congrats, baby and little brandon.

my baby sister is engaged! Stop by her blog (and his blog) and tell them congratulations. and check out the gorgeous ring she designed for herself.

i am most especially happy about this wedding because i get to help pick the bridesmaid dresses, and i pretty much love any excuse to buy a pretty dress.

my book came!

yesterday. in the mail. a week earlier than they said. i'm already loving them.

great news

My department head came into my class the other day for a formal evaluation. Just to make sure I'm actually teaching. She filled out an evaluation form, on which she gave me ALL excellent ratings. She has never given a new teacher excellent ratings on everything. Pretty good for my self esteem.

My school gave me my very own tablet laptop. WHOO!!! This will be put to great use. (Namely, Office reruns, Facebook, blogging, etc.) Haha.

4-day weeks make me happy.

weekend recap

Even though I had a 3-day weekend, it was jam packed. I'm not even rested.

Friday, I went to the mall with Sarah, and showed her the beauty of MAC cosmetics. She's hooked. Our neighbor went ballistic when my roommate parked in her spot. I told her she was acting like a child, then ran inside and locked the door, because it's really not a good idea to piss off an enormous angry woman.

Saturday I graded lots and lots of lab reports, ran errands, then watched the DC United soccer team lose. (Hi, Justin!) I'm pretty convinced that soccer is the best sport on the planet. How is it that every other country figured that out before we did?

Sunday was church, an awesome dinner of frozen pizza and peanut butter rice krispie treats. My roommate invited everyone she knows to our house on Sunday night. Then she left in the middle of the evening because there was another party that sounded like more fun. This girl gets stranger every day.

Yesterday I continued grading, planned a lesson, went to lunch with my roommate, and hosted the best FHE all year. Dodgeball was a hit. I am now eagerly awaiting my amazon delivery of:

Don't try this at home: The Physics of Hollywood Movies
The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager
and Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity

I'm so excited to read!!!

Books... because I have nothing else to say

Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t (or just didn't) finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange - underline
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible*
1984 - underline
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray - seriously SO GOOD
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Ubervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things - underline
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - underline
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five - strange, but pretty good
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - underline
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - gag. never read it.
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
The Agony and the Ecstasy - reading it now
Feed - best book ever
And so many more...

weekend recap

So even though I couldn't make it to the Turkish festival, it was still a good weekend. Friday I participated in our school's homecoming festivities. The soccer game was great, and we won in overtime. I even had time to watch a movie when I got home Friday. Saturday, I went to a picnic where I consumed way too many caramel apples and donuts, ran into someone I used to know, then went shopping with friends. I bought a skirt on sale for $10 at Banana Republic. I'm wearing it right now. Very cute. I tried to begin the comments that I have to write on each student by tomorrow morning, but got pretty much zero work done. Oops.

Sunday was church, then dinner with friends, and a nap. Awesome.

bummer

So I tried to go to a bluegrass concert last night, but my neighbors took their dear sweet time getting ready, and it sold out before we got there.

And then I was supposed to go to the Turkish festival this weekend with my Turkish friend and his Turkish friends. But then he remembered that the festival is Sunday, and not Saturday like he said.

But it's homecoming weekend. And instead of a homecoming football game, there's a homecoming soccer game. Pretty awesome.

busy bee

Okay, so seriously, I'm busy. I'm averaging 4.5 hours of sleep a night (besides weekends, obviously), and it's not just because I'm working all the time. There's the weekly Office party (as in the TV show, not a work party), way too much shopping, making friends, blah, blah, blah.

So here are a few things that have happened in the past week:

• One of my students got his feet stuck in his lab stool. He started falling over, grabbed his neighbor, and hopped back and forth with the stool between his legs. I'm still laughing.
• One of my students told me that I'm "doing much better" at explaining concepts. Whatever that's supposed to mean.
• Every single student passed my first test. I love these kids.
• I am going to a friend's cabin this weekend to watch conference. I realize that it's just the same watching it at home, but it sounds way cooler to say I watched it at a cabin.
• We started our Movie Physics unit today. The kids love it. Hallelujah for that. It should last about 2 months.
• My pink fur dice were lost in the scavenger hunt we did yesterday in one of my classes. Sad.
• It's Friday. I'm going home.