Cool Cucumber

Rob and I put up a yard sign supporting Barack Obama after we attended his rally last month.  It’s been a running joke that we don’t talk politics with either of our next-door neighbors, who both have McCain signs out in their lawns.  We are sandwiched between them, people!

One of the most exciting events this past week was Halloween night, where Rob and I had a good number of kids come to our door for trick-or-treating.  At the old townhome, I had approximately 3 kids come by in 5 years.  NOT exactly a prime trick-or-treat spot.  But this year- it was so fun to get to meet some new neighbors and people from the neighborhood.

There was one group of about six kids who, upon my opening the door, said loudly, “GO OBAMA!” instead of “trick or treat!”.  So cute!  I gave them extra candy, of course.

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I got this from Abbey and thought it was interesting.  I’ve been working on reading more this year and I’m having a great time, even if I’m behind on my goal right now.  Unfortunately, I’ve been reading a lot of more recent books instead of classics.  This list inspired me to look at reading some of these next.

The Big Read says that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or for whatever reason loathe.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling (it’s not that I loathe the books, but the movies are just so good that I don’t want to bother with the books)
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 Traveller’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 Hitchhiker’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 Stoker
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

So I’ve read 24 of 100… not bad!  So many of these, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve begun but never finished.  Many of those are italicized for that reason… I own them but haven’t read ALL of them.  I couldn’t locate more than one book that I never wanted to read.  I don’t know, many of these I just hadn’t heard of, and others I’ve never attempted, so I didn’t want to rule them out.  Keep my options open, you know.

How many books have you read?

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Well, we moved into our first house just a week ago.  There are so many things to show you, but I’ll pace myself so I can squeeze a few blog posts out of it.

On top of ALL the unpacking we’re in the middle of, I have to go back to school tomorrow.  I’ve been slowly working on unpacking and setting up my classroom for the past week, but having little success because I want to be at home.

Probably the most overused phrase in our family now is “You know why I love this place?  Because of the…”  Rob and I feel very blessed to live in a cute 1941 house, in a charming neighborhood with large trees, friendly neighbors, and quiet streets.

For me, I’m off to school now to put up my bulletin boards!

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As many of you already know, Rob and I are going to be moving at the end of July to the downtown area of Colorado Springs.  We’ve dreamed of moving into a charming neighborhood with big trees for some time now!  We are also selling our townhouse at the end of the month, leaving behind a lot of good memories in the process.  When I bought this place, I was a first-year teacher still figuring out how to balance it all, and I remember all the parents in my classroom chipping in for a very generous gift card to Bed Bath & Beyond at the end of the school year.  I felt so grown-up!

I took some photos of the townhouse when I first moved in, then took photos from the same angle in May.  I love looking through these pictures because I can see aspects of my life that have drastically changed during the past five years.  Here are the 2003 and 2008 photos for your enjoyment!

Front of the townhouse (notice the new car and new husband working in car!):

Backyard (although not the same view):

Living Room:

Dining Room:

View from the front door:

Front Door:

Looking into the kitchen:

Kitchen:

In the kitchen:

Upstairs hallway:

Office (I didn’t get a photo in ‘03, probably because it was my roommate’s bedroom):

Upstairs bathroom:

Bedroom:

It’s been fun living our first two years of marriage in this small space, but we’re ready to move on!

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I know I’ve been a bad blogger… but I was prompted to write because 1. someone noticed I was missing! and 2. because of something one of my students wrote. 

My class has writing homework each week in which they have to write a paragraph in response to my prompt.  I know, I’m such a meanie.  Last week’s prompt was: If you could offer three suggestions to someone about how to live a happy life, what would you suggest?  I received a lot of really neat pieces that spoke about treating others fairly, not using drugs, following your dreams, etc.  But what made me laugh out loud SEVERAL TIMES was this boy’s paragraph:

In my opinion, the three suggestions on how to live a happy life are the things that involve common sense.  First is not to eat yellow snow.  “Duh!” Everyone knows that!!!  Well you shouldn’t eat yellow snow because you might get sick.  You should also think, “Oh, this is pee snow,” not, “Oh, yay!  It’s lemonade flavored!  Yippee!”  Another suggestion is to not try to impress girls by saying, “Look what I can do” and try and stand on a monkey bar and fall and then- well, you know what I mean.  Don’t do this becasue one you’ll be made fun of and second, you’ll not be liked by a girl and thirdly, you’ll get hurt.  Third is not to pick your nose in public or period.  You shouldn’t do this because it is disgusting and gross.  Also because it gives you nosebleeds that are really bad.  In conclusion, these are three suggestions on how to live a happy life. 

Have a happy Monday!

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Last week Rob surprised me with a trip to Denver to see a 3D Imax movie that he knew I would enjoy. U23D! I had never even heard of it, which made it even more exciting. Having been to three U2 concerts before, it felt as if I had a front-row seat the whole time. The only odd part was the quiet of the theater; several spots in the film were so moving and the on-screen crowd was so excited that it felt only natural to cheer or sing along. We had a fun time at the theater with our groovy 3D glasses on, too. I have such a fun husband!

Then today, for a late Valentine’s treat, I made my first apple pie ever for my sweetie! I think I made a pumpkin pie once last year, but it was from a store-bought crust and pumpkin from a can. I made the entire pie today from scratch, including the crust, which was very scary when it started to tear as I put on the top crust. In fact, I had never done a top crust before and had to look up what “vent slits” looked like in my Joy of Cooking.

Here’s the pie just before I put slits in it:

(I just noticed that this photo includes the box of “Live Crickets!” for our class toads at school… and no, that wasn’t what I filled the pie with!)

Here’s the pie just out of the oven (the house smelled heavenly by this point and the apple juices were bubbling out of the vent slits):

It’s pretty on the inside too! This photo was taken to showcase the pie plate that it was baked in. My mom bought this for me as a gift for Christmas, knowing that I loved some of the Polish pottery she has. She has an identical pie plate, making me even more proud to make a pie in this one!

I had a lot of fun making my first pie from scratch and I would recommend it to anyone who has President’s Day off.

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Rob and I are sitting here watching Earth: The Power of the Planet, a BBC program that’s relatively new. Ohmygoodness-wow, this is the greatest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Lots of people have gotten excited lately about the Planet Earth series, but personally, I’m way more into this history-of-our-planet series than the animals-on-earth angle.

Here’s a neat clip that totally blew my mind!

Between the computer-generated simulations of the movements inside the earth and the amazing camera-work of spectacular places like under the oceans and the heights of the Himalayan mountains, I am simply amazed by the the quality of this series. Check it out if you can!

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This boy is a student of mine!

(Photo by Bob Breidenbach - The Providence Journal)

Brock was chosen to be a kid’s reporter for Scholastic News at the Superbowl.  There are all sorts of articles on the web about him today.  Here’s a neat story (though I’m not the teacher who wanted the autographs that he mentions).

What a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a great kid!

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Rob and I had never played Scrabble together until January 1st of this year. We had the whole day off and I suggested we play for fun (I had an old version that I’d picked up at a garage sale). That was the day that the addiction began.

Since then, not a day goes by that Rob doesn’t ask me, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”, to which I reply… “Scrabble?”. Recently, we’ve had to set a timer because otherwise we get lost in the game and nothing gets done around the house the day.

We began to realize that the old version was hard to play with because the tiles easily slid off the warped board. We also wanted to be able to set it aside and resume the game later without having to painstakingly remove it from our dining room table, covering it with books so our crazy cat wouldn’t steal the tiles and chew them.

So we found a Scrabble Deluxe set on eBay and ordered it. It came with a beautiful game board with recessed grid spaces for the tiles, a two-minute timer, and a bag to store the tiles. I think it’s so pretty!

We’ve also been very proud to see our skills increase. Here’s the game we played this morning:

And here’s our score sheet- an all-time high score for me! (Sorry, sweetie…)

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Rob and I are Big City Burrito’s biggest fans in Colorado Springs. We got in the habit of calling it “Burrito Barn” a year ago when we started going to choir. Every week after we work out at the Y, we grab a burrito (which gives Rob a chance to try a new hot sauce) before choir practice.

Tonight, as a treat (since I can’t attend choir this week), I drove downtown to get burritos for when Rob got home. I was shocked and alarmed to see the lights out and all of the refrigerated cases cleaned out. Oh no! And not even a sign on the door explaining the situation. Just last Thursday, I was telling Rob as we ate our potato burritos, “I hope their business isn’t in trouble… they’re never busy.”

One thing that gives me hope is that I found a web site listing the business for sale. Maybe they sold the business and someone else is renovating it. But would they really not put up a sign or note in the window? I am very upset about this, in case you can’t tell. I can’t even imagine going to choir next week without a Big City burrito. At least we recently used up our Free Burrito punch card…

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