Last Friday I took a personal day off from school to go see my friend Irene's "Research & Inquiry" presentation at UW. She and I are in the same cohort in the doctoral program, but she has actually continued full time :)The "R&I" is a big rite of passage for doc students, so there's a get-together afterwards and I was also able to see my friend Maxine who recently had a baby AND was presenting her R&I (she made me feel like such a slacker...). It was great to see them, and Irene began practicing the "baby squats" documented here.
This Friday was a big relief for my AP students and I. After an insanely packed Semester attempting to prepare them for the big exam, they took the test on Thursday morning and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief when it was all over. They really are sweet kids--the day before the exam I told them their homework was to get plenty of rest and eat a healthy dinner and breakfast. The kids decided to meet at a local diner at 6:15 am for one final get-together be
fore the exam an impressively enough, I was able to get up and out of the house by 5:45 in order to meet them at Mitzel's family restaurant.The night before I went to the drugstore and bought a pack of the fanciest pencils I could find, then at Mitzel's we ceremoniously passed around the "magic pencils" for them to use on the exam. We had a pretty amazing party in class that day after the test, complete with a wii boxing tournament and more sweets than anyone should ever encounter in a single day. Luckily there was a track meet that afternoon, so I was able to pawn off the extra goodies to some throwers and my jumpers.
FINALLY the pool in our building is being filled! The weather has been quite lovely lately, despite a few ugly rain showers here and there, and now our building manager has begun the process of getting the pool ready to open. And yes, I am too lazy to take the pict
ure from downstairs, so that diagonal line is my condo window, open so that I could stick my iph camera out to take a picture. The iphone is a slippery little sucker, so there was a definite moment of fear that I might drop it the five stories down onto a neighbors porch. But luckily that did not occur and just look at what a lovely picture it took (ha! the iph takes horrible pictures...for all the pictures of my students I had to tell them to hold very still for at least five seconds).Now if only I had a kitty cat...
