Christmas

We drove down to Mom's early this year, so we had lots of time to get ready for Christmas. A good thing too, since I wasted one of the days being sick. (Note: If you're shivering in a sleeping bag wearing a long-sleeved shirt, two vests, and a sweatshirt and you're not camping, you might have a fever.) Luckily we were all in good health for the big day.

We had a great Christmas, following our traditional routine: We had a big dinner at Mom's on Christmas Eve. Ham and scalloped potatoes, with double cream lemon pie for dessert. Then we opened our stockings (cause when we were little Andrea and I couldn't wait until Christmas morning). Christmas morning, we opened presents with Mom. Then I was in charge of making waffles with strawberries and whipped cream for brunch. After that, we waddled over to Dad's house and exchanged gifts with him. Then we enjoyed Christmas dinner with Dad. Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits... Haley helped "Grandpa" open the biscuit tubes, which was a very exciting experience for her. It was apparently a little disconcerting popping the tubes with someone who startles as easily as Dad... *grin*

Haley got the watch she had been desperately hinting for


She also got one of the Fancy Nancy books


Mom got a bottle of Arpège perfume


Here's a photo of Andrea helping Haley to open one of her presents:

Thanksgiving

Another successful Thanksgiving :) The weather was nice, as usual, so we played tennis every day. Here's Dad, ready to serve.


Somehow, Andrea manages to look a bit more intimidating when she's about to serve. Course, that may be because I've seen how fast she sends the ball flying!


Every morning, two news papers were carefully dissected over the breakfast table.


And as usual, we got our "let's get a family portrait before we go!" photo.


We stopped at the Golden Gate rest stop on the way back.


And took turns taking photos :)

Halloween

This year, Haley was determined that she was going to be scary, and NOT CUTE. She pretty much recycled last year's costume. "But it's totally different, Mom. Last year I was the Spider Princess. This year I'm the Princess of the Dead!" My friend, Molly, came over and did our hair. If I were going to the prom, I would definitely be begging her to do my hair!

Here's Haley's hair before we sprayed the black and purple dye on it. It was so gorgeous I hated to color it!


Here's a movie of Molly and Haley, after we colored her hair.


This was my costume. Much less impressive, but still cool :)


We started trick or treating just as it was starting to get dark.


We later returned home and lit our pumpkins so trick or treaters could come to our house. Check out the wicked cool cat shadow behind the rats on my pumpkin!

Soccer in the Rain

You may not be able to tell in this photo, but it's raining :)

We were positive that Haley's game was going to be canceled today. It's been raining for 2 days, and there was a 100% prediction of rain for today. But when I called the hotline this morning, the games were on. It ended up being pretty fun, in a cold and wet kind of way. Several kids didn't show because their folks were sure the game was canceled, so the team didn't have any subs until a couple kids showed up at halftime.

The score was tied until the last few minutes, when the other team kicked a shot that slipped out of the goalies hands. Both teams played hard (with lots of missed kicks due to slipperiness) and it was a good game :)

Going to the Eye Doctor

So I had an eye appointment today. Not because I really wanted one, but because my optometrist wouldn't sell me any more contact lenses without a current prescription. It wasn't just the little exam either, but the full on, eyes dialated, after-images-like-a-bar-code-floating-in-front-of-my-vision exam. Haley's comment? "You look creepy!"



The doctor didn't like how extensively I wear my contacts, but was surprised by how well my eyes were doing given that info. He did recommend that I switch my contact cleaner to another brand. It's actually pretty cool. You put your contacts in a little cage, which is then suspended in a tube which you fill up with a special hydrogen peroxide solution. The case includes a gear thing which is coated in something that reacts with the hydrogen peroxide and causes it to separate into oxygen and water. It kills all the germs and then subsides into a solution that won't cause agony when you put it in your eyes. The catch is that you have to let it sit for at least six hours, so you're not sticking H2O2 into your eyes. But I'm a "desperately need more than six hours of sleep" kind of person anyhow, so that's not really a problem :)

The neatest part is watching it fizz :)

Seat Sacks aka Chair Pockets

I was going to order my chair pockets off eBay. I had email exchanges with several vendors. I finally decided to make them myself, however. That way I know the fabric is prewashed (and preshrunk!) and the pockets will look the way I want.

I ordered green canvas from hancockfabrics.com. When it arrived I took it to the laundromat and washed it and dried it on hot. (One of the vendors didn't prewash her chair pockets -- the finished products were dry clean only!!!). Now I'm in the process of ironing, cutting, and sewing 39 chair pockets.

Surprisingly, the fabric didn't shrink at all horizontally, it just got shorter. So I really can cut out 3 20" pockets side by side from my 60" wide fabric. The sewing is pretty easy, but the ironing and cutting are miserable. I finished one last night and took it to work today. It fits perfectly on my chair, and looks pretty snazzy :) When I'm finished, the math textbooks will have a place to live where they're easily accessible, and the students won't books scattered all over their tables :)

Body Butter Batch #2

So my palm butter and essential oils arrived, so I made another batch of whipped body butter :) This time, I ended up with a much thicker batch.

Ingredients
100g	Shea Butter
60g	Palm Butter
40g	Coconut Butter
2 tbsp	Corn Starch
1 tsp	Vitamin E Oil
1/2 tsp	Vanilla Powder
1 tsp	Crème Brulé Essential Oil
1/8 tsp	Cinnamon Leaf Essential Oil
100 g	Shea Butter

Method

Just like the last batch. I measured out 100 g of shea butter, 60g of palm butter, and 40g of coconut butter. This time I used a bigger bowl, to make whipping easier. Unfortunately, that meant I had to use my crockpot bowl as my ice bath. It used a lot more water, and I ended up not having as much ice as I needed. Next time, I want to make sure to have 2 trays of ice before beginning.

I added the essential oils and the vitamin E. As I mixed, it didn't harden as fast as I was expecting. Next time I'll let it sit for a few minutes and see if that fixes it, but this time I melted another 100g of shea butter and added it (since the shea is the most aggressively solid of the butters). Eventually, it cooled and began whipping properly. I have mixed feelings about the different proportions of shea butter to the last recipe. It's less creamy, and more solid. However, I think shea butter is the big good ingredient, so having more of it is probably just great as far as the skin is concerned.

The scent ended up bordering on too sweet. Definitely too sweet in the jar, but once on it leaves the skin nicely scented. Haley loves it, of course. Is there a scent too sweet for an 8 year old girl?

Anyhow, the next day I brushed it through Haley's hair before her shower, and then shampooed it out. After the shower I melted some in my hands and ran it through her wet hair. It's been 2 days, and her hair is smooth (not greasy!) and feels really moisturized. It's much less tangly than before :)

Body Butter Batch #1

I got some cool body butter in Canada from a fellow hostel guest. It had the recipe on the side, so I've been planning to make more. Naturally, my ingredients haven't all arrived at the same time. I picked up some coconut oil at a local health food store, and my shea butter arrived today. Even though my palm oil and new essential oils haven't arrived, I'm almost out of the stuff I got in Canada. On the theory that anything containing Shea Butter and Coconut Oil is probably going to be pretty OK, I'm going to give a partial recipe a try.

Ingredients
100 g	shea butter (solid @ room temp)
65 g	coconut oil (solid @ room temp)
35 g	almond oil (liquid @ room temp)
2 tbsp	cornstarch
	essential oils

Method

I put a pyrex bowl on the base of my scale and set zero. Then I scooped in 100 grams of shea butter (the metric was more finely graduated). I scooped about 50 grams of coconut oil, then a little more. I was worried that too much almond oil would make it too runny at room temp. Then I added almond oil till the total weight was 200 g (I had to thump the counter to get the scale to register).

I put the 200 g of oils in the microwave and cooked on high at 30 second intervals for about 2 minutes (stirring every 30 secs). The shea butter still had a few little lumps in the bottom, but I left it on the counter about 5 minutes and they were all melted when I came back.

I put the bowl in an ice bath and began mixing with my hand mixer. This is *lots* better than sticking the bowl in the freezer!!! I added the cornstarch while the mix was still pretty liquid. I tried to measure by weight for consistency, but it was too light to register, so 2 tbsp it is!

I added essential oils when the mix began to thicken. I used rosemary, tea tree, eucalyptus, and peppermint. Too much eucalyptus -- i thought one of my bottles of eucalyptus was peppermint, and I couldn't figure out why my mix kept smelling like eucalyptus and not mint!

Kept mixing, now on high speed. I scraped the sides with a spoon several times -- the mix would harden because of the ice water bath. Eventually, it seemed colder than room temp, so I stopped. No point trying to cool it further, since it'll just warm up again. I spooned it into two short cream cheese tubs; they're each about 3/4 full.

Result: Fluffy off-white goop. Kind of a whipped frosting consistency, between cold cream and cool whip. It melts quickly on contact with my hands. I feel the cornstarch as a very very fine grittiness when I'm rubbing it into my skin -- it helps it keep from feeling slimy/oily, but I'm not sure how I like it. Though the mix is very strong smelling in the tub, it's not that strong on my skin.

The Gym

So after significant pestering and begging, The Club has allowed Haley to become a gym member. Every week, Tues - Fri, we get up at 5:15 and stagger over to the gym to work out before school. I generally feel pretty miserable while I'm brushing my teeth at 5:30, but after running for half an hour and showering, I feel great :) Haley jogs on a treadmill while I run on an elliptical runner right beside her. Haley's coach noticed a big difference in how much she was able to run during yesterday's game :) :)

Haley's got soccer practice on Monday and Thursday afternoons, and I've got a standing tennis game on Sunday, so we're doing pretty well on the exercise front right now :)

We ♥ Potpie

Potpie is one of the best foods EVER. It has stew inside, so it's good like stew. But it's stew wrapped in *bread*. Meat, potatoes, and bread, all in one beautiful package. Plus the stew has veggies in it (meat flavored veggies -- the best kind!) so you can almost feel virtuous about eating potpie :)


Mom visited this weekend, so I made this potpie with leftover chicken stew. It was the first chicken stew I'd ever made, so I was excited to show it off. Mom said it was pretty good too :)

Soccer Games

Haley is having a good year in soccer! Her coach is great. Lots of positive reinforcement, as well as corrections. Having listened to some of the other coaches screaming at their teams this year, we're feeling pretty lucky.


Haley's ball skills are getting better and better, and she's learning to steal the ball rather than just let her opponents have the shot. Her team is really starting to pull together on the field, which is neat to watch :)

10,000 Miles

Today my new Prius hit 10,000 miles on the odometer :)

First Day of School

Haley was all ready for school :)



Her new teacher is Ms. Weir, and so far Haley *loves* her. All the other teachers I've talked to have good things to say about her, so it's shaping up to be a great school year :)

Labor Day

I promised Haley that if she got her room clean,we would go to the river. Yay bribery -- she got it clean! We went with some friends. Here are Haley, Sierra, Julie, and Sierra's little sister. The girls spent the day catching crawdads and frogs.







Unfortunately, there were also snakes at the river. Huge vicious snakes! They must have been this big:


Although I promised a river trip, I am anti sun. It was too hot to wear my sweatshirt, so I hid as much of myself as possible under light towels for most of the time :)



Finally we got to -- er -- had to leave for soccer practice. While the girls practiced, Cynthia and I walked a couple of blocks to the pier. It's so beautiful here!


The pier is a great place to walk. On nice days there's usually at least one amateur crab pot dangling off the end of the pier.


The view is great. This part of the sea wall is pretty neat looking :)


Cynthia took my photo for me -- proof I didn't just download these photos from a National Geographic or something :)

My Fantastic Classroom

Haley was a trooper last night -- we were at my classroom till 7:30 last night. But I'm done getting ready for the first day -- we won't have to go back this weekend to finish up! I have all my photocopies done and organized. (We have these crazy packets to hand out -- about 8 pages that parents need to sign and return -- permission slips, picture forms, and more!)

I got a deck of cards and took out one of each rank. I taped one card down on each desk. The other three of that rank went into a deck -- when the kids come in, I'll hand them a warmup quiz and they'll draw a card, and they'll go sit at the table with the matching rank :) It's a good way to randomly divvy them up and seat them three to a table.

Anyhow, my classroom is looking pretty good! I even have, get this, POSTERS on my walls! I know, crazy, huh? I guess it is about on schedule though -- it generally takes me a few years to decorate *grin*

Here's a video I made of my classroom :)

The Mighty Fava Bean

Today began with a 4 hour staff meeting. Blah. Unfortunately, most of what was covered really needed to be discussed, so I can't even complain that much. Then I had a lunch meeting with Cindy M. Then I had a 45 minute AVID meeting, and then a partnership meeting. Yup... A whole day of meetings. But... the meetings were mostly productive. For example, during our lunch meeting Cindy & I went to the library and covered our new class sets of books with snazzy new covers and then hauled them back to our classrooms. Jeff gave me one of his old computers, so now my classroom has a Strawberry iMac as a student computer :) He might even end up giving me another, so then I'd have two student computers :)

Haley and I joined the gym today. We're going to try working out in the morning before school. We'll see how that works out... But Haley really enjoys running, so I thought that the treadmill would be great for her. We have so much miserable weather (for weeks at a time!) that we can't count on outdoor exercise.

On the way home we went grocery shopping, and we bought this funny thing that looked like a giant string bean. It turns out that it's a fava bean. Tonight's dinner was fish sticks, guacamole and chips, and a few raw fava beans each. They taste a lot like giant peas :)

Crazy Busy Day

So today was my first official day back at school. Of course, most of the teachers came back last week to start putting things back together, but now we're getting paid for it! *grin* We had the big welcome back thing in the auditorium, where every teacher in the entire district crams in. It was hot. I admit, I snuck out to drop Haley off at the babysitter's, and then came back and kinda drifted in and out around the back door. I did do the welcome for the new employees, but other than that...

Then there was a big meeting for all the math teachers, on how to use our new textbooks. Unfortunately, it was focused mainly on the technology, directed by a sales lady who wasn't that strong in technology. I had played around with the software some on Friday, so I'd pretty much picked up the stuff she spent 3 hours covering. *sigh* I still think we picked the wrong company, but oh well. Suck it up and move on already, right?

Then I picked up Haley and we changed clothes and played tennis with Cynthia and Julie. A friend of Cynthia's, Teira, joined us with her daughter, Sierra. So we had three girls with tennis rackets. Haley suddenly got a lot more motivated to play (all the sudden it was cool!) She did a pretty good job swiping at the ball :)

Then we went home and showered, and then drove out to Cindy M's house so she and I could work on math teacher stuff. Dang. Let me say that again: DANG. Her house is beautiful. It's about 10 miles inland, on the river. She helped design it, and WOW. We were very impressed. We had dinner and then worked on math stuff. Did you know that pizza hut makes chicken parmesan??? I sure didn't. It was good, too! Garlicy (sorry Mom) but I *like* garlic! Cindy made a salad with lots of avocado, which made a great pairing.

I brought a bottle of wine: 2006 Coppola Rosso. Cindy and I both liked it quite a lot. I'm not good at tasting notes, but I found some online. Winemaker notes: "Rosso 2006 has smooth, rich layers of sweet dark fruits, cloves, a touch of vanilla and mildly toasted oak. Its mild tannins make it incredibly food-friendly, so it's easy to pair with anything from braised short ribs to grilled salmon or a sausage and pepperoni pizza." Yum.

Crash and Burn

Haley went to a slumber party last night. How did I spend my exciting night of freedom? Err, well... I went to work and fiddled around with my classroom till 11. Um, exciting. No hope for me, I'm afraid :)

I french braided Haley's hair before the party. I've only french braided a few times, and Haley's hair is *really* tangly, so this was a 20 minute, sobbing ordeal. But it looked pretty good afterwards. Moreover, when I picked her up today, after lying on it at least part of the night (although apparently not sleeping) and going to the river and swimming, it *still* looks pretty good!!! Yay me, and yay french braids!


Of course, Haley crashed on the way home. She had a headache, she was going to puke, etc. She got home and headed for the bathroom, to hang out by the toilet. No, she didn't puke. She fell asleep on the bathroom floor, and didn't wake up for more than an hour. Finally I went in and told her that she could either get up and have dinner, or she could get up and go to bed.

Too bad; tonight's dinner was potpie :)

Haley's First Game of the 2008 Season

We're really happy with Haley's soccer team this year. Not only is her friend, Julie, on the team, but the coach, John Murphy, is awesome. He's a teacher, so he's got the management/rapport thing down :) The team has 18 kids, so each kid gets to play half a game -- plenty of subs in case of sickness or whatever :) Here are the kids who managed to show up on time for the jamboree (opening ceremony) today:


Haley got to throw the ball in at least 3 times this game -- she's good at throwing it far and to her teammates. Her coach is standing next to her :)


She did a really good job of running hard and staying on the ball :)


Ok, yes, they did win. 3 to 0 :)

Getting Ready for School

So I've already spent a lot of time getting my classroom ready. This year I'm going to have a *lot* of students -- my largest class has 37 students. So I had to completely rearrange my classroom to try to accommodate 37 bodies. I'm a little discouraged about the number of students -- many of them are already struggling with algebra, and cramming that many in a room is not exactly the best way to help them to succeed. Oh well, I'll just do my best. We have a completely new textbook this year, so we'll see. Anyhow, here's a photo of my new classroom layout -- three kids to a table...

Henna with Ann

Today, Ann Redd came over and we got to use up some more henna :) I warned her that my drawing skills were limited to stick figures. I would now like to retract that statement -- as a joke she used stick figures in her designs, and I'm not that good. So I guess next time I'll have to find an even more pathetic description for my lack of skill. Meanwhile, here's Ann's leg


and my shoulder. (This is even better if you know that I fight with a teardrop shield. And, yes, that is my coat of arms :)

Pas d'Armes

Robert & Leia hosted the Allyshian Pas d'Armes this year. It was pretty fun. We got there after dark Friday night, but set up our tent by the light of the full moon (and assorted streetlights:) On Saturday, we armored up and had both rapier and heavy fighters. The heavy tourney was such that the gallery selected a challenger, the challenger issued a challenge to another fighter, and that fighter got to pick the weapons and format (three bouts, 10 thrown blows, etc.) It was fun :) After the fighting, I put my armor away (yay me!!!) and brought out the henna (woohoo!)

Wendy painted my hand


and Paula painted my face :)


BTW, for those who aren't familiar with it, henna is a plant that is ground up and made into a paste which is applied in fine lines. When the paste is removed, the skin beneath has been dyed a reddish brown. The thicker the skin, the darker and longer-lasting the dye. That's why my hand is darker than my face, which will be dye free within a week.

Grandma Ruby visits us!

Grandma Ruby and Mom came up to visit us. We went to dinner at the Chart Room. They have excellent clam chowder and fish, a good view of the sea lions on the dock outside, and a neato shark carving out front.


Then we went to the Simpson Reed Grove, to go on a walk. Grandma, Mom, and Haley posed on a bridge.


Here, Grandma and Haley pose in front of a fallen redwood.


This tree grows all the way across the trail, reaching the ground on both sides.


But now matter how hard she tries, Haley can't *quite* jump high enough.


Haley would like to move into this tree-cave, but only if we get rid of the spiders first.


Haley and Grandma in a hollow tree :)