Lazy Summer

Well, summer is rapidly coming to a close and I have to admit it has been a very lazy couple of months. I am going to have a hard time breaking my "lazy" routines when school resumes in two weeks. Although I am looking forward to being back on a schedule. I have had some good times this summer. In early July I attended a Brad Paisley concert with my good friend Katie. It is the only country singer that I am really familiar with (thanks to Katie!) and will go see in concert. Here are some pictures of us before and during the concert:



We had a good time but I missed having Tom there. He does NOT like country music so there was no way he was going to attend with us (even though we did have an extra ticket!)

I have spent several days at the pool which has been enjoyable during the hotter days. I am try to convince Tom that it would be a good idea to put an in ground pool in but I don't think he's sold. We don't have much privacy in our back yard so if we were to get a pool our neighbors would have a great view of us.

Heather and Jason were in town visiting from Germany. It was a pleasure to have them stay here with us for the 2 1/2 weels they were in town. We had many family gatherings over at our house, celebrated Jason's birthday and went to the zoo. It was sad to see them go but Tom and I have decided to spend Christmas there again so it will only be about 4 months before we see them again.

Response to Laurie's Blog: The Death of Standard American English

I decided that this was worthy of adding on to my blog. I think I am going to be very embarassed when I am finished but I am hoping it will inspire me to read a few new books. I have added a portion of Laurie's blog here so you all know what the book list is and what to do with it. Laurie is a friend who use to teach for the Lakota School District but moved to Columbus, a few weeks ago, to pursue her PhD in education at OSU.

Apparently, Standard American English is dead. I know, I was shocked too. What's happening is that the short hand used in Instant Messager and text messaging is infiltrating our schools to the point that kids no longer know how to spell or write in proper Standard American English. This, at least, is according to one Language Arts teacher in one of my classes (okay, she's a little extremist). In any case, I feel that I should do my part and stop typing in all lower case. Even though I think it's cute and informal, I also think it's probably better if I actually get used to typing correctly all the time. On that note, I blatantly stole this next section from my friend Vicki who is getting her PhD in English at Rice University. I think it's a cool little exercise.The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE (I had to put an asterisk because my blog doesn't allow underlining. How weird is that?)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling*
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown*
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold*
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White*
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Ok, so I am the typical average adult reading only 6 of these titles. I think I have more italicized than in bold and I know I have seen a ton of these books as movies. Too bad that doesn't give me any credit!

Question to Ponder...

A colleague of mine brought this bottle of wine back for me from his trip to Santa Fe. I'm not quite sure how to take it... I must say, it is quite a pretty bottle. I think it is just a joke, right Travis?

Fourth of July Weekend

My mom and stepdad came down to Ceasar's Creek, a state park 30 minutes from my house, to camp for the fourth of July. It was great to spend time with them and celebrate Christiana's 4th birthday (which was Sunday). I brought her up a cake decorate with Disney princesses on it. She was very excited to cut into and open her presents. She is quite the big girl now!

Shingles...and I Don't Mean on a Roof

After days of pain I decided to go to urgent care and discovered that I have shingles! Since returning from Boston the pain has gradually gotten worse and over the weekend I developed a rash on my neck and left shoulder. Thinking it was some weird poison ivy (that hurt!) I tried to deal with it. How long could it possibly last? Finally yesterday I could take no more! The doctor told me had I come in a few days earlier he could have given me some medication to help with the rash, pretty much shorten the virus. Go figure! So now I am riding it out. He prescribed me vicodin which really helped me sleep. I'm not sure if it was the medicine or maybe I am healing but I didn't wake up as stiff as I have the past few mornings.

The reason shingles appear is unclear, possible cause is a weak immune system. The doctor asked me if I had been under a lot of stress lately and I just laughed! Let's see, I'm a teacher who is off for the summer and I just got back from a lovely vacation in Massachusetts. If the doctor considers deciding what book to read next, what time I'm going to go to the pool/shopping, and what time I'm going to wake up in the morning stressful, then YES I'm under a lot of stress! In fact, Tom said this is the least stressful he's seen me. I guess this virus was just waiting to rear it's ugly head!

Attack of the Cicadas

Cicadas have been invading our area for several weeks now. They are these large, red eyed, creepy insects that do absolutely no harm and have no real purpose except to annoy. As Tom and I were running today we tried to predicted how many cicadas we thought would land on us, surprisingly we weren't attacked by that many. They have no problem flying into you when your still, I guess being a moving target was too much for them. The cicada life span is about 6 weeks which gives us about three more weeks of them. After that we can expect them in another 17 years or so. I will be glad when they are gone, however Kaiser might feel differently. He enjoys a cicada snack every once in a while. Yes, that's right...he eats them!

My Life as a Blogger

I have started this blog (thanks to Laurie!) in hopes of staying connected, or reconnect, with friends and family. As many of you have discovered, I stink at writing, emailing and calling, just staying in touch in general. I started a MySpace page and haven't done to well updating it. I do miss everyone and thought I'd take the summer to try to figure this bog thing out. So far so good!
Since school has let out I have finally found myself in summer mode. That first week off was rough, I was actually bored! Not anymore! Summer vacation has led me to Cape Cod where I spent a long weekend with my Dad and Candy and then to Boston to meet up with my hubby. I am also reading my third book. The joys of being a teacher! I don't have much else planned for the summer but I kind of like it that way. I feel like I have all the time in the world to enjoy my time off.
We were hoping to have a visit from Tom's sister and brother-in-law, Heather and Jason, this summer but they have decided to stay in Germany. They will be greatly missed but Tom and I are looking forward to our visit with them this Christmas! I am posting some pictures of their visit from last summer...hurry home guys!