Saturday, December 30, 2006

Mornings Become Electrified

I've been working on lesson plans since 8:30 this morning, and I hear my second sock seductively calling me from the family room: "come play with me. I feel nice and soft, not like that hard keyboard you've been pounding."

My second cup of tea is kicking in, and I'm getting these plans to fall into place. I have several big units coming up, so I'm not doing the typical one-week lesson plan. This will be a large scope, general two month plan, broken down into pieces without specific dates, but ending up in the same place (we hope). Everytime I try to factor in a weekly time plan, there's holidays, assemblies, fire drills, lockdown drills, last-minute "oops my class can't come today" phone calls, and other such mayhem. When you only see your classes once a week, this doesn't make for smooth unit building!

In October we were off for two Mondays, then two of the classes had field trips. That means I only saw these classes ONCE during the entire month of October!

So I'm pretty charged up about this new way of writing the plans, and it's clearer for me, too - I'm not trying to balance out big pieces and hope (by luck) they all fall into place, but allowing myself some breathing room.

How pitiful is it that this is what's jazzing me on a Saturday morning???

Friday, December 29, 2006

Knit one, bump two

A long car ride to visit a shut-in makes for good knitting, right? I did manage to finish one sock, even Kitchenering (is that a word???) the toes smoothly. BUT! Try to wind a new skein (using the turkey baster) on the lovely and charming Jericho Turnpike, LI Expressway service road, and local streets in Roslyn, and you end up with nothing more than spiderwebs.

Grrr.

It did get done, just not as neatly or quickly as I would have liked. The shut-in liked the completed sock, but was more interested in her cheeseburger happy meal. That was fine, she was happy, and I continued to rib the second sock.

My promise to myself is to learn to use DH's digicam and actually put a picture or two up here.

In the meanwhile, lesson plans are knocking away at the back of my head, and I think I have to spend a good amount of time at it tomorrow. I've got some good ideas, hope they work out okay and I can find all the materials I need instead of realizing as class is about to start that half my supplies are in the other school. That would be par for the course, but I really want to be more organized about myself!

It also feels really good that I've made my donations to the causes championed by Wendy and Ms. Harlot; it's impressive what two women and many knitters can accomplish.

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Welcome to the home

How long do you have to think about something before you do it? Apparently (in my case) ten months.

I didn't want to just jump on the blogging bandwagon without a lot of thought. Not that I thought millions of people would want to read my words (so they'd better be *darn* perfect!) but did I really want to put it all "out there" for anyone to read?

Clearly, I had (have?) some issues.

I'm not looking to get published. I'm not looking for a big return. I'm not looking to be an authority. (Okay, smarty-pants, what *are* you looking for?)

I want to write because time is moving pretty fast and it slows me down to write, think, and write some more about it. This is the upshot: I want a record of what goes on in here, because I can't remember it all and there's a lot to remember.

Just for the record: Married, two teenagers, teach music, knit, read, love movies, frustrated artist. Okay, that's going to be enough fodder for a while!