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Thursday, 20 August 2009

  • August 2009 Update

    Updates lately are few and far between, but I figure I should still write here once in a while.  I know I have a couple of followers out here who don't hear much about or from me otherwise.  This is for them.

    I started teaching at West Side Alternative Academy in Midwest City earlier this month.  I'm teaching high school science.  The Alternative Academy is for students in high school in the Mid-Del (Midwest City and Del City) Public Schools who are not earning enough credits to graduate high school for whatever reason.  For the classes I'm teaching, that reason includes a mix of students who act up, have short attention spans, had a baby, or have trouble learning, or some combination thereof.  We also have a program at the school for students who are "special needs," 60-70% of whom have parole officers and have been expelled from school.  After a ton of training sessions, I felt more overwhelmed than prepared.  The first day of school materialized my worries.  In the mornings, I teach science in a traditional classroom format, albeit with a considerably smaller class size (I had 5 students the first day, and that's the most I've had so far).  My morning students are great-- there's some chitchat and zoning out now and again, but 90% of the time, there's no problems.  It's my afternoons that I'm finding to be draining.  In the afternoons, I basically supervise a group of students while they work on a computer-based learning program.  They read information, and take quizzes on it, then earn a year's worth of credit in about 9 weeks.  Easy, right?  NO.  No, unfortunately, all of my students went to high school together, so they all know that so-and-so likes so-and-so, and that so-and-so hates so-and-so, and what have you.  And there is one notorious instigator in that class that has a bad reputation with the entire faculty at the school even though he's only been there a few days.  When he acts up, everyone giggles and makes snide comments, etc.  Anyhow, it's been a huge battle, but I'm learning, and the faculty at the school is awesome and always there to help.  It's a trying task, but I'm getting there!

    Other than that, I've been working on my running.  Before school started, I was up to running 10 miles on Saturday mornings, and feeling great!  But now, it's hard to run 30 minutes.  I've fallen out of practice, and though it's only been 2 or 3 weeks since my hard workouts, and despite working out 3 times a week, I just can't keep up with my training.  I think most of it is that I spend so much energy during the day lecturing, pacing, supervising, and stressing, and most of that on my feet.  My legs get so tired.  But I have plenty of time before my half-marathon in November, so I'm not too worried about it.  It's just a matter of taking the time to actually fit my workouts in.

    That's it for me for the night, I've got to get to bed and do this all over again in the mornings.  So it goes...

Thursday, 28 May 2009

  • Oh, how life is a-changin'...

    So!  We have a house now.  We gradually moved in starting April 17 and we were out of our apartment by May 1.  We've painted our bedroom a calming green, which looks a-gazillion times better.  We even put new baseboards up.  All of the trim is white in that room, too, and all of the doors except the 2 entry way doors have been replaced with white 6-panel doors.  We've also finally got some office furniture, so we have someplace to put our paperwork/bills/etc.  The kitchen isn't happening yet.  We have to build out a wall into the area where the accordion doors used to be so that we have someplace to put our huge fridge, and right now, the fridge is just sitting in the middle of the floor of the kitchen.  So, it's coming slowly.  It's soooo much better than an apartment!!!

    I turned 25 on the 14th.  A quarter of a century old already!  Makes me feel old.  Especially when I think of high schoolers having been born in 1994.  Ridiculousness!  For my birthday, I bought new clothes and skin care products.  But really, I needed the clothes.  I was trying to make due with my old clothes from college (and I mean college, not grad school), since those were the only ones that were fitting me.  So I went shopping!  And I can fit into size 6 and some size 4 clothes now, so that's great! 

    Which reminds me.  One thing I love about our house is how close it is to Lake Hefner, the City's water reservoir lake that has some really great trails around it (total distance around is 9.8 miles, I believe).  Anyhow, I've been running recently.  And I love running now.  Like, really love it.  I am slow right now, very slow, but I'm amping up the miles surprisingly well, and I'm starting to get some speedwork in there to push my 5K time under 30 minutes.  For our anniversary (which is this Sunday, if you can believe it!), I convinced Jonathan to buy me a running GPS.  You wear it on your wrist, and it calculates your pace, distance, heart rate, and all this other stuff.  There are a ton of features and I won't go into a lot of detail, but the point is that it's the COOLEST.  And I love it!  And I am going to be the best runner!  In like 5 years!  But still, for now, it's so useful.  It beeps at you if you go too fast or too slow, and it tells you how far you've gone, and you can "race" against a virtual partner based on how fast and far you tell it you want to go.  So, it's super neat, and I am in love with it at the moment.

    Speaking of running, Jonathan ran a marathon last weekend!  He ran in the OKC marathon relay, running the 12K (7.5 miles) portion in less than an hour, and he was moved by the hoopla surrounding the marathoners, so he decided right then and there to run the next marathon.  Which was this past weekend.  Jonathan did not train at all for it.  He finished it in 4 hours, 44 minutes, 51 seconds.  He thought he would finish it in under 4 hours, and he would have if he could have kept up the pace he ran his first 10 miles, but he just about died halfway into the race, and his last 8 miles were the most miserable thing you've ever seen, maybe running a 12 minute mile, if that, plus about a 20 minute walking break and a stop for a massage after all of his major leg muscles cramped up simultaneously.  But he finished!!  He won't be running another marathon any time soon.  Until next April, when we will both run the OKC marathon together!

    I do not have a job.  Still.  I finished teaching at OCCC, and if I can help it, I probably won't teach there again, at least not for a while.  I had some bad experiences with it.  Not the worst, it was just disappointing in many ways.  Anyhow, I'm trying to get a job teaching high school biology now.  I finally got my teaching license, and I've applied to 4 different positions around the OKC metro area so far.  I will apply for more later at some of the "lesser" schools if I don't get anything at the better schools, but I was invited to an interview for a position as a Biology teacher at Edmond Public Schools (Edmond Santa Fe High School), and that would be a great start (Edmond Schools are leaps and bounds better than most other public schools in the OKC metro area).  So, it's a waiting game.

    As I mentioned, our anniversary is this Sunday!  I will have been married for a whole year on Sunday.  And what a year it's been... I swear, though, we made it through some tough times, what with my quitting grad school and moving to OKC and other ridiculous issues, and if we made it through that, we are sittin' pretty.  This weekend to "celebrate" our anniversary, we are going CAMPING!  Which is good.  But I need to fit in a long run and a tempo run on Saturday and Sunday mornings, respectively, so other camping activities will have to revolve around that, naturally.  But we'll be fishing, hiking (hopefully not through ridiculous brush with 5,000,000,000 ticks like our last hiking trip), canoeing, swimming, etc.  And of course, just camping in general.  Hazel will be joining us, and Jonathan is pretty pumped about the whole trip.  I'm sure it'll be great.  We're supposed to have perfect weather this weekend, so we're set up to have a great trip if all works as planned.

    Well, that's it for now.  Stay tuned for your next update!  A lot will happen in that time!


Tuesday, 07 April 2009

  • Quick Update

    No news on the work/occupation front, other than I have an interview on Thursday with the Teacher Competency Review Panel to get my license to teach high school.  I don't know what happens after that, if I get a job right away or if I have to wait until the new school year starts or what.  I'll let you know.

    Bigger news:  we FINALLY heard back on our house offer, and it's been officially accepted with a closing date set for April 17.  The seller is very motivated to sell ASAP, and we're motivated to move ASAP, which makes a good combination.  The inspection went alright, so that's good news, too!  We're super excited!

    You can see pictures of the house here.

    And here are some pictures for design inspiration for the house.

Thursday, 26 February 2009

  • Recent Happenings

    EDIT: apparently when you mark a post as "explicit," you have to verify your ID or something to see that post.  Sorry.  I took the dirty words out.

    I'm long overdue for an update. 

    Again, a lot has happened since last I updated.  And yet, a lot hasn't.

    I passed my Teacher Competency tests to get my teaching license for high school teaching.  They were supposed to contact me about going before the review panel to approve me for my candidacy, but no one got back to me.  Finally I called (a few days ago), and they said they must have just looked over my files or forgot about them.  That's awesome.

    In January, I began teaching at Oklahoma City Community College.  I'm teaching a Biology course for non-science majors.  This means they don't care at all about learning about science.  Which makes my job considerably less enjoyable.  The class also meets only once a week, on Saturdays at 8am.  Which is a crappy time, but I have no experience, so it was hard to get a job, especially with the economy the way it is.  So, it is better than nothing, and at least now I have some experience, even if I am only making $2500 for the entire semester.  But really, it's hard.  Not the material, but teaching to people who don't care and don't want to care, not to mention these aren't the caliber of students I've been exposed to for the past decade or so.  These students, a lot of them didn't even go to halfway-decent high schools, and most of them haven't had any science courses since middle school or high school, and almost all of them have been working since last they were in high school, which has taken them out of the learning environment for several years and they're just getting back into it.  So, it's not really fun.  Plus, I need more structure in my schedule.  When I left Penn, I thought things would get better.  I am assuming they will get better, but Lord Almighty, it's taking way too long.  Things aren't going to get better at least until the summer intersession comes, if not until the fall semester starts.  That seems like forever.

    On Valentine's Day whilst driving to work, I wrecked by brand-new Toyota Corolla sport into a truck parked in our apartment complex's parking lot.  Yes, I hit a parked car.  This has been incredibly demoralizing.  I've been depressed about it ever since.  Seems like I fail at everything I do.  The car is supposed to be fixed tomorrow afternoon.  We had Collision coverage on our car insurance (Oklahoma law requires you to have collision coverage for a vehicle you have on lien) with a $1000 deductible.  So we're out $1000, but at least it wasn't $8000, which is what the repairs cost.

    We have been house hunting.  I can't remember if we started looking in November or December.  Either way, we made an offer on a house in NW OKC in the beginning of January.  The seller accepted the offer, but the seller's bank STILL hasn't even looked at the contract.  We had locked in a 4.75% interest rate at our bank, but now that's out the window because these jerks haven't taken the time to look at our contract.  Supposedly, that's going to happen on Friday as well.  This is taking about 3 times as long as it would take the average person to buy a house, if not more.

    Also in January, I started Weight Watchers.  I weighed in at 142.6 lbs the first day, which was January 6th.  Last time I weighed in, Feb. 24th, I was 128.8 lbs.  That's 13.8 pounds in less than 2 months.  I'm pretty happy with that.  So Weight Watchers works, guys.  Really.  I can't believe I'm saying that.  But then again, I wasn't really fat, obviously.  Just a little more curvy than I wanted to be.

    What else?  Our dog Hazel is still cute.  Too excitable but still cute.

    That reminds me.  Our downstairs neighbor.  He came upstairs at 7pm last night complaining we were making too much noise.  He complains about how much noise we're making on a regular basis.  This was probably the 5th time he's complained about us making noise.  It wouldn't make me mad if he were complaining about reasonable things at reasonable hours.  But he'll come up here complaining about us playing Rock Band at 2pm on a Saturday.  Now, I understand that the drum kicker can make some noise on the ceiling, but we're talking about him coming up here not 5 minutes after we start playing, complaining on a SATURDAY and 2PM.  And we weren't going crazy on the pedal or anything.

    Whatever.  LAST NIGHT.  When he came upstairs at 7pm to complain about the noise we were making, this wasn't a Rock Band situation where we were actually making some noise.  No.  We were watching the TV (we don't watch the TV loud, it's a normal medium volume, and we don't own a stereo or subwoofer, so that doesn't even make noise).  Sitting watching TV.  And Hazel was just laying on the floor chewing a bone very quietly.  Sometimes she will really go to town on her bones, but that frustrates me (mostly because I'm in constant "fear" of the downstairs neighbor complaining about her), so I stop her from chewing it.  But LAST NIGHT WE WEREN'T MAKING ANY NOISE AT ALL!!!  This guy, oh man. 
    So he comes and he's like, "I don't know what y'all are doing but you need to keep it down." 
    And I just about lost it.  I said back to him, "OK.  Seriously, we were just sitting here watching TV, at the volume it's at right now, just SITTING HERE, and our Dog was just laying there chewing on her bone."
    And he has the NERVE to say, "No, you must have been jumping all around.  I could hear it through the ceiling."
    And me: "No.  No, literally, LITERALLY we were just sitting watching TV and our dog was just laying on the floor.  Chewing her bone.  LITERALLY."
    And him, "Well, you need to keep it down."
    In my mind: Go frak yourself, you jerk.

    Anyway.  I hate our downstairs neighbor more and more every single passing day.  His girlfriend/wife/baby's mama parks her car outside his/our apartment BLARING her music for literally 30 minutes EVERY morning starting at 5:30 am.

    Is there anything else I can complain about?
    My hard drive crashed on my Mac for no reason.  I had to get it replaced.  I lost all of the pictures I took from my wedding, Erica's wedding, my trip to Turkey, my pictures from Philly.  So I bought an external hard drive to back those sorts of things up in the future.  Jonathan took it back because he says I paid too much and that he would order a new one.  He still hasn't.  I'm just waiting for my hard drive to crash again so I can bitch at him for not buying the external hard drive, since he won't let me buy one since apparently I don't know what I'm doing when I buy anything.

    Midwest City is ghetto.  More ghetto than Philly, somehow.  And I hate it here.

    Is there anything I can appreciate? 
    I like Hazel and Jonathan.  Those are good things.  Oh, and because I wrecked my car, I had to learn how to drive Jonathan's car, which has a manual transmission.  So that's a good thing, right?  And we're going to get more than $10,000 in tax returns because we're going to get the new homeowner's tax rebate thing, and we heard that they've changed it from $7500 to be paid back over 15 years to $8000 that doesn't ever have to be paid back.  Yeah.  That's a good deal!

Thursday, 25 September 2008

  • Has it really been a month?

    Has it really been a month since my last post?  I suppose it has.  That's the way things go when you are starting a new life, I suppose.

    Too much has happened.

    First, the move.  I moved in with Jonathan.  That's been alright.  I have Midwest City, and our apartment could be nicer, but things could definitely be worse.  Almost nothing has been unpacked.  Still.  I think we've unpacked 10 of the millions of boxes.  Ugh.

    On top of that, Jonathan decided it would be a good idea to get a dog.  Sure.  So we go to the shelters, but he doesn't like the dogs there.  I liked this one dog a whole lot and gave him a hard time about it for a few days, but he said it was ugly because it had that dark mismatched color look to it.  Which I happen to like and which Rufus happened to be.  Anyhow.  I decided to wait to meet this Vizsla mix, since we did some quiz on the Animal Planet website and it suggested Vizsla as a breed for us.  We went and met her, Hazel.  She is a puppy, about 10 months old, and full of licking and playfulness.  A really good dog.  We took her home the same day.  Come to find out, she is completely covered in ticks.  Despite the flea and tick bath, there were literally hundreds of tiny ticks all over her.  Ticks are my worst nightmare.  So we gave her her Frontline Plus that night instead of waiting until the next day, 24 hours after her bath which is what is recommended.  And I am glad we did, because the ticks started to fall off about 24 hours after that.  But then they were crawling everywhere, on the carpet etc, and by the time I noticed it, she had been all over the furniture and the different rooms.  So outside she went!  I tried to spend some time on the porch with her, but I kept almost having panic attacks.  I did make some baba gannouj, which I dropped some on the ground and then ate it, but I got very sick the next day with a fever and multiple vomitting and soreness and all of that flu-like crap everyone hates.  Good thing it only lasted a day!  That next day, a lot of the ticks were gone, and the ones we picked off of her were all dead.  That was pretty much the end of the tick fiasco, and she is now tick free!  And we can love on her and pet her.  She does nothing bad except chew on some non-toys, and that's just us needing to discipline her.  Now that she is basically housetrained (she had a few accidents but hasn't had one for about a week now, so we hope she's done with that), we have trained her to ring a bell when she wants to go outside, so that's good since we live in an apartment and don't have a yard to just let her run in.  She pretty much hates swimming and loves other dogs and people.  I take her running on the cross country trails in Stillwater about 3 miles twice a week and she runs with a backpack on carrying my water and her various doggy items and she still finds energy to run and play with other dog friends afterward somehow.  She is a ball of energy.  There are some pictures of her in this album here.

    Also new, I got a new car.  It's a Toyota Corolla S type.  It's silver with a moon roof and leather interior.  It's super nice.  I will post some pictures soonish but for now here is a link to look at a picture of what is basically my car.  We got it for the good gas mileage.  It's rated at up to 41mpg for the highway, which is the highest I could find for any reliable sedan that wasn't a hybrid.  Originally we were in the market for a Prius, but there's a  huge waiting list for those in Tulsa.  They don't get many in, and they call all the people on the waiting lists at the same time, tell them what the features are in the car, and then it's a first-come, first-serve basis to get them, and there's no haggling price.  So that didn't seem like a good deal for us.  And the Camry hybrid didn't get any better mpg than the Corolla, not to mention it cost about $10,000 more.  So Corolla it was.  The S type is more sporty than the standard Corolla, with a sportier suspension, which I like quite a lot.  Got to say, no complaints with that so far.

    So, what have I been up to lately, other than playing Oblivion (a video game) and watching over Hazel?  On Tuesday and Thursday evening, I go with Jonathan to his ultimate frisbee practice with the OSU team in Stillwater.  I go run with Hazel on the cross country trails while he does his frisbee thing.  On Wednesday evenings, we go rock climbing with one of Jonathan's buddies.  I was so out of shape the first time we went that I could barely finish a 5.6 climb (Climbs are ranked by hardness from a scale of about 5.0 to 5.13, where 5.13 is a 5 point thirteen), but today I finished a 5.8 no problem, and it was only our third week, so I'm getting back in the groove slowly but surely.  But honestly, that's pretty much my day with the exception of cooking lunch and dinner every day and doing laundry and dishes and other wifely duties.  I don't have a job yet.  I applied to get certified to teach high school biology, and I got accepted to the program, but I have to take a general and subject are competency exam first, and those aren't until November!!  So I will study once I get the study guides and I will take those exams and go in front of a board in November, and then hopefully start teaching soon thereafter.  We'll see.  I'll keep you updated on that situation.

    That sums it up for me for now.  I'll try to keep up with this about once weekly, but don't get mad if I don't get it done.