One Week Left!

One week left till I get my first class of 5th graders after teaching ten years of 7th and 8th.  Monday is an Institute Day, Tuesday is Meet The Teacher, and the Wed. is out first half day.  How very, very scary.

My classroom looks almost pulled together.  My class library is set up mostly, and I bought about 40 bins at the dollar store.  I am trying for something like this: http://hill.troy.k12.mi.us/staff/bnewingham/myweb3/library.htm by Beth Newingham.  I saved all my personal books from 4th grade on up, so I have a huge amount of girl-protagonist books, but not a lot of boy ones.  I'll have to work on that.

Two of my old students helped me set up the room, and we hot glued stuff to the walls.  I came in this morning, and even that had fallen off the walls.  Nothing sticks.  We spent three hours doing that gluing yesterday.  Gr.

I have been in the classroom every day this week and will probably continue through Sunday.  There's so much to do and so many boxes to unpack.  But.... I found out I could bring the dog while I work!  Three other dogs were in the building today with teachers who were fixing their rooms.  I know my pup would prefer that to being home alone.

On an unrelated note, I wrote an article on HubPages about losing weight with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis or Hypothyroidism.  You can find the article here.  I checked the Hub stats to see how people were getting to my page, and all the search queries on google were saying things like, "Can I lose weight with Hashimoto's?"  It made me sad, because it is hard to do, and it's sad that all people's doctors aren't as good as mine, who really takes care that I feel good and healthy.  I hope it can help someone out of a health jam.  It's a sucky disease, to be sure, though I figure as far as autoimmune diseases go, I'm sure glad I got this one over some of the other options!

Stay healthy, ya'll!

Penguin!

I spent a short few hours tonight watching random tv shows (Old Christine, Glee, Ghost Whisperer), and while I did, I carved out this stamp:

It's actually a pretty big stamp at almost 3" or so.  It's the first stamp / block I've managed to make that actually has some semi-fine lines on it!  Hurray! :0) 

It actually turned out well, considering I free-handed the original picture in under 30 seconds, on an index card, during my lunch break at school.  If only carving took such a short time.  But it's actually kinda therapeutic in a way.

On a completely random note, I'm feeling kinda like a bad doggie owner right now.  I had to get the hyperhund an electric collar, which I swore I'd never do.  But he runs off-leash at the doggie forest preserve every day (probably about 12 miles a pop), or he's hyper for the rest of the evening.  He needs a whole lot of running.  However, once he gets on a coyote or deer scent, he's off and he runs so far and fast that I'm scared to death that he's not gonna come back, not because he wants to, but because he gets lost.  Another dog at the forest preserve got killed last month when he ran off on a scent and ran into a highway quite far away.  Got hit by a semi.  These dogs go insane on deer and coyote scents.  I don't know if there's any training that would keep them by their owners in this case.  My dog is well-trained, even with squirrels and rabbits and ducks, which he would love to  chase.  Deer and coyotes, forget it.  Hmmm. 

Well, the collar is a pager collar by Unleashed Technology.  It vibrates first and you can go to stim if you want.  I had a vibe only collar for him, but he quickly learned to ignore that.  At any rate, I figure I'll only use it when he does go nuts on a scent, to break his focus.  He's part pointer, part weim, part GSD, so he's extremely nose-oriented.

Well, that's that.  I'm so in need of vacation.  It's nice being a teacher; I get a lot of time off, I get time to make a bunch of stuff, and I do have a  good time while I'm teaching.  I have parent-teacher conferences on Monday and Tuesday, then the rest of the week off.  Can't wait....