Obsessively Organizing and Decorating - Possibly Need Rehab

Yeah, so, I got this new teaching gig, and I am SO SO SO SO excited about it! I'll be teaching French only - not French, and __________ (fill in the blank). Plus, I'll be teaching either French 1 or French 1 & 2. That means I will have either one, or possibly as many as two, preps each week. I. Am. About. To. Die. from the joy of it! ONLY one or two preps!!! Ahhh, it's like a vacation or something! (I used to have 4 preps. Some teachers I know have 5 or 6 preps: I don't know how they do it and have any kind of life outside of school.) 

I am a big believer in Organizing For Success. That may be a catchphrase but it's a darn good one. I live by it. I need an Organized Environment, with systems and procedures in place, in order to feel calm and sane in the face of hordes of teenagers who don't know me and are consequently going to really Give Me Heck this year. Plus, if I'm going to be staring at the same four walls for hours on end every day, I need to be happy about what I'm looking at. 

When I first opened the door to my classroom, I was greeted with a jumble of student desks, one table, and pretty much nothing else. Like, not even a teacher desk!  But here's the great news: I have this absolutely awesome sister who has given me practically everything she ever used when she was a math teacher, so thanks to her, my classroom isn't so empty after all! As an added bonus, my sister came and helped me out today....and I can't wait to show you the bulletin board she helped me put together!  


This is my desk area so far. I bet you're picking up on the pink, black and white theme, aren't you?  

Okay, the bulletin board. Man, do I love this thing! The background is a large piece of hot pink felt I found at a thrift store, and my sister scavenged the zebra-pattern border from a "To Shred" box out in the hallway: yay for cheap/free stuff! Sister brought over a cute little bottle filled with small fake pink flowers, which we used to dress up the border even more. We pinned them using white thumbtacks so the thumbtack looks like a white flower center. To finish it off my new dressed-up bulletin board, we used fake carnations in the upper corners! Just bend the stems and staple well. Fantastic! 

Here is what I think will be a student table (for picking up and organizing papers) across from my desk: 

Not sure exactly what is going to go here yet.  The shelves could be used to organize papers. The basket on the left is full of "classroom blankets" - for when the kids get cold, they can go get a classroom blanket. The tubs below contain things that need to be stored or that the kids don't need to get into all the time; to keep this all "out of sight, out of mind," I have some pink curtains and sheets that will be tacked on to the table as a kind of skirt. 

The purple bean bag cushion will probably find a different place to stay, too. I'm probably going to make sitting on the cushion a privilege. 

Okay, so this is another student area I'm working on....I'm thinking, for now, that the two bins on each side will be "In" and "Out" student trays. The wire rack in the middle will hold file folders for each class with absent work. Pink flowers will be attached to pens to make class flower pens. Pink bin underneath is for recycling.

On the right? That black rolling plastic bin with drawers? I am SUPER happy with what's going on inside there....here, take a look:
 

 

Yep. All the drawers contain things like crayons, markers and colored pencils, organized by color.  No more raggedy boxes of crayons with too many orange and not enough blue! No more jumbled-up markers in a giant box where you can't even find a red one! Nope, now they're organized by color, so students can quickly and easily find the ones they want. And then they can put them back in the right bins.

SOOOOOO happy about this! Thank you Pinterest for the inspiration, here! 

Now, if I can just get some filing cabinets. 

  

Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Remember when you were a kid, and Sunday was the day you loved/hated? Because it was still technically the weekend, but by Sunday night you knew you had to Get Ready for School Tomorrow. Well, I think I have that now. The back-to-work clock is ticking, and my time at home is running out. 

I think this "end-of-summer blahs" teachers get should be called something. We work hard, we should have our own syndrome to quantify this lovely/terrible time when the summer sand is running down the hourglass at ever-increasing speed. I would like to propose Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

I think it's appropriate. Here's why: 

Before the kids ever darken the school's doorway - for One. Solid. Week! - we teachers are already back to work. And let me tell you, much of what we do to prepare for the school year is dreadful. Meetings upon meetings upon meetings. Hour after hour of training. (Why IS it that, though we teachers are supposed to inspire our students, to give them hands-on learning opportunities, we can't seem to give our colleagues the same respect? WHY, I ask you, would anyone in the education profession ever feel the need to read straight from the powerpoint for the meeting - and then, give everyone a hard copy of that same powerpoint so they can follow along? If that's how they taught, wouldn't they get fired?) 

So, we have endless, boring meetings, punctuated by frantic rewriting of your syllabus because of massive curricula revisions (We have new standards! Everything is different now - everything! What you used to use, you now have to get rid of, because Administration cannot ever see those horrible, useless learning objectives that we used last year ever again!). 

It gets super fun when you have to move your classroom. This is like playing the worst game of Jenga in the universe: just when you get everything to fit, it falls apart. Only in the teacher's case, those Jenga blocks are stratified layers of collected teaching tools, articles, data folders, art supplies, books and sundry teacher-y things, miscellaneous cabinets, shelves, stackable storage drawers, and your actual big old wooden ornate desk you got off Craigslist that takes a team of horses or a very motivated football player to move even half an inch. It's almost as bad as moving into a new apartment. And, since every classroom in existence was built by the Old Spice "Worst Architect in the World" guy, it's terrible to move from the relative comfort of your old quirky room (that, after five years, you've managed to Jenga everything to make a workable space) into the unknown territory of a new quirky room. Those floor lamps you were using to light up that dark corner in your old room? Now you get no outlets! Muahahahaha! 

Moving your classroom is bad, but moving into a new school building as a new teacher is worse. Teachers poach. An empty classroom is like blood in the water for sharks: teachers can smell it a mile away, and they won't stop till they get what they want. And what they want is....all that cool stuff the retiring Social Studies teacher left behind in her classroom. It all belongs to the school anyway, so no one needs to get their dander up. But still. This makes it hard for the new teacher on campus. You will arrive to find your student desks are all broken, you have no teacher desk, no tables, no cabinets or shelves, and your overhead projector works only if you jiggle it every two minutes. 

Then there's making copies. My goodness. Schools are probably the single worst contributor to global warming, since we are responsible for killing all the trees to make paper. Before the kids get back we have to make about a million copies of a thousand different things that for some reason have to go home RIGHT AWAY, the first week. It's an avalanche of paperwork. You will also have to ask for much of this paperwork back, so you can file it away (remember - you need file folders - you don't have any since your room was poached) but you usually never look at it again, unless the counselor comes by to say, "Hey, did you get the 504 on the Jones kid in 2nd period?....I need it back, that was the old version. But I promise I'll get you the new one tomorrow."). As a parent I hate the beginning-of-year paper deluge, and my students' parents, I know, are just the same. Which is maybe why some (most? a lot? too much?) of the paper we send home never really makes it back. We will spend hours pointlessly making copies.

Generally speaking, teachers and copy machines have a love/hate relationship. We love them when they work for us, but they're terrible when they get jammed or they run out of ink (and the school isn't getting any more ink till the end of next week: thank you, bureaucrats). I spent many an hour making copies. Sometimes it's refreshing to have a mindless task to distract you from the otherwise crushing reality of the papers you'll be grading all weekend instead of, I don't know, spending your off time hanging with your family or having any sort of life at all. But there are times when making copies is terrible. When there's a line and you're in a hurry. When you have to run the copies for your department, but the math people got there first and now you have to wait two hours before their stuff gets done. When the school is out of paper. (Thank you, state legislators, for absolutely and completely screwing up school funding for the past several years. No, don't worry about it, we don't really need paper!) 

So with all this stuff hanging over our heads - meetings, syllabus revising, overhauled curricula, training, moving your stuff into a new classroom, making copies - we should get to claim Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

It's the thing that makes you seriously question why you got into education in the first place, that makes you want to run very far away in the opposite direction of your school. 

Oh, and apparently, I'm not the only teacher who's been thinking about teacher training lately.

Bread Happens. Or - Let Them Eat Toothfish

My husband is AWESOME. Seriously. THE BEST. 

Not only did he buy me new jogging shoes for my birthday, he also took me out of town to a nice hotel, gave me a spa day, and made reservations for us to eat at a very trendy (read: expensive) restaurant. And then, after all that, he took me to a movie. (I LOVE going to the movies.)

Best. Birthday. EVER.

Pre-massage. Note the posh interior.

 

Pedicure was last, after the massage and the facial.

Windows look over a beautiful, peaceful garden. So serene.

I can't show you a picture of the massage or the facial because, duh, I was too busy relaxing and getting massaged and facial-ed to take pictures. The massage therapist was terrific, by the way! Great hands. (I can say this without it being weird because I used to be a massage therapist.) Anyway - strangely, my left shoulder blade area was super tense, and also the lower left leg. This confused us at first but then it occurred to me: There is a 25-lb reason why the left side of my body is more tense than the right. Yep, it's my grandson! I watch him nearly every day and I hold him on the left almost always because I'm right-handed! Mystery solved.

I really enjoyed the pedicure, too. At this spa the pedicure chairs are all set up in this long room, and directly across from the chairs are windows overlooking a lush garden. That's quite a thoughtful touch, isn't it? Most places, when you get a pedicure, you're either staring at other people across from you getting pedicures, or else you're looking into the salon watching people get their nails and/or hair done. I loved looking out at the garden during the pedicure. And while I was there, it rained! It was so lovely and peaceful and pampering, and the rain was just perfect.....I was so happy. I know where I'll be going for a pedicure next time!

After all the massaging and soothing music and pampering, hubby whisked me away to a fancy hotel, and then a fancy dinner. We went for seafood at a chic (read: pricey) restaurant. 

I had Chilean Sea Bass. Wikipedia says there's no such thing, that it's actually called a Toothfish, but restaurants call it Chilean Sea Bass because it sounds so much better than Toothfish. Here is a Wikipedia picture of the Toothfish (A.K.A. my dinner): 

No, my dinner didn't look like that. It was just the meat, which was white, tender, and a just a little sweet. I loved it! 

Because I'd had nothing to eat since a small protein shake at breakfast, by dinnertime, I was starving. Alas, they serve bread before dinner at this restaurant. I was so hungry I ate a few pieces. (Yes, I logged my calories!) I hate it when that happens.

After dinner we went to see "Pacific Rim" in IMAX 3-D. If you haven't seen this movie, you need to! Especially in IMAX 3-D: you feel like you are IN the movie. The screen takes up your whole field of vision, so the 3-D special effects really pop out at you. Plus the size of the monsters and the robots seems so much more....amazingly huge in IMAX. And the sound system! AWESOME!!! A couple of times at non-IMAX movies lately I've been unhappy with the sound systems; it seems that some movie theaters are afraid to turn up the volume. (Maybe they are. Maybe if they turned the sound up too much they'd blow out their cheap speakers.) I had nothing to worry about last night! The sound quality at that theater was SO amazing! I could go on and on about how much fun it was to see "Pacific Rim" in IMAX 3-D, but really, you probably should just go and experience it for yourself. You won't regret it. And hopefully when you blog about it, you'll do a much better job than I have here.


 

Birthday Shoes! Weight Loss! Squats In A Museum!

So, hey, I'm turning 44 tomorrow. Yay! Is it weird that I've been reminiscing about my teenage years lately?....please tell me I'm not the only one. 

Been a pretty good week around here! Did I mention it's my birthday tomorrow? My hubby is awesome, he took me out today to get some NEW jogging shoes. Here they are: 

Purple and "citron," which really means "fluorescent greeny-yellow" and not lemon, like you'd think.

The girl at the running store totally sized up my feet just by looking at them. The last time I had shoes fitted at a running store, they had me get on a treadmill and watched me jog before making a recommendation. This girl today did pretty much THE SAME THING by eyeballing my feet - she said the same thing the other guys did! (If you're interested - I have a medium arch and a minor problem with pronating, or the feet turning slightly inward.) 

Also, the weight loss is continuing! I'm down over 20 lbs now!!! Don't know the exact number, because, well, I was so horrified at how big I was that I didn't weigh myself until I was several weeks into my eating / working out program. At that point I guesstimated my weight at 180. Realistically it was more. This week I'm down to 168. I really do think my heaviest weight was close to 190 or even slightly more...I mean, I was wearing size 18 clothes, for Pete's sake! 

But okay, I'll take the "official" twelve pounds down. That's fine too. I'm not a size 18 anymore either.

So, I think I may have mentioned this thing I signed up for - the Spartan Race. 

There is NO FREAKING WAY I will look anywhere near this awesomely cool crawling under barbed wire.

Did you know I signed up for this? It's true, I did. Much as it looks like it's all about crawling in the mud under barbed wire, you won't believe it, but that's not the only thing you do in this race. Apparently there's a lot of running. Jogging. Going up and down hills. (Possibly rock climbing as well.) Anyway - the course is 8+ miles (Dear God In Heaven, please don't make the "plus" part more than a couple miles! Amen) so there will be some running or jogging involved. Which means, duh, I will have to jog. At least a little. 

Did I mention my knee didn't like jogging a few years ago? And that I stopped jogging for awhile? Yeah, it's true! Now I'm trying to get back to jogging again, and at the same time, trying to strengthen the knee so it will be okay with the jogging. I may have mentioned this.

Anyway - on the recommendation from one of my support group friends (Sparkpeople!!!! Yeah!!!!), I started a "Couch to 5K" program - C25K for short, which is cute when you say it Cee Two Five Kay, and not when you say, Cee Twenty-Five Kay like a dummy (like I did at first). I'm in the second week of this 5-week program. And Yes! Hooray! Jogging is happening! For real! Okay, it's really slow jogging, and it's intermittent, but hey, it's a starting point!!! 

Tonight I completed my second week / 6th walk/jog workout on the program, and I have to say: I am, indeed, starting to see a difference. I am getting stronger, the legs are getting more adapted to running, and the knee isn't complaining much. Sooooo happy about this! 

In between walk/jog workouts I like to do the classes at the gym. Here is a picture of me with my favorite instructor. She's super cute and super mean at the same time. I asked if I could take her picture with me and when I said I would call her "The Wicked Witch of the West" on this blog, she cheerfully obliged. 

The Wicked Witch on the left. I'm on the right. She is SO cute, amiright?

 
This is the same instructor who offers to give a free punch in the stomach to first-time CX Works participants, just so they'll know what they're in for with this terrible, terrible core workout. Surprisingly no one has yet to take her up on this offer.

And, in homage to all the squats we do in the BodyPump class, I took this picture of some ancient wooden statue from Africa. It looks like this lady is doing a squat. I don't know why it's the least bit interesting. Maybe I think it's funny there's a statue of a squatting woman in an actual museum. 

Why? Why are they squatting? Do they have bad knees too?

I get this same look on my face during squats

 




 

 

View from a Treadmill

Several years ago, when I was training for a half-marathon, I hated the treadmill. Hated it. I was a treadmill snob: "I run outdoors, thanks. The view is better." The treadmill was only to be used as a back-up plan, the emergency indoor workout when outside was too wet, too thunderstorm-y, too icy, or during summer when there was no way I was getting up at 4 am to run in the cooler, 80-degree pre-dawn. Nope. Treadmills were B-O-R-I-N-G.

Well, here I am now, quite a bit fatter and in terrible, terrible shape, and now, guess what? The treadmill is my friend. True, the view isn't as spectacular as running outside - you don't get the vast expanse of blue skies with puffy white clouds, you don't have tall rustling trees and birdsong, there are no curious horses pricking up their ears as you come huffing over a hill.  You may not get these things, but what you get that I am Eternally Grateful for is this: Air conditioned comfort and a machine that keeps track of the time and calories. It's just what I need, for now.  

Here are some views - and observations - from the treadmill.

Ellipticals and the gym entry. Also, the cardiac rehab center is just over there. And if anything is going to make me feel like more of a schlub, it's those folks over there in cardiac rehab. They have actual, verifiable heart conditions. I have an eating condition and a laziness condition. Seriously.

The weight machines. You can't really tell what the lady in the yellow looks like because, duh, I was on a treadmill attempting to take pictures around me - but the lady in yellow is my new hero. She is about five-foot-nothing and bristling with muscles. I watched her on the fly machine - she put on 5 stacks of weights. FIVE. Dang. I am totally intimidated and totally inspired: I want to Be. Her.

The fitness class area. Right now they're doing Bodypump. If I weren't on the treadmill I'd be in that room. I hate the exercise they're doing right now; you have to use bands and get them on just the right way and do these killer lunges. It's hard to keep your balance AND keep the bands from whipping off and snapping your legs. Fun times. 

Since I am apparently unable to run (eh, jog - sllllooooowwwwwly) for more than five minutes at a time, I am doing this C25K program (Couch To 5K - that's cute, right, the acronym?) which involves mostly walking with some intermittent jogging. Hence, the treadmill. I do this 3 times a week. The other 3 days I do something low-impact - like Bodypump or a water aerobics class. 

After the treadmill I do the elliptical. 

My attempt to remain hidden behind rows of people on the ellipticals is foiled when all the other people LEAVE. That means, the nursery - right there! Clear glass! - has a direct view out onto the gym. Luckily the windows aren't full-length. If they were my little grandson would've seen me, and then it's Goodbye machine, hello screaming baby.

 While on the elliptical I could hear the occasional screech from the nursery. I know this screech quite well. It's my grandson's happy screech of joy. Hooray for a new place with new toys to play with!  Just wish the baby could be happy without the random, piercing, parrot-like screeches.

I Just Paid for the Spartan. Now what?

Remember when you were a kid, and your friends dared you to jump off the high dive at the pool? And you finally agreed, and you went out there in the chlorinated air and climbed that aluminum ladder, all those bathing-suited kids above you, everyone dripping, and you got to the top - white diving board, blue sky, hot sun on your back - and you went to the end of that diving board, and you could see how deep and blue the roped-off water looked so far below you, but then you just closed your eyes and cannon-balled it?  

I don't think this is exactly like that. But in a way it's similar. Jumping into a chlorinated pool from 10 feet above the water while a lifeguard watches is not normally a death-defying experience (even if it feels that way to your 8-year-old self). Sitting here in the comfort of my home, signing up for the Spartan doesn't feel like it's death-defying either, until you read all the disclaimers - Warning! YOU MIGHT DIE!!! Warning! You might drown! Warning! You could suffer animal bites! Lose layers of skin! Break one or several bones! Get mowed down by large moving vehicles! Collapse from a heart attack! YOU REALLY REALLY MIGHT DIE! But since you might die, and we are telling you YOU PROBABLY WILL, you agree to not sue us, ever, forever, no matter what. Good luck!!!

Worst. Idea. EVER. I don't even know why I'm doing this anymore, except that I need motivation to go to the gym. 

And that's how you look certain death in the eye, my friend! With absolute, unyielding, boundless self-doubt and terror. 

What can I say, that's just how I roll. 

Here's one of the founders of the Spartan race. 

It's a nice video. 

There isn't any death in this video, Thank God!
 

Faster than a Galapagos Tortoise

 

The great thing about technology is this: With just a few clicks, I can find out interesting facts about the Galapagos Tortoise, which I knew was a slow-moving creature, but until today I had no idea just. how. slow. that could be. 

Did you know it would take over six hours for a Galapagos Tortoise to go one mile? For real. I'm assuming that it would take a fair amount of motivation, as well. Food perhaps, or an especially sexy Tortoise of the opposite gender to wink knowingly and urge the poor beast along.

Hormonal tortoises aside, did you know it didn't take me six hours to go one mile today? I'm almost as surprised as you are. In fact, I covered just over one and a half miles in 30 minutes today. Hey, I can't help it if I'm setting land-speed records....for tree sloths...

I'm actually super happy I got to run today!  (Ahem. I suppose I'm using the term "run" loosely, as noted by the aforementioned distance and time.) So at this pace, I will be able to cover an 8 mile hellish obstacle course after approximately 67 years of training.

Seems legit.

Here are the treadmills at my gym, looking all pretty and bright underneath the skylight:

                                                                        

Here's my treadmill. I didn't get a shot of me while using it because, duh, I can't jog and take my picture at the same time.

That's my drink! (You care.)

Annnnnd...voilà, la pièce de résistance (which is a fancy French way of saying "This is the cool part"): My mileage. Isn't technology awesome? The machine tells important things like how much ground I would have covered, had I been on the ground (and not on a, let's face it, slightly easier smooth surface with a moving track to keep me going), and it tells me how many calories I burned. Today it shows that I went over a mile and a half! Most of which was accomplished by actual running. Well, maybe half of which. Okay, not quite half, probably just under half. Possibly a third. But it was running. Okay, it was jogging. Almost speedwalking but not quite. It was definitely a jog, even if it was slow.

Jogging happened here today! Well, something happened.

At least it wasn't Galapagos Tortoise slow.