March 2008 Archives

Thursday after school, Ms. Dean was telling me how they needed another male teacher for their annual weeklong Camp Goddard trip.  I shot off my mouth and said I'd do it.  She got very serious and said, "I'll make some calls."  Next thing you know, I'm slated to be that missing adult.  So, on Monday morning, I'll be loading up into a bus with 50 6th graders and heading to picturesque Sulphur, Oklahoma for 5 days.  I'm a little apprehensive, but I'm sure it's going to be fun.  I'll have a cabin with 7-8 boys and we'll spend the days teaching environmental science lessons, hiking, and doing all that camp stuff.  What's not to love about spending a week at camp when I'm supposed to be working and getting paid extra for it?  I always liked Scout Camp, so this shouldn't be so bad...I hope.

I spent all day Friday pulling together lesson plans for my sub.  I'm sure my lab will be a wreck when I get back, but I pulled their internet connections, so hopefully they'll stay out of trouble.  I've never dealt with kids this young before.  All of my students now are 8th graders.  Before that, they were high school age.  I already plan on hitting Scout Camp this summer for a week so I think this will be a slightly more civilized (air-conditioned cabins) warmup trip.  Wish me luck.  I'm sure I'll need it.  

(This is my first post on our new blog so ... here we go.)

Today, March 28, 2008, "Miss Chris" was able to get ALL FOUR kids down for "quiet time"! 

The question is not how it happened.  Who cares, right?  No, the question is what to do now.  Hmmm ... television?  Nap?  Straighten the house?  Oh!  I know!  How about a nice and relaxing lunch?  I wonder what that's like.

Today is "Easter Bunny Day" according to Noah.  The little man and I were riding our bikes in the street in front of our house.  Noah kept swinging by the mailbox and opening it up.  He'd look inside and say, "No Email today!"

Pic from last weekend's wedding. I especially like how the sign is covered with soda stains.

So, after 3-4 hours of searching by the whole family plus about 5-6 neighbors, we finally gave up on my ring.  Our nice neighbor, Terry, even called up a friend who brought over a metal detector.  He and I scoured the backyard together for about 2 hours.  He believes that one of the searchers probably stepped on it and pushed it deep into the dirt.  We must have hit 50 false positives but could never find it.  He planned on coming back the next day, but it rained for almost 24 hours straight.  Terry's yard has a little creek that runs through it when it rains.  That's not good. 

Jewelry has never been that important to me.  I love the ring I received on my wedding day, but I'm not particularly attached to it.  The inscription inside was more special to me than the metal band around it.  It's easy to engrave a ring...I hope.

Chris and I went ring shopping yesterday because without that ring, the ladies just couldn't keep their eyes off me!  We ended up buying one, too.  It was cheaper and looks totally different from my original, but Chris says thats OK.  My new ring is made out of Tungsten Carbide and is a whole size smaller.  That's right, Tungsten Carbide.  The same stuff they make oilfield drilling bits and armor piercing ammunition out of.  The cool part is the black stripe on it.  Chris complained that it didn't match her ring so I told her I'd take a Sharpie to her ring to fix that.  And so, without further ado, here's a shot of my new ring:

Granny got Myra a tether ball pole for Christmas and I finally got around to putting the thing up.  It took me a whole lot of digging to get a hole deep enough for the cement base, but I finally got it poured and let it cure.  We stuck the pole in this afternoon and Myra and me spent some good quality time together playing.  She caught two balls in the face and only cried a little bit, but she seemed to enjoy it.  Noah took a shot to the head, too, when he got to close to the action.  Later that evening Chris and I decided to hold a grudge match.  I was well on my way to an easy victory when POW!  I hit the ball and felt something weird.  It was my wedding ring flying off my finger.  I listened but couldn't hear it hit the ground.  As near as we could figure, it went over the fence and into our neighbor's yard.  We enlisted a few neighbor kids to help us and when our next door neighbor came home, he helped, too.  He even called up his buddy from work who brought over his big fat metal detector.  We searched in vain until well past dark.  Tomorrow, the metal detector guy is going to give it another go.  Meanwhile, we have heavy storms predicted tonight.  We're keeping our fingers crossed.  I'll let you know how it goes.

We met the Gode's down at Willow Creek Park for the Saginaw Fire Department's annual Easter Egg Hunt.  Noah was pumped because there were fire trucks everywhere.  Myra was pumped because the real, live Easter Bunny was there and he was GIVING OUT CANDY.  It felt like being part of the Oklahoma Land Run or something as we all gathered around our little areas.  The longer we waited the more the crowd edged onto the field.  Finally, they blew the fire truck horn and it was chaos.  Myra's field (4-6 year olds) was picked clean in about 2 minutes.  Hannah and Noah's field (0-3) took about 5 mintues.  It brought back great memories of the Easter Egg hunting parties our elementary classes used to have down at Foster Park.  I still remember how excited I was when I found a silver prize egg (with a dollar in it!) stuffed inside a coffee can back in 1st grade.

FINALLY, our blog is up and running again.  We switched over to a new server and that caused problems on the backend and then we decided to upgrade to the latest Movable Type which caused even more problems.  Now that it's Spring Break, I have a little more time to work on this thing, so hopefully, you'll start seeing this thing turn from this default template into something a little snazzier.  It's good to be back and we've really missed this thing.  We love you blog.  :)  Expect some big updates soon!