MCCI Finals

Allen competed in his MCCI finals last night out in Gates. The boys all did great and we parents did a lot of cheering and hollering! Very exciting meet!

Cool Website

This is a very cool website. Every educator out there should take a look at it.

Thinkfinity

Calling all creative people!

Help! I need to create a newsletter for a fictitious library. I'm having a hard time thinking up a creative name for it. Does anyone out there have any ideas? "The Library Gazette" is just soooo boring!

Snowy Birdhouse

Feeling a bit better. Of course I'm not giving up on my grad work. I'm almost done and I'll get through it somehow. I have to "just do it."
Here's the bird house my father made me. He never got to see it in person after I decorated it with the tools, but I showed him a picture on my digital camera when he had just come home on hospice. He liked it. I think it looks great in the snow. Tomorrow is a day of concentrating on schoolwork and nothing else!

Allen had another swim meet tonight and did awesome on his 500 yd freestyle race! His best time yet. He may have made sectionals. We have to wait and see. It was very exciting! I never imagined I would have such a competitive swimmer for a kid!

Thanks for all of your encouraging words. Gotta go finish Ender's Game, which is turning out to be quite a good book. I'm not usually a science fiction fan, but this book has captured me.

School has started

This past week school started up for me. I already wrote a 3 page essay. I've also read 3 YA novels (The Outsiders, Hotlanta, and Gossip Girl) and started a 4th (Ender's Game). I feel like I have knots in my stomach and am sure that I can't get everything accomplished on time. I have other things on my mind too...like my kids, my mom, money, the job market, and some other concerns. I fell less upbeat than I did a year ago. Maybe it's just these past few months and how hard they have been. I guess must be honest and admit that I'm feeling a bit depressed.

Love is...

Do you remember these little cartoons created by Kim Casali from the 1970s? I used to have whole collection of these. I found this one and a few others glued inside the cover and pages of an old diary from junior high.I thought about them today and looked around on the internet to see if I could find some more. They were so cute!

I've been working on a paper for my YA lit class: a flashback to my teen years. We are supposed to try to remember what it was like being a teen and write about it. After reading a few of my diaries, I think I was the typical teen girl who had her head in the clouds half the time and was a bit lonely.My diaries sound an awful lot like my daughter Audra. Who knew?

Swim Meet

I took the camera to Allen's swim meet the other day. I got some really nice shots. This is Allen with two of his best buddies, Sam and Eric.
Allen swimming the 500. He got a personal best on Saturday for this event.
His team. Don't ask me what those boys are doing in the foreground. I think they were actually horsing around when I took it. This was at the end of the meet. They had won!
Allen...zoning out while his coach is talking to them. LOL!

New Cam

I got my new camera today. I have nothing exciting to take a picture of. I walked around snapping pictures in different settings and modes to try it out. I've deleted most of them. I still need to get a memory stick for it. This snap touched my heart just because my father being in the background. He looks like he's looking down in love on his grandchildren.

Balmy at 20° F

After having temperatures in the single digits for several days in a row, it actually felt balmy today at a whopping 20°. That is...until I decided to take a winter walk with the dog. We lasted a half an hour. You know it's cold when your dog refuses to put all four feet down on the ground at once.
I took along my camera (still the old one...which takes excellent pictures outside) and snapped a few pictures just for fun. My new camera should arrive in a few days.
There are Christmas tree carcasses all over town. I counted 12 laying on the ground when I drove my son to school on Saturday morning for swim practice (and that was only after thinking of the idea to count them). I'm planning on taking ours down today too.Yesterday, I went to see my mother. I was amazed at how much more snow that she and both of my sisters have on the ground in their towns. Mom and my nephew Dave were surprised when I told them we could still see blades of grass through the snow in Canandaigua. I wish I had my camera with me yesterday to show you the difference.More snow fell overnight...which has essentially covered all the little blades of grass poking through here and there. Here is one of the sidewalks downtown. I can't work my camera very well with gloves on. My hand was so frozen after the above picture that I swore it would be absolutely the last one I took.
However, I couldn't resist taking a picture of this happy fella. He just thrives in the cold!

Happy New Year!

Another year has come and gone. I have not made any profound resolutions or anything. I just hope to steadily keep the faith while navigating life's path. We went to Ovid for New Years. We ate far too much junk food and stayed up far too late, but it was great to see family. Jamie's cousin was up from Florida with her daughter. They are not used to snow and were amazed by the few inches we got. We had fun playing games and laughing so hard that tears came to our eyes.

Good news: I ordered a new camera. I am anxiously awaiting its arrival...which should be some time this coming week. I ordered a Sony Cybershot H20, after researching cameras withing my price range for about 2 weeks. I used a camera with a broken flash for way too long!

Bad news: My swimmer has a terrible cold and is miserable. He forced himself to go to practice today since he hadn't swam since Wednesday's meet. Jamie is also feeling under the weather.

Neutral news: School starts for me on January 10th. I will be traveling to Buffalo on Tuesday nights.

(We don't have as much snow as the picture shows. The picture is from last year)