Christmas 2010

We've had some lovely sunsets. In winter the air can be so clear, and the trees have lost their leaves and don't obstruct the horizon so much, so it's a great time for watching the sun go down. On the Solstice night, Daddy and I stayed up most of the night, going outside periodically to look at the total lunar eclipse. There was intermittent cloud cover, but we were able to see the moon often enough to track the progress of the eclipse.



On Christmas Eve, Allie and Layla, Charlie, Taylor and Alex came over and we had our Christmas celebration: gifts and a barbecued ribs dinner. Layla happily monopolized the camera, so most of the pictures are of her, but I'll include one short video Allie appeared in.

Layla played with the crocheted nativity set to dramatize the nativity story, then gloated over her pile of presents, which was "the biggest of anyone's!" Later, we opened crackers. (A British tradition -- you pull apart a wrapped paper tube that contains a firecracker, jokes, small toys, and a tissue paper crown. It's sort of a smaller, less violent piñata, I suppose.)





Text of Layla's story: "Once upon a time there was a beautiful butterfly. Then a hippo appeared. Then they were BFF. THE END"

Happy Memorial Day and thank you to the troops who have served and are serving.

Holiday wishes

May you all have a peaceful Christmas and a beautiful Winter.







Apologies for getting carried away with the effects in that second card. :)


Here are a few pictures from our day with Allie and Layla. We took them to Build-a-Bear Workshop and then opened presents and played a few games at home. Layla wasn't feeling well some of the time, but she was determined not to let it ruin her day!

Veteran's Day

This dog is really, really excited that daddy is home from Afghanistan.



A French teacher in my department said today that not one of the students in her class knew why we celebrate Veteran's Day on November 11. Sadly, I don't think even prompting with "Armistice Day" would help those kids. I was momentarily tempted to create a photoessay on the subject, but none of the intended audience are going to read this blog, so I'll settle for saying Happy Veterans Day and thank you to the veterans in my life.

Santa Pup

Merry Christmas! We've had a couple of stray dogs hanging around, a mother and pup, and the puppy wanted to wish you all a merry Christmas.

Valentine

It's February, and it's been cold on and off, but we haven't single snowflake around here. Two tornadic storm systems in the dead of winter, thanks, but no snow. This has led me to go hunting on Flickr for pretty snow pictures with which to soothe my disappointment.


Happy Valentine's Day
Originally uploaded by Jokull

I took my students homemade (okay, Duncan Hines mix), festively decorated cupcakes today. In addition, one of my students handed out Valentine goody bags of French and American candies, including cherry liqueur chocolates and something called CaramBar, which promises "blagues tordantes!" inside:

Dans la série: tu devinaras jamais!
Pourquoi les avocats se font souvent disputer par leurs femmes?
Réponse: Parce qu'ils achètent souvent de nouvelles robes.

Now the question is, how well will our high school French serve us here?

I haven't been around blog-land very much, since I've been gone a lot of weekends and classes are starting to pick up a lot. For the first time, I'm trying out a wiki with my classes. Like Wikipedia, it's a website that the users can edit. I'm the maintainer of this one, but my students can create and edit pages, keep group vocabulary lists, and start conversation threads in message-board style. It's great, and very easy (not like actually being a webmaster) but does require a good deal of monitoring. I hope when I get the procedures more established and tested, I can do a presentation on it at some education conference or another. Brownie points with my superiors, is what that would get me, and maybe it would give other teachers some ideas, too.

Happy day!