D-Day

Today is the day every year that is toughest for me. It marks the anniversary of my mom's death. It's been fours years and I still want to pick up the phone and call her all of the time. I think about her when I'm driving home from work and see a pretty sunset or remember the stories she used to tell me about violets being thrones for fairies and moss being the grand capreting for their homes. I used to lay under trees on my belly and imagine their lives and wish a fairy would happen along that second. I made houses for them out of moss and bark.

I remember riding home from grandpas house in the dark and she would look at the strings of headlights and tailights of cars and mumble "rubies and pearls" to herself to enjoy the traffic instead being irritated to sit in it. She encouraged me to play in the dirt and was always thrilled at whatever I brought home-alive or dead. She always had a story about what I found, sometimes she'd come with me. Or bring some scary bug in the house to show us.

I want to curl up in my warm blankets today and dream the day away. I hope the children can make me happy today with their warm smiling faces. I love you, mama. I hope you're watching over me today. My eyes are staying damp on their own.

The Possibilities Are Limitless....

Open Floorplans Are Not Fun For Me

Over the years I've tried so many ways to decorate my house, I've gone with trying to define rooms by using a different color room to room, that was bad...more recently we have made the dining area and foyer all one color.

I hate that when I am on the sofa I can see the kitchen, the wall of the living room, the dining room, the foyer, and part of the hallway. How can I make my eyes happy? And unless its all clean all the time there are lots of problem areas. Here's what I was looking at...


Also we really never entertain company so we invested in a huge sofa that wraps around the living area so we can do what we do best-watch movies and be couch potatoes, but now can we ever rearrange? Not to mention the cloth of said sofa is not doggy-proof. The Jack Russell has taken trying to eat the sofa and her toenails have snagged the material badly. Rethinking the purchase....

I love the fact that we have these vaulted ceilings, but trying to hang pictures is a total drag there's so much wall and all the pictures I have don't go together or make any sense together size-wise or color scheme-wise or anything, plus getting back to that huge sofa there not a sofa picture big enough to hang behind that big daddy.

Just a small sidenote....

Bradley Cooper is HOT!!!

No more things

So I failed out of 23 Things right around voice threading. I still liked reading all the blogs I found when I was busy surfing around for stuff to use for the class. I loved the photos and interesting snippets of conversations posted. Just wondering if I have what it takes to create a pretty and amusing little corner of the world. For now I'll just keep my little blog right here and add stuff to it as I go along. Maybe it'll just be enough to please me.

We are in the middle of redoing our master bath and bedroom. We aren't taking the rooms apart. In the bath we will be removing the flooring and counters other than that it is mostly cosmetic in both rooms. I've chosen a pretty Wedgwood blue for the bathroom, brushed nickel for the metal works, dark wood, very stark white for trim, and a neutral ceramic for the tiles. Its coming along slowly and I'm looking forward to months of it being torn apart as we come up with the funds to do it.

I'm hoping the cabinets and floors will be done in summer so I don't have to share a bathroom with the girls for any length of time.

Thing #14

I have had lots of fun looking around on both youtube and teachertube. I'm actually glad we can't view youtube at work without really working at it because I have actually spent hours on it at home. On teachertube I found Mr. Duey's fraction video most entertaining as far as sharing with kids and math facts. http://www.mrduey.com Lots of teachers seem to be using this format to teach concepts. I love it!! Mr. Duey visits schools to rap about all subjects, from parts of a cell to how to treat each other as people.

I usually go for the weird or funny videos on youtube, I am also interested in what people can do with Photoshop or lapsed time videos. But, I found some beer pong trick shot videos that did amuse me (if you mute the screamo music and cursing). There is a genuine physics concept related to this. In most of the videos I chose to view they were using glasses of water and a ping pong ball, but doing accurate and sometimes amazing tricks. One person floated a cup of water in a full fish tank and made the ping pong ball into the cup from at least 10 feet away. There has to be a lot of hypothesizing (practicing), measuring, and trajectory, not to mention "experimenting" to perfect their shots.

Instruction could be supported with this just as much as the proverbial dropping of the egg off the rooftop to see whose design keeps the egg from breaking; which according to students I've talked to is getting pretty outdated. But, both involve engineering in some form. I found rules of play on wikipedia that vary by region or college campus. In fact, after googling physics and beer pong, I came back to edit this post because I found this site---http://www.alongyotte.com/platinum_equation.html that appears to be a physics paper written by a college student for his physics class. I know, I'm easily amused.

My Art Wordle