The Last Day of Summer

Today, was a very good day, and as of 9:30 PM, I am not bummed. I hope not to be at all.

I actually decided to sleep in this morning, getting up around 9 AM, instead of 6, like it has been the past week. Meggie and I got up, and had breakfast, then did computer stuff. I ended up ordering $125 worth of pool stuff. I really didn't want to put more money into anything, since our summer spending was so high, but there were things I needed to close the pool. Max put a hole in the air pillow (for under the cover) that I bought last year. I also needed a new backwash hose, since the old one exploded. I had been getting away with just backwashing into the yard, but when I close the pool, I will have to drain several inches out of the pool. It's probably not a good idea to drain it all into the yard, so I ordered a 100ft of hose, which, in combination with the shorter hose I have, should get me out to the street. I also ordered a winterizing chemical kit, another bottle of test strips, and two types of chemicals that I needed.

After that, Meg and I brainstormed an idea we got from one of my aunt's at Crab Day yesterday. We were talking about baby stuff, and names, and all, and she told us this story about this friend she had that kept the name a secret, but gave very vague clues every week. I kinda thought this was a cool idea, so Meg and I drafted a list of clues that wouldn't give away the name, but would give people something to think about. Then, since we are the e-generation, we set up a blog for our daughter. Yes, she is still in the womb, and she is on the web. I love the age we live in. Well, anyway, the link is on the sidebar, but you can check it out here. We've already posted one clue, so leave a comment on that blog and put in your guess. On the side bar of that page, you can see all of the guesses we have so far.

Setting this up took most of the morning, so after that, we had lunch, while watching some more of Seinfeld, Season 6, including a featurette documentary about the making of an episode. Very interesting and informative. Meggie then took a nap, and while she was napping, I broke my rule about schoolwork. I sat down, and started to update my school web page. I got a little done on that, and then woke up Meggie, and we headed out to the pool.

We kept Max crated at first, because the pool was really messy, and needed vacuumed. I set up the vacuum for Meg, and she got to work. I put on goggles, and did a little bit of deep sea diving to get all of the leaves off of the bottom. You would've thought an entire tree had dropped leaves into the pool. I took a while, but we got everything cleaned out, and we then let Max in for a while.

Meggie made dinner, pasta & sauce, and we ate out on the deck, because it was beautiful. We spent the rest of the evening, enjoying our last day of summer, and watching 3 more episodes of Seinfeld.

Now, I wrap my night up with blogging, and some end-of-summer thoughts.

The Sunday of Summer Ends
My analogy for the weekend works well, but usually, I am not looking forward to a Monday, as I am the start of the school year. We'll have to see how I feel on 'Monday morning,' which doesn't technically happen till this Thursday. Tomorrow and Wednesday are both in-services. They don't really count as school starting, because there are no kids, and there is time to get your room set up and stuff. It is very low key. It all really starts on Thursday, when the kids get in, and the teaching starts.

What I Accomplished This Summer
This is the first summer in a long time, that I really feel like I got a lot of stuff accomplished. I mean, other summers have been very important, but usually, they are so busy, that at the end, you say, "Where did the time go?" I don't have that feeling this year. I am a list-maker, so here is my list of what I accomplished this summer:

• Built the deck
• Got the pool up-and-running, with balanced water and all.
• Kept the property looking good.
• Re-did the nursery
• Installed a new light in the laundry room
• Reorganized my music collection
• Actually used this blog
• Completely explored the various tools that Google has to offer
• Got a new toy, my Zen.
• Revamped our grocery-shopping situation, and set up a stock room in the laundry room.
• Visited family in Gettysburg.
• Had several house guests here: Brenda, Caitlin, Meg's mom, and Meg's dad
• Helped in throwing a kick-a** party for my dad.
• Was supportive as Meggie 'gestated.'
• Watched two seasons of Seinfeld
• Read several books (although have given up on the last one I started, maybe I'll pick it up again some day)
• Wrote curriculum maps for all grades.
• Made every worksheet that I need for the entire first marking period.
• Updated my band handbook.
• Got a major head start on my room setup.
• Attended the ActivBoard workshop
• Switched the handbell closets
• Ordered and picked handbell music for this season, and made up the schedule.

I might have missed some things, but I think it is a pretty good list.

What I want to accomplish this 'Monday, and the rest of the week' (school year)

• Always know what I am teaching. That is, have good lesson plans with clear objectives, and all materials ready. No more scrambling the night or morning before to make a copy a worksheet, or 'winging-it' when the class comes in.
• Stay ahead: on everything, but mainly on grading. I need to be organized from the beginning. My goal is to take a student's approach. Write down my 'homework' for the night, do it when I get home, and relax the rest of the night. I am not going to let the grading pile up, and then spend an entire weekend getting caught up. Also, as far as staying ahead, I plan to keep up the planning-ahead that I started this summer. In other words, I can spend the entire 1st marking period preparing all of my worksheets and materials for the 2nd marking period.
• Get better at discipline: this has been my weakest area every year I have taught. On one hand, I let too much stuff slide to avoid confrontation. I am inconsistent with discipline. I also don't yet think like a middle-schooler (I didn't even when I was IN middle school), and therefore, I have trouble understanding, and dealing with, some of the behavior problems I have. On the other hand, I let the kids get the better of me. I give a kid a demerit, and he/she argues with me. I argue back, and then get angry. The kid gets a kick out of the fact that it makes me mad, and then that makes me madder. I need to take the emotion out of discipline. I need to stop arguing with them. I'll never win. I also had a problem with drawing too much attention to my discipline system. I used to use a 'name and check on the board' system. Some kids LOVED seeing their name up there, and they enjoyed getting a demerit in front of the whole class. I am going to use a much more discrete system, and not let my class turn into the 'Demerit show.'
• Be a better, more motivating band director. I am not going to get into situations that make band a crappy experience. I am going to keep my cool when getting close to performance time. I am not going to let a few bad seeds ruin it for the good kids. I am not going to let a few bad seeds join the band, simply to annoy me. I am going to run better rehearsals, and be more prepared. I am actually going to take a look at the scores, and plan out my rehearsals. I going to put on a performance that I can feel confident about, and not crossing my fingers that it won't fall apart.
• I am not going to let school/work run my life. When I think back to last school year, it was like "Home is that place I go when I am not at school." I can't let it get that way. My job is a job. It's a good job that I like doing (most of the time). I do the job, so that I have money to live my life. By living my life, I mean, being with Meg, Max, and my future daughter. My enjoying time at home, blogging, going out (cheap, of course), and basically doing what I did all summer. I guess before I was still under college ideal that school is life. It really is for four years. You live at school; everyone you deal with is associated with school. You are immersed in the college experience. When you get into the real world, that's all you know how to do. Then, you get married, buy a house, get a dog, and have a kid, and the college model doesn't work there. This can be a major problem for some people, and it's not going to happen to me. I am done with college, and am living the life of a working adult, soon to be a family man. This person cannot revolve their life around school/work. I can still be a great music teacher/band director, and a family guy. I don't see why not.

Another pretty good list.

Well, it's 15 minutes past my bedtime, and I actually can't sleep in tomorrow. I have to pack up my laptop, and get my school paperwork ready to go, and then it is off to bed... the first 'school night.' of the summer. The 'Monday of Summer,' here I come!

Worksheet Machine!

After blogging, I waited around for the termite people to come, only to discover my oops of the month. I put the appointment on August 31 in my calendar, only to discover that it was ACTUALLY on July 31. If you check that date on this blog, you'll see that I slept till 11:30. Meg said she was downstairs watching TV with the door closed. This usually means we don't hear the doorbell. According to the secretary at the termite place, they came, no one answered, and then they left. So, now it is rescheduled for 9/6.

We had lunch, watched Seinfeld, then went to St. Paul's (our church) to do the closet switch. Basically what happened here was I was asked to move the handbell stuff to a different closet. Reason being the church needed a new place to store the communion dishes and stuff, since they are kept in the altar table, and get banged up anytime anyone moves it. The new closet is downstairs, which I thought originally was going to be a problem. However, it is twice the size as the old closet (good thing, since we barely had room for everything before). I also decided to move rehearsals downstairs, to eliminate having to take our equipment back up once a week for rehearsals. That means we will only have to bring everything up once a month for our Sunday morning performance. This isn't a real big problem, because the elevator is located right down the hall from the closet.

So, I installed the shelves I bought while Meg (carefully) moved equipment into the elevator. Then, we loaded everything into the new closet with plenty of room. This will be a surprise to the bell members when we start at the end of September. Some of the members seem to have this major fear of change, so I know there will be whining, but, it's done now, and it isn't going back. I'm kind of looking forward to the change.

Speaking of changes, I chose my first listening example for my middle school classes... David Bowie's "Changes." A great song, with cool instrumentation, interesting meter changes, and a good meaning. Hopefully the kids will appreciate it.

The rest of my day, aside from grilling some pork chops from dinner, was spent churning out worksheets, lesson plans, and materials for school. I got a TON done tonight, and hope to get some more done tomorrow. I'd like to take it easy Sat, Sun, and Mon, as they are my last three days of summer. Believe it or not, this doesn't bother me. Maybe it just hasn't hit me yet, or maybe, it is because I am actually prepared. Anyway, I was a worksheet machine tonight, and am very proud of the pile of papers in front of me.

Oh, I forgot to mention the poor things we do to our dog for entertainment. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:


Max, wearing one of my "paint shirt" ringer tees. Maybe he is getting ready to re-do his crate, or maybe he is going to poop, pick or something. You wouldn't want to ruin a nice shirt.



Aww, isn't that cute, Max and I match!

Grocery Experiments

I got up right at 7 yesterday, blogged, and then got right into schoolwork and such. I created several rhythm practice worksheets. Each worksheet contains 1 measure examples that are meant to be repeated. I'll play music with a strong beat, and call out the # of the example, and the students will clap it. I'll probably turn them into transparencies, or maybe use them on the ACTIVBoard that I will be able to use this year. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with them. I am thinking of using Google Pages to create a website where I can share the teacher resources that I make. When I finally get around to doing that, I'll post them there.

I worked on that kind of stuff until lunch. Meggie and I had pizza, and finished up the 5th Season of Seinfeld. We will have one more season that we have yet to watch. Then, we have to move on to The Simpsons. We have up through Season 8 now, and I have only watched up through Season 5.

After lunch, Meggie and I went BACK to Sam's Club, this time with our grocery shopping list. We walked around the whole store, and wrote down the price and the quantity of everything that we might possibly buy there. Yes, I know it sounds crazy, but it was actually fun. Meg and I were commenting that we feel like little kids in Sam's Club because everything is supersized. There were also tons of free food samples. The prices seem to be really good, but we still need to do the same thing at Wal-Mart, and make some decisions about what we are going to buy where. Sam's Club only carries certain brands, and we still might be better off getting the generic brand at Wal-Mart for some things. We'll have to check it out. It seems like an unusual Saturday outing, but: it was free, it was fun, it will potentially save us money on our grocery bill!

When we got home, Max was acting a little rambunctious, so I suggested we go S-W-I-M-M-I-N-G. Apparently Max knows how to spell now, because I got all excited when I said this. The weather was kinda yucky though, so I ended up letting him in and just watching him from the deck. Then we had dinner, and afterwards, I got some more school work done.

I developed an updated lesson plan format, and then changed gears back to groceries. Now that we are Sam's Club members, we are going to plan our meals by the month. We usually plan them by the week, but if we do it once a month, then we can go to Sam's Club at the start of the month and see what we need to get and store/freeze. Meg and I are discussing rearranging the laundry room so that we can fit shelves in there to store all of this stuff. Eventually, we want to get a chest freezer for down there too.

I'm very excited about all of this. When my Grandmom & Grandpop used to live in Stratford, my Grandpop had this neat workshop off the back of the garage. Along one wall, he had a workbench, some machinery, and a bunch of tools and stuff. Along the other wall, there was what I called the "store." They had shelves with all of this food. To a little kid, it looked like a grocery store aisle. Basically, my grandmother bought lots of sale items and stored them there (I don't think they had wholesale clubs back then). I always thought this was really neat, and now we are talking about doing the same thing. Also, when I used to work at Cinemark (a local movie theatre), I was always fascinated by the stock room for the concession stand. Now we will have a stock room. Now, if we could work on a popcorn popper (which they did have at Sam's Club, I might add), and a soda fountain, we'd be set.

So my task for the rest of the evening was making a calendar on the computer to put our meals on, and actually planning out the meals. It was a little tough to think of 31 different meals, but I made it simpler by thinking of 'theme days.' For example, Saturday is Fish, Sunday is my parents, Monday is pasta, Tuesday is Mexican, Wednesday is chicken, Thursday is pork, and Friday is either the diner or beef. Once I got that down, it was easy to plan everything else out.

After that I went to bed, got up at 7 (still not by the alarm clock, I really gotta do something about that), had breakfast, and blogged. Today we are going to Wal-Mart to complete the other half of our price comparisons. I'll blog about that, plus dinner at my parents', later tonight.

In the Club

7 AM didn't really happen yesterday morning. Missed the alarm again, but only by like a half-hour or so.

I got up at 7:30, had breakfast, and read the news. Then, Meg and headed to the hospital for our monthly growth scan.

Baby D is doing fine. She was 2 lbs 9 oz right now. Her growth rate is where it should be. She is breech (upside down--or is it right-side up? Let's say, feet down) right now, but this is not a concern until the end, as she is still able to move around a lot. She was much more cooperative this time, and the technician was able to get all of the measurements she needed. No pictures though, she was very 'business-like,' and did not print any.

After the scan, we had lunch, and watched some more of Seinfeld: Season 5. After lunch, I started to make the grocery list, and then got involved in a tangent that took pretty much the rest of the afternoon

As it is the end of the month, our grocery budget was low. I wanted to make it a goal this month to find a way to stick to it, since we always go over. So, what I did was start by making a simple spreadsheet of everything we needed. Then, I went through old receipts, and put in prices for the things we needed, since we pretty much buy the same things. Then, I had it total up everything. This way, I could make our list according to our budget. This seemed like a good thing, and I got the idea to switch to making our regular shopping lists in Calc (OpenOffice.org's version of Excel). So I added to this list everything we ever buy, and went through old receipts, adding prices for as many things as I can find. Then, when you make the list, all you have to do is type a number in the "Qty" column, and it totals up everything you are going to buy, including sales tax! Pretty cool. So now the problems: I ended up with a list of like 200 things that we could possibly buy. And the idea is that we can continue to add to this list. Well, it seemed silly to have to print out a few pages for one trip, when really, we probably only by 30 or so items in a trip. So, I found out a way to filter out all of the items we didn't need for the shopping trip. Great! Now, I can work it, but my next problem was to make it more user-friendly for Meg. I was trying to record macros (small programs to automate tasks) to make things faster. I was able to successfully program one to sort the list by aisle and one to clear out all of the numbers in the "Qty" column to start a new list. I was working on one to automate the filtering process, and I just could not get it to work. I posted my problem to the OpenOffice.org Forum, and found out you need to know some advanced stuff about programming language to do this. I think it would be cool to program stuff, but apparently I know nothing. I was looking over help guides to do this, and I might as well be reading German. So, I gave up on that. But the rest of the file is cool, and should make grocery shopping easier, and help us stick to our budget.

Speaking of groceries, I am now part of the "club," Sam Walton's club that is. My mom has been a member of BJ's (another wholesale club) for a while, and I have always been impressed with what you could buy in bulk. However, I never wanted to join a wholesale club before, because A) I thought the membership was really expensive, and B) I didn't think we'd be able to use everything we bought in bulk. Well, I found out the membership was only $40 a year for two cards!

So, we decided to check it out last night. Just on the meat prices alone, we will definitely save more than $40 a year. Plus, they have diapers, and a lot of other stuff that can easily be bought in bulk.

So, we signed up. I've got my own Sam's Club card now-- Complete with bad ID picture.



After Sam's Club, we went over to Wal-Mart (boy, the Walton family can eat tonight), and did our regular grocery shopping, and actually were UNDER the amount that I had predicted. Woo-Hoo, we actually stuck to our grocery budget this month!

We got home, and I toyed around more the the grocery program, and then gave up and went to bed.