This and That

I feel like nothing really big has been happening lately. So I'm just going to post a few little stories from the past week or two.

Today our ward choir sang in church (just a reminder in case you've forgotten or didn't know, I'm the choir director). We sang hymn #82, For All the Saints. It's a powerful hymn that we don't sing very often in church. I think it went pretty well. Jeff said that he got goosebumps a few times while we were singing. I'm really grateful that we've gotten several new members to come these past couple of weeks and boost our numbers. It really made a difference.
Next up, we'll be singing a Grateful hymn medley the week before Thanksgiving. For Christmas, the choir will be singing two numbers - Still, Still, Still and Night of All Nights - and I'm going to put together a small women's group to sing a song called Christ Child, Christ Child.

This past week I had a small cooking fiasco. I was starting to get tired of the meals that I seem to make over and over because they're easy and I'm familiar with them. So I pulled out my recipe book and looked through it, and decided to make Hawaiian Meatballs. For those of you unfamiliar with the dish, it's made up of small meatballs in a sweet sauce with pineapple and peppers (but I leave out the peppers because I don't like them) served over rice.
I first tried to make the meal on Wednesday night after leaving the hamburger to thaw for a day in the fridge. Sadly, the meat was still too frozen to make the meatballs, even after I tried thawing it under running water for 20-30 minutes.
So I put the meat back in the fridge to finish thawing and tried making the meal on Thursday night instead. I mixed up the sauce, started cooking the rice, then got out the meat from the fridge ... only to discover that it was a sick greenish-grey color and smelled horrible. Because I had the rest of the meal prepared and ready to go, minus the meatballs, I decided to try to thaw another bag of hamburger in the microwave (I usually hate doing that because parts of it will thaw, parts of it will start cooking, and other parts will remain frozen). However, I discovered that ALL of my frozen hamburger had that same nasty greenish-grey coloring. Jeff and I spent a few minutes googling descriptions of spoiled meat to try and determine if it was still safe to eat, but the universal advice we found was: when in doubt, throw it out.
I was super sad, not only for my meal, but also for the wasted meat. This was actually the first hamburger I had bought since Jeff and I were married, because it never seems to be on sale. And now it looks like we have to throw it all out. I vaguely remember that when we were bagging the hamburger the day we bought it, it was discolored underneath where the sticker was. If anyone has any tips about buying and storing hamburger, I would love for you to share.
Well, back to my meal: there I was with rice and sauce and no meatballs. So we had rice with sweet sauce and pineapple, and it wasn't a very well-rounded meal. We had a lot left over, so we decided to add chicken to it the second night and make it kind of a sweet and sour chicken meal. It turned out really well, actually, and since I find it easier to cook chicken than meatballs, I'll probably make it this way in the future. So my fiasco turned into a blessing in the end.

In the past week or two I've been feeling a bit stressed at work. There were a couple of different things that were contributing to it, but I decided that a major factor was my attitude. So for the past couple of days I've tried harder to focus on the positive and try to have a good attitude, and it really made a difference. I was a lot happier and found myself enjoying work a lot more. I've always been a big believer in the power of positive thinking - I just had to challenge myself to live up to my beliefs.

I have a confession: Jeff and I haven't been great about cleaning our home on a regular basis. Without kids, sometimes things don't get dirty very often. Well, and a large part has also been laziness, too. So for FHE this past week Jeff and I tackled a couple of cleaning jobs that we had been neglecting. We cleaned out the fridge and scrubbed the microwave (for the first time since we've been married), wiped down the kitchen counters and sink, scrubbed the tub (I bought a new cleaner, Lime-Away, and I LOVE it) and bathroom sink, and straightened up the house here and there. It felt really good when we were done. I have a renewed desire to set weekly and monthly cleaning goals - if anyone has any tips to share, please do.
As a reward for doing our cleaning, we went to Iceberg Drive-Inn down the street for a peppermint shake. If you've never been to Iceberg, I highly recommend their shakes. Their fries are good, too. The one by us is always busy. It was even busy on Monday night when we went, in the middle of a cold and heavy rain.

Rolling Valley Ward Get-Together

When people ask me where I'm from, I tend to give a variety of answers. My most common response is that I'm a military brat who moved around, but I mostly grew up in Virginia and New York. For those of you who don't know, I spent 7 years in each state, though neither was consecutive. But if I had to choose between the two, I would say that I'm from Virginia.

This is because each time that we moved to Virginia, we lived in the same house on Gillings Road (when we were gone on other assignments, my parents rented it out). For a military brat, it provided stability and a sense of home.

When we lived in Virginia, we were members of the Rolling Valley Ward. I loved our ward and the people in it. Over time, many of the members of the ward and/or their kids have moved out here to Utah. Some are going to BYU, some are going to other colleges, and some (like me) have finished school and are still living nearby.

Last night we had our second annual Rolling Valley Ward get-together. It's a gathering of the kids who were members of the Rolling Valley Ward at some point (because there are others like us who were there for a year here or a year there). My parents came up with the idea and have hosted it at their house each fall since they moved out here.

It was a lot of fun seeing everyone. There was quite a range of ages there, from college freshman up through those approaching their 30s. I had fun wandering from group to group catching up with people or just saying hello. I found myself in the unique position of being in the middle age-wise, so I knew everyone there. One of my highlights of the evening was goofing around with my brother Kenneth and throwing M&m's into his mouth.

I will always feel a special camaraderie with members of the Rolling Valley Ward. When I see them, it feels like coming home.

You Know You're a Teacher When...

So I wanted to share something from work that makes me happy.
This is my third year teaching at La Europa (wow, where has the time gone?). I teach all four main high school math subjects: Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and Pre-Calculus. For the first year, they had the Pre-Calculus students do an online course. I think they did this because a previous math teacher wasn't very confident in teaching Pre-Calculus, and the online course provided instant feedback on their assignments. Well, it was a real pain to use, actually. There were a few upsides, like the fact that I didn't have any lessons to prepare for that class period, as well as being able to use the class as a prep period when students didn't have any questions. But overall it was a pain. I won't go into all of my complaints against it, but here are a few of the inconveniences it caused:

-When students first come to La Europa, they're not allowed to get on the computer right away, so I would have to print out their assignments and grade them by hand.
-I had a hard time coming up with what to base their grades on, because they would complete 2 huge chapters each term (which they had a hard time getting through) and take a test at the end of each chapter. So, basically, if they did poorly on the test, it totally killed their grade. It took me a little while to figure out what to do as a first year teacher.
-Of course, it was an online class, which meant that the website was frequently down. So I had to print out all of the assignments as a back-up, and then grade them by hand without an answer key. Ugh!

Hopefully, you get the picture. It was not fun.
Now, begin year two. By this time I had perfected the pacing and grading somewhat, so we kept using the online course. But the system was down even more frequently than the previous year. So I decided halfway through the year to get everyone caught up to the same point and then teach them all at once. I didn't have any textbooks, so I used the printouts from the website and gave them copies of the exercises. I had to make answer keys as I went, as well as quizzes, but I felt that the students got a lot more out of the class. However, this was not the solution, either. We needed textbooks!

Well, you know you're a teacher when you get excited about getting new textbooks. I got a class set of 5 (our Pre-Calculus class usually isn't very big, and I had a limited budget, so I figured they could share if the class got bigger than 5 - I currently have 4 students in that class), a teacher's edition textbook (which I found out afterwords is an earlier edition than the student books, and a couple of things are different - oh, well), and several teacher resources.

It was great being able to pick out my own textbooks. Some of the textbooks that we have for my other classes don't match very well with my teaching style, so it was fun being able to pick out books that do. Some of my favorite features are: the vocabulary in each section is both highlighted and in bold, there are several good examples in the text, there are a lot of practice problems, there are ACT/SAT Prep questions in each section, and there are calculator notes in the back of the textbook that give them step-by-step instructions for doing things on their graphing calculators. Plus, in each section there are a few "communicating mathematics" questions that are perfect for their journal entries (for each of my classes this year, I try to come up with a short, meaningful journal assignment to help them think about and understand the concepts that they are learning - and the textbook already has the questions for me!).

Even though the textbooks themselves are great, the teacher resources are definitely my favorite part. I have a Resource Masters booklet for each chapter in the book. Each Resource Master comes with: an alphabetic list of vocabulary for the chapter (that I have them fill out as we go), notes (which will be great for Home Passes, when I have to send the girls home with the work they're going to miss), worksheets (which I use for homework), enrichment worksheets (which are quite challenging and perfect for my honors students), quizzes (yay, I don't have to write them!), and 6 different versions of the chapter test - 3 multiple choice (which I could give out as a study guide) and 3 regular (I use one of these as their test, and then I have others on hand if a student fails the test and needs to take a re-test). These Resource Masters are WONDERFUL and will save me hours of work this year.

I cannot say enough of how much I am enjoying teaching Pre-Calculus this year. It is a completely different experience from the previous two years. It's now my favorite class, and I really look forward to teaching it.
Well, I hope I didn't bore you with the details of what excites me as a teacher. I just felt like sharing.

Living Room Curtains

I've been meaning to post a picture of our living room curtains for a while now. This was my project for several months. My sister Suzanne came up to Salt Lake to help me pick out the curtains a while ago. Then it took me another month or so to buy the curtain rod. Then a couple more weeks passed before we got around to putting them up. But here they are.

It was a little tricky arranging the curtain on the rod without any clips - the material is pretty silky/slippery. But I'm pleased with the finished product. It adds a little color to a room that was predominately green and black. And now the window doesn't look so sad and bare. :)

OUCH!!!

So some of you may not know of the ongoing ordeal with my right wrist. It all started about 3 months ago. After a long work week, my wrist was hurting. I then noticed a rather peculiar bump on my wrist. I wasn't sure what it was. I asked a few coworkers and they didn't really know, either.
To make a long story short, after several visits to the physical therapist that treated Christine last year (when she broke her pinkie), I decided to see a hand doctor because the bump was still there. The doctor informed me that the bump is called a ganglion cyst. Apparently, it's quite common. They're not completely sure what causes them, and they're not always painful like mine.
The doctor first treated it by draining the cyst. He told me there was a 50/50 chance it would come back. Sure enough, two weeks later, it was back and slightly larger. So back to the doctor's office I went.
The options I faced were: live with it, or have surgery. Because I use my hand so much, I opted for surgery. For the past three months I haven't been able to play the piano, play volleyball, or work with a mouse (I've been using my left hand at work).
So two Wednesdays ago was the big day. The nurses were all very friendly. One nurse even had a cyst on her wrist and was very interested in my treatment.
After the surgery, I wore a splint with an ace bandage on my wrist for a week. A lot of people mistook it for a cast. So this is what my wrist looks like now:
The doctor says it may take a few weeks to heal. Right now I wear a brace that keeps me from overusing my wrist while it heals. One time, when I wasn't wearing the brace, I slipped and caught myself with my right hand. It hurt so bad I cried out in pain.
Each day it gets a little better. I look forward to playing the piano again, as well as returning to other daily activities.

Trip To Zions National Park

I spent this past Wednesday through Friday in Zions National Park. I went there with a group from La Europa. They take the girls on short trips every couple of months, and I always wanted to go on one. So this past month, I did. I went as a staff member, so I was in charge of two of the girls - knowing where they were at all times and making sure they were safe. But my room and board were all paid for, which was great.

On Wednesday we hiked the Narrows. For those that don't know, the first part of this hike is a sandy trail next to a river.

Then you leave the trail and actually hike through the river. You weave back and forth from bank to bank, first upriver and then back downriver. I wore my bathing suit under my shirt and my swimming shorts, because I knew that there would be parts that got waist deep.

Funny story: when I got to the deepest part of the river, where it was only supposed to go up to my waist, I was a little ways behind the rest of my group (probably a combination of stopping to take pictures like the one below - the deepest part was right past this bend - and the fact that I wasn't wearing the best pair of shoes - my sandals completely died by the end of the hike and I ended up throwing them away). So I didn't get to observe which part of the river everyone else crossed at. Result: I picked the deepest part to wade through and got in up to my neck! It was a little crazy for a minute there, but I made it through. At least the people coming behind me learned from my mistake and waded on the other side of the river at that point.

When you're hiking through the water, you watch your feet pretty closely. I happened to notice that someone had etched the word "HI" into a rock. I thought it was cool so I took a picture.

Towards the end of the hike two deer decided to join us. They got pretty close to us.

Now, unfortunately, I dropped my camera in the water on the way back through the Narrows, and I was afraid it was ruined. I took out the batteries and left it to dry that night, but the next morning it still wasn't taking pictures properly. So I don't have any other pictures from the other two days. Sorry. But when I checked my camera again today, lo and behold it was working! Yay! So, at least you got to see my pictures from the first day.

On the second day I went canyoneering. It was AWESOME!!! The first thing we did was rappel down into the canyon. I'd only been rappelling once or twice at West Point when I was in high school. I really loved it and couldn't wait to do it again. This time it was even better. One of the rappels was about 100 feet down a cliff side. I bounced off of the rock on my way down rather than just walking down the cliff face, and it was SO MUCH FUN!!! The girls were surprised/impressed that I enjoyed it so much and had some experience doing it.

We then hiked through the canyon, surmounting obstacles along the way. It was very taxing but a lot of fun. I would love to do it again sometime. And our girls did really well. They worked together, listened to the guides, and had a lot of fun.

On the third day I was with a group that did a few small hikes. We drove through the east part of Zions, went on a short hike to a waterfall, and pulled off at a random spot and hiked some of the sandstone. The trip to the waterfall was everyone's favorite. We followed a stream to a secluded, shaded pool of water that had a small waterfall feeding into it. Some of the girls decided that they wanted to go swimming in their clothes. They also jumped off of a cliff about 8-10 feet high into a spot of water about 7 feet deep. I captured it on video on my phone. (Side note - does anyone know how to get pictures and/or videos off of their phone if they don't have a data plan? Is there some kind of software I can buy to transfer it from my memory card to my computer?)

We also found a flat rock overlooking the stream where we had a yoga class. One of the staff that was with us is a yoga instructor, and the girls do yoga a lot a La Europa. I'd never done it before, but I decided to give it a try. It was the perfect setting in the middle of a canyon with blue skies, hawks circling on the cliffs above, and the sound of running water below us. It was very relaxing.

Overall it was a great trip. I arrived home Friday evening sore and tired, but happy. The activities were fun, but the main reason I went was to bond with the girls, and I was able to have some good conversations and fun times with many of them. I'm really glad I went.

I'm Grateful for Running Water

Sometimes you don't realize how grateful you are for the little things in life until they're taken away.

Well, we had a little excitement on Friday night. Right around dinner time, we discovered that we had no running water in our condo. We had noticed some construction going on down the street when we drove home, so I walked down there to find out what was going on. They told me that our water should be back on in about an hour. I thought that sounded a little optimistic given that they were completely digging up the street, but I was at least hopeful that it would be fixed that night.

I was able to make dinner without any water, but it felt really wrong to leave the dishes in the sink without rinsing them.

After dinner Jeff and I went to see a movie - Julie and Julia, in case any of you are curious. (It was ... ok. They definately had more language and "content" than they needed to. I thought it was a shame, because it would have been a lot better without all that.) We came home to discover that our water was still off.

At that point, I started thinking about all the things I wanted to do that night or the next day that involved water:

Dishes
Cooking
Using the toilet
Washing my hands
Brushing my teeth
Showering
Laundry


We got by on a few of those things with some of our water storage, but I started to get a good idea of how inadequate it is.

Fortunately, our water came back on at 11:30 - yes, we were still up. I was just getting ready to brush my teeth and climb in to bed when I heard the pipes gurgling. And lo and behold - we had our water back. Yay!

So, I know, we were only without water for a few hours. It could have been a lot worse. One thing that I gained from this experience is a renewed determination to increase our water supply. If anyone has any tips, let me know. And I have an increased appreciation for running water.