The Box

Awesome K Teacher (AKT) has been bummed out about the k's pretend violence during pretending time. Empty pizza box at our house gave me the idea to go in and set up a pretend pizza shop during free choice time. AKT gave the idea a big thumbs up so I showed up at 2:30 with the box, construction paper, and some little notebooks for order taking. As I set up, I felt a wave of nervousness. AKT asked me if she should make an announcement about the Pizza Shop. "Good God, No," I answered, hoping I could get by with as little commotion as possible. Within minutes pretty much every K (except for the sleeping K in the middle of the floor) was over with me, filling out orders, answering the phone, creating paper pizzas, and making deliveries. There was a wild exuberance in the room that gave me an edgy sensation of fear. After a bit, I pulled over a chair and ordered a large diet coke with extra ice. When AKT sang the cleaning up song, the place was a mess. One K said she could not help clean until she made a "Pizza Shop Is Closed" sign. Despite the disastrous mess, I thought her plan was fairly reasonable. AKT came over while I was under a table gathering up glue stick caps and said, "You have such a calming effect here."

I felt sorry for the AKT when she said that.

The Airport

We're going to begin boarding in about 5 minutes. If you listened to the voice thread below, you know that I'm in a little blogging contest with this gal here. Writing every day, commenting every day, all the way to 2010. The challenge here is thinking of interesting things to write about. Nothing that interesting is happening at this moment. Typical airport stuff. People are being driven by on the cart. They look like they could walk. Woman with big glasses and odd hat just walked by. And here's a man with a fedora. I never wear hats.

You can see that it's going to be a great month ahead for all of you, reading these interesting posts. Gotta board now. I'm in zone 4.

The Jones

The Bloggers

We saw some author bloggers today. I'm inspired to perk up my blog. Maybe run some contests. Get a blog mascot. I'll keep you posted.

The Suitcase

Suitcase needs filling. Tweaking my talk a bit first.

The Movie

Today has sucked somewhat. Getting in at 3 am just trashed my whole outlook and energy level. I feel mad at myself because I should have been able to push through it all. But instead I just noodled about, played a bunch of word twist and then played more word twist. I did see a movie with #1 son, which was the big highlight. The movie was 2012. It's about the world ending, but these people make these huge metal arks to keep some people and animals safe. Kind of a modern Noah's Ark kind of thing. Pretty good effects. Now I'm heading to bed and hoping I can be super productive tomorrow.

The Trip

I heard 4 talks yesterday. 3 were quite good. 1 was pretty bad and I felt the speaker was doing some teacher bashing. At the break I ranted just a very wee bit about the condescending speaker and one of my colleagues said, "Lee gets all worked up sometimes. When she does it with me, I just leave."

I said, "I don't get worked up so be quiet."

A bit terse, but obviously I needed to set the record straight.

We ate dinner at Loteria a great Mexican restaurant. Loteria is a card game that's played a little like bingo. Replicas of the cool loteria cards were all over the restaurant. I had cactus as a side dish. All very good.

The Trip

I worked with every teacher in the school today to develop some common assessments and curriculum alignment maps. I was a little sharp tongued a few times during this work, but I think every one still appreciates me for my excellence as a literacy partner.

The Child

I'm looking over info from one kiddo's sketch book. It makes me miss those little peeps. This week I'm going to L.A. for a conference on RTI. I feel like I haven't been at school for forever. But after November everything will be back to normal.

The Talk

Tomorrow would be a good day to finish up that 20 minute ncte talk. I have a lot of doubts about that happening. Lacking a bit of confidence.

The Deer

I feel sorry for the owner of this car, the driver of this car, and the deer who ran full speed into this car. After impact, I heard a dragging sound and was told that the deer was probably being dragged under the car. I told my companion that I couldn't get out of the car because I couldn't handle having a deer dying underneath the car. She convinced me I should get out by saying, "Get out." When I got out, I found out that the deer wasn't under the car at all. She was way back on the highway somewhere and the tow truck driver was making plans to go collect the body for venison sometime after he dropped off the car. The whole thing was a little bit sad, but could have been much worse.