. Tom Bosley died today. He was the dad on Happy Days. I didn't regularly watch that show, I don't think we had a TV at that time. But I did know who he was. One day, in the 90's, I was driving through Malibu on my way back to my home in Ventura County from L.A. The traffic was thick and so we stopped often at lights and it was just too crowded to go fast on the curving Pacific Coast Highway. I glanced over at the car to my left as we wended our way north, and thought to myself, "Hmmm...that guy looks familiar." I had the chance to drive alongside him for two more lights and finally realized it was Tom Bosley. He was just whistling as he drove along, his arm propped on the open window, enjoying the lovely California afternoon like the rest of us, cruising up the PCH.