It's cold!

It's 30°F here when I got up. That's ridiculous! At least the pets know how to stay warm. (c:

Video Test

This is my short trip from school back home. Thought I'd try a little video and see if it works.

Tree colors

It looks like morning is an excellent time to really see the rich colors of the trees up here in the fall. I'm waiting, with my fellow Leo Club advisor, for students to come to campus so we can go do the Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk. We organized it too late to be able to get a bus and now we find out neither our president nor our vice predsident are able to make it. If we don't get at least 5 students before 8:45am or so, we're going to call it. So now we wait ... But at least I've got a great view. ;-)

Saturday Knitting

So, some exciting news. Two other teachers and I are going to start a knitting club for the students at school. It'd be nice to have someone else around my age that also knits who I could learn from. I haven't touched anything in a long while and actually still have a half-finished glove that I started working on last Christmas still laying around. Well, with the election coming up and looking at fun stuff to do, I found a pattern for an Obama beanie. I actually had all the colors already (actually the blue is a little light and the red a little dark, but it looks OK) and wanted to try it out before going through making the whole beanie. Here's what I was able to do. It's my second attempt. On my first attempt, I didn't leave enough slack behind for each of the colors and after finishing, it didn't lay flat. This one doesn't look too bad. I've never used different colors with knitting and it's not all that easy. Anyways, yay me for being able to follow a pattern! What do you think??

Is that frost on the Pri?

Why yes, it is! It got below freezing last night and we had to warm up the car this morning before leaving to get the frost off the windows! What have we got ourselves into??

Late night @ the law library

Here's Joce doing what she does best at school - studying. Doesn't she look great? ;-) We're here getting out of the apartment and trying to get ready for this upcoming week. I'm grading and listening to some great jazz and she's reading away. This'll probably look fairly familiar for the next 3 years ...

47°F and Freezing!

So Jocelyn's softball game is at 9am here and it's cold! It's only mid-October! What's up with this weather? ¡No entiendo!

Joce just made an amazing outfield catch and the other team is impressed! Unfortunatly she was up to bat right after she caught that last out and they got her out. The second time she got up to bat she got a good hit and just ran in to score. The other team started off well, but we're now up something like 7-1. Let's keep this going!

- sent from my treo -

Large Love-Lorned Leaves Lived Long Lives Laying Lazily Littered on the Lively Lush Land in Low Light

Now, that's a big leaf.

Jersey is Beautiful in the Fall!

I'm not sure if the pictures from my phone do it justice, but the trees around here are beautiful right now! The best time to really see the vivid colors is late afternoon before the sun starts to set. I've never seen leaves with such a variety of gorgeous colors all together. I see these trees on my way to and from school everyday and I'm still amazed every day.

Look who I met in Phila!

Check it out. Senator Obama happened to be at one of his Phila headquarters today as we were passing by. I asked him if we could take a quick picture and, of course, he obliged. How lucky are we?

Joce and I ate lunch at a place called Harmony Vegitarian. It was some great chinese food! They had all your regular chinese food except no meat. I had the sweet and sour chicken and Joce had some crispy chicken and it tasted just like chicken. They had vegitarian shrimp, pork, beef and chicken. It's amazing what they can do nowdays.

My day off / Ducks!

So it's Columbus Day and I actually get it off. It's the only day in October that we get off. November is another story. October we have 22 total school days. In November, we only have 14! Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, inservice, the NJEA convention for 2 days, and Veteran's Day, we've got lots of vacation days. Well, I'll be brief today since even though it's my day off, I still have a lot to do!

We've got flocks of flying fowl of all kinds around here. Geese are aplenty and ducks are everywhere. Luckily I haven't re-lived one of my most traumatic childhood experiences - being bit by a goose who didn't want to let go - so all is well (so far). But one night we noticed a lot of quacking outside our window. It was a whole flock of ducks. They weren't spooked at all by us, so I got some bread and started feeding them. Their bite isn't so hard, so i was able to hand-feed them. Unfortunately they left some excrement on the sidewalk on their way out. :-P

Ever seen a shorty VW bus?

This thing is freaking amazing! When Joce and I went to go eat and check out this mexican food restaurant in Lindenwold, this was right next to it. I had to stop and take a picture! I hope the guy out front didn't mind me taking a picture of it.

Awesome SIGG Bottle

Check out this awesome aluminum SIGG water bottle. It says, "Think Green." I'd be the envy of all teachers if I had this!

Fowler Farms!

Looks like we've got some relatives in Wolcott, NY that harvest apples. ... (c:

Grading and such

So here I am, making sure all my grading is up to date so I can do final grades for the mid-marking period. Up here it's not grades every 6 weeks, it's grades every 9 weeks (which they call marking periods). The end of this past week marked the end of the mid-marking period, so progress reports go out starting next week. So far I've only given one test and 2 quizzes along with homework and classwork. I'm going to try to give at least one small quiz a week and a test every 2 weeks or so. That way the kids don't have as much to study for each test and I can see how they're doing more frequently. The only thing with grading is that it takes me a while to grade everything. There are short-cuts to grading (such as having the kids grade it themselves, counting only a couple of problems, just seeing that they did it, etc...), but I want to find my balance of giving good feedback and making time for myself. Right now, it's not too bad since Jocelyn is having to study a lot, but as life gets busier, I'll make adjustments.

Yesterday at Jocelyn's softball game, we brought 2 recycle bins and labeled them for cans and bottles. They were one of the first teams to play, so not very many people had been drinking (which is a very popular thing to do at these softball games), so I just put the bins next to the trashcan. I saw a couple of people use them and when we came back to the park a little after 5:30pm yesterday, they were both full with two other boxes full of cans and bottles! So yay for recycling! We brought them back and emptied them into our apartment's recycle trashcans. I was looking online at any place nearby that might have larger trashcans for next week, but couldn't find any that were anywhere near cheap. So we might just keep using our small trash cans and hopefully if there's overflow, people will use the boxes that they bring their drinks in.


Besides that, there's not much other news to report. We went ahead and bought our plane tickets now for the Christmas break. We'll leave here on the 23rd of December, have the folks pick us up and take us to Temple where we'll spend the next 4 days. Sunday morning, we'll head to Austin for church and to say hi to everyone at Simpson UMC, then off to Houston for the next 4 days. Friday morning we'll head back to Austin, have the folks pick up the Jeep that we'd have borrowed for our Houston trip, and head back to Phila. Ironically the best timed flight will take us back to Houston with an hour layover before going to Phila. Well, it's now noon and I want to get done with all of this before dinner, so I'm going to work hard at it!

peace and love!
-jas ... (c: