31 December 2009

Nike+

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I'm so excited! With saved up birthday money and Christmas money from Grandpa Harris just purchased the Nike+ running system! I also *had* :P to get a new iPod nano to allow the program to work. This program will keep track of my runs and hopefully motivate me to run and workout more!

THANKS GRANDPA HARRIS!!! :)

29 December 2009

holiday pictures!

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We (I) haven't blogged for nearly two months! Thanks to being insanely busy, boring and addicted to facebook, I've slacked on our postings.

To recap:

November: Flew by! Dan got started on a lot of his final art projects for the semester. We don't know for sure, but we think he ended up with all A's! He's so talented! I did well at school for most of the month, but had it a little rough after Thanksgiving when I decided I would start 3 new units at the same time right after break and try to wrap them up before christmas break....bad idea - won't ever do that again...

December: Well it's always a crazy month, but thankfully most of it is consumed with Christmas! For the holidays we made it down to San Francisco to visit my mom and then relaxed in Eagle Point with our family and Eddie and Leila. :)











11 November 2009

catching up on life

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Look at me...finding time to blog....!!


Today I am home alone, trying to catch up on life. This mostly means doing dishes, washing laundry, catching up on emails and bills and making some good food for dinner. Not too exciting, but it beats the stress of work! :)

Dan has school today, but he is mostly all done with his big projects of the semester. He signed up for new classes this week and is doing really well in school (of course!). :)

I am actually not too stressed with lesson planning and grading. November is a frustrating month curriculum-wise because there are so many holidays, but also a lot more free time to plan and relax. I'm actually all caught up until after thanksgiving, so that is a huge relief!

On Monday I had to go home from school because I suddenly felt sick. It was kind of scary! I've never gotten so sick as a teacher at school before and I scared the heck out of my 1st period students. Being a small school, the word got around quick and I came back to school on Tuesday and heard all the fun not true rumors about me "passing out in the girls locker room", etc. But all the students and staff were really sweet and were glad that I was back. Since then, I've felt fine but have had a bad headache!

Well, better get back to another load of laundry and dishes!

09 November 2009

26 October 2009

depressing blog...beware!

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Once again...we don't have anything interesting to blog about. We are both just trying to not drown in school work. I'm trying to be positive, but this is seriously one of the busiest/craziest points in our lives. Dan spends 1/3 of his time riding the train back and forth from Wilsonville and Portland, 1/3 in class and the other 1/3 working on art projects. If you don't have a phobia of fractions, you can see that there is hardly enough time for sleeping and eating or anything else entertaining (yes, at this point sleeping and eating are a luxury!)

I don't even want to go into the details of my crazy life as a 1st year teacher. Just trying to describe what I do on a daily basis gives me a headache. How do teachers stay sane? It's a struggle every day. I love working at my small high school....science is fantastic....I love my students. But I am stressed. I am almost wishing H1N1 on myself, just so I can stay home for a day or two...

So here is what we do when we are 1) Avoiding our work or 2) Celebrating our minuscule minutes of free time.
  • watch The Office (we're finally caught up!)
  • shop online for the things we wish we could have (Goorin Bros. hats for dan, vacations for Carlie)
  • edit photos
  • watch any of our recorded tv shows on DVR (heroes, greys anatomy, private practice, project runway, HBO movies, jon and kate plus 8, top model, etc...)
  • take naps
  • pretend like we have time and motivation to work out
  • facebook (carlie has an addiction)
  • try to make dinner/game plans with friends
We hope you all are staying A LOT less busy, but we know many of you are in the same boat. We miss everyone who we've been neglecting lately....call us! We'll get better at our hectic lives!

20 October 2009

Birthday Month Festivities

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Well Birthday month is pretty much over :( , but here are a few pics of this years celebrations. Since I've joined Dan's family and since the birth of our niece and nephew, our family gets to celebrate 5 birthdays all within about 5 weeks. So I've started calling it Birthday Month!

To start off we have Dan's birthday on September 28th
Then it was my birthday exactly one week later, October 5th.

This year, Dan's parents came up to celebrate our birthdays together. We made a trip to the Portland Art Museum, ate at California Pizza Kitchen, ate delicious chocolate cake from Costco and enjoyed each others company just the 4 of us. As you can see, Dan acquired the always needed art supplies, and other art related gifts. My gifts included The Office Season 5 (hilarious!), Fossil jewelry, a new satiny robe from VS and an amazing new hair dryer. Dan and I also celebrated our birthdays some more by going out for CPK again on my actual birthday.

One week after my birthday, is Dans moms birthday. So we headed to Eagle Point for the
weekend, to celebrate her birthday as well as our nephews (which is this week) and our niece's which is two weeks after. We also celebrated with a faux Thanksgiving dinner because Dan's brother was home on leave from Iraq and won't be here for all the festivities. I also had a delicious breakfast that same morning with my sister, nana and Dad. So we had a pretty busy weekend!

And now birthday month is over..... :( But the holidays will be here soon...

Here are a few pictures of the kids last weekend.

This picture reminds me of the book, Where the Wild Things Are! :)

07 October 2009

28 September 2009

Janna and Daniel

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The same weekend as Ofest, Janna and Daniel, good friends from Willamette got married up at Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood. Janna lived on the same floor as Carlie her freshman year and then they were roommates in the yellow house during their junior year, right before we got married....so Dan was always around and really hit it off with Janna and Ellen (Carlie's other roommate).
We hadn't seen Janna and Daniel since graduation, so it was great sharing their big day with them! It was such an intimate, beautiful, classy wedding! It is so great to see good friends get married and be so happy together. As you can see from the photos, they were nothing but smiles all night!






Oktoberfest 5K

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In case you haven't heard....Oktoberfest is HUGE in Mt. Angel!! Nearly the whole community participates on Ofest weekend. The school district had half days so the students could help out at all the booths, meanwhile us teachers got to have a long lunch, sampling all the delicious food and of course "quick" inservice meetings. On Saturday, I dragged Marla and David to the 5k race. It was so much fun, despite the pouring rain, being sick and exhausted from our 1st two weeks as 1yr teachers!

Dan was a sports photographer for the day....





09 September 2009

We're surviving!

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Just to give a little update...we are enjoying our new busy lives!

Dan is into week 2'ish of his BFA program. He loves loves loves art, but is not so excited about the 1+hr commute to Portland on public transportation. But we're toughing it out until we absolutely need (and can reasonably afford...) a new car.

I love my job. I don't know how long that will last, but I'll take what I can get. Even though I left school around 5pm yesterday and today and it's only the 1st days of school, I thought to myself, "wow, i love my job, that was a really fun day." Don't get me wrong, it is an incredible amount of work. But I basically get to hang out with hilarious kids all day, chat with them, do cool science activities and be in charge - who wouldn't love that?

We hope all of you are enjoying the change into fall!!


06 September 2009

30 August 2009

Happiest Sunday!

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Today was a fantastic day! We love our new ward...it is such a blessing to be in the same stake as the Portland temple. We also had a blast hanging out with Eddie and Leila. Anita had to work, so we hung with the kids. We took them to both of the playgrounds in our little Villebois neighborhood, one had fun water fountains and the other had swings - what more could you want as a kid? Here are just a few of the great shots we got today. I brought out my new/old manual 50mm to give it a try again. It took half the day to get the settings right, but I love the photos we got. More to come if I ever get some more free time (not likely).










25 August 2009

Updates!

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Dan's top 3 updates

  1. His BFA program starts in 2 days!
  2. He looks good in plaid.
  3. New invention: the fanny messenger bag

(Prague: Eating chocolate!)

Carlie's top 3 updates

  1. Her job starts in 3 days!
  2. She just found out that her science classroom is going to be loaded with technology (SMARTboard and clickers!)
  3. Got offered a job coaching volleyball today......but quickly turned it down because I think I'm already going insane and the year hasn't even started yet. Hmm....this is going to be a frequent theme of working at a small school huh?
    (Ewww....sorry those are all about teaching. Ugh.....)

(Athens: view of the acropolis and a byzyntine church from our hotel rooftop)

11 August 2009

Bloggity blog

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So I am constantly blogging because
  1. it's the lazy days of summer
  2. i'm procrastinating lesson planning
  3. starting Aug. 28th you probably won't hear from me EVER - except maybe my screams of frustration about being a 1st year teacher.
SO -
Last weekend we went to our friends Roseann and Jeremy's wedding. It was absolutely gorgeous. Also we also had a mini Willamette track reunion. We had a great time catching up!




08 August 2009

Graffiti in Prague

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This is one of Dan's favorites. The tram stop outside of our hostel in Prague had some pretty intense grafitti, despite it being a nice outdoorsy place along the river. Right next door to our hostel was a sort of outdoor park. People were constantly rollerblading and biking by. There was a golf course and a place to rent fun water toys (kayaks, etc).

07 August 2009