22 March 2009

Spring Break!!

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You do not know how badly we need this spring break! I am so grateful to have one week off from teaching and everything school related!!

We started off our spring break right by going out to get Vietnamese with some good school friends. Then we hung out at our house and played YAHTZEE and ate warm chocolate chip cookies. It was FUN!

On Saturday we spent time with Dan's family. We visited and had lunch at Baja Fresh and then headed up to Multnomah Falls for hiking. It was a little rainy - but we all got in a workout and had some fun. We also all laughed at Eddie and his hilarious frisbee skillz once we reached the bottom and the sun came out! We finished it up with 10 trips around Troutdale (trying to decide where to eat) and Shari's.

I also took out my 50mm for the first time. I had been playing with it at home, but I got a little discouraged because I was so used to using my automatic lens and using a manual focus lens in manual mode is pretty tricky! But I think I ended up doing a decent job with the 50 yesterday. The pictures are a little contrasty, but with the rain I didn't want to mess with the settings too much, otherwise the camera would have gotten soaked!

28 February 2009

The Good and the Bad

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It's been one of those strange weeks where the days move on SO slowly, but then all of a sudden it's Friday and the weekend.

As a teacher...I've become a little list happy, so here's my/our list

Good things that happened this week:
  • Dan found a new series to read, Eragon. He's almost finished with the last book - what a reader!
  • Track practice started at the high school I am studenting teaching at. There are some amazing athletes and it's nice to be part of a great coaching staff.
  • I had my first official observation in class and it went just ok in my opinion, but great in my supervisors opinions...I'm getting this teaching thing down! A student even told me yesterday that I was a really great teacher - yay!
  • I've held a lot of 'potential' critical incidences in my classes pretty well. And my students are actually coming in to make up work and there are hardly any F's now!!
  • Dan and I bought lots of delicious fresh food at the market and made a few decent meals this week!

Not so good things that happened this week:

  • My really great friend from Florida, Marla, passed away on Tuesday. I knew it was coming eventually, she had lung cancer....but still it made me cry all night. We worked at Target together every single day, people called us "Marlie" She was hilarious. I miss her.
  • Dan still felt kinda sick at the beginning of the week, it was sad.
  • Not one single workout...wait maybe Dan worked out. I definitely did not.
  • Our new 50mm lens is a bit difficult to work in full manual mode - it requires lots of practice and time :(
  • It snowed A LOT and I failed to get a nice pic of it because I had to get to school - lame!

So that's that! We don't have too many plans for the weekend. Just the usual. I am volunteering at Willamette's home track meets though. Today is the first meet of the season, so I better get going. I am helping officiate Javelin....which I don't know too much about, so we'll see how it goes!

22 February 2009

most awful week ever

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it's been a bad bad week....but thankfully, it's Sunday and we are determined to have a much better week.

Here's what we learned:
  • don't stay the night at virus infected houses - no exceptions!
  • when puking at school...make sure students are not in sight. 
  • you really can down an entire pepto bismol bottle in one night and STILL feel VERY sick
  • carlie-like a normal person-likes her back rubbed after throwing up...Dan HATES it, in fact don't even approach the bathroom door for the next 5 minutes EVER
  • don't watch The Office after hours of endless puking - it doesn't make your stomach feel very good.
  • have very detailed lesson plans ready ALWAYS for "just in case" 
So here are some of our goals to catch up this week:
  • carlie needs to catch up on her lesson plans and start planning her evolution unit!
  • practice practice practice shooting in full manual mode with our new 50mm lens
  • dan is going to get back to painting
  • make delicious dinners all this week


14 February 2009

New things

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I made it my first 2 weeks of student teaching!! Really, it wasn't too bad... :)

I really do love it so far - even though I am exhausted in a very weird way. Bedtimes this past week were around 7:30pm and 8:30pm!!! Teaching is pretty tiring! I think I'm just constantly thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking all day long - it's hard to explain! But my students are great and my class sizes are incredibly small (on Friday I had 7 students in 6th period!!!) so I get to work with my students one on one a lot, which is really great for them. 

Soon I'll get to start helping out with track practice...which I can't wait for! There are a lot of good athletes at the school I am working at, so I'm excited! 

Dan and I had a simple Valentines, nothing too dramatic! The most exciting part of the day was when I actually won my first eBay auction -haha!! I finally found a decent, cheap lens for our camera. I've been searching eBay for a 50mm for a long time and I finally found a Carl Zeiss for dirt dirt cheap. It's an m42 lens, which will fit the adaptor I just bought so....it's an oldie...but hopefully it'll arrive soon in the mail and make me very very happy! 

Hopefully, I'll get to practice with this lens during Spring Break. It looks like we are going to take a road trip with some of my MAT friends down the Cali coast and San Francisco - I can't wait!!!!

Anyways, this is a weird random update...but I hadn't posted anything for awhile, so I figured I would. Also, below are some pictures of some cute little friends. Dan and I don't have kids of our own, so we just take pictures of everyone else's kiddos! :)

14 January 2009

Little Max Sperry!

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Here is sweet little Max. Monday night after Family Home Evening, Dan and I snapped a few of him....they turned out really adorable. Emily and Kris....now you can enter him into the Cutest Baby contest! :) Emily - I'm getting getting some photos printed this week, so let me know if you want copies...or if these pictures don't save right on your computer.





08 January 2009

Longest post ever

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Happy New Year!

You would not believe how many pictures I have to post from the past few weeks! Thanks to the snow storm we had in salem and portland, I had an ENTIRE week off of school!! It was a great way to start off winter break!  

So here's a list of the great things Dan and I's winter break included:
  • I finally cut my hair! It was so long...too long! I probably cut off about 7 inches...I didn't want to measure and be sad about it, so I just did it! I loved it for awhile, but it was slowly starting to drive me insane. So here's one of the last pictures taken with my long hair:
  • Visiting with my favorite friend from the Dirty South, ASHLEY! We basically played scrabble, blink (to be mentioned later), listened to Dan's 'rymes' music and watched The Hills (don't even say anything...) the entire time. Good Stuff! Now she's back in Mississippi being an awesome Teach for America teacher. 


  • Hanging out with our adorable niece and nephew. They are the cutest kids ever. I have a trillion pictures of them (Attn: Anita!!). Eddie is talking and saying all sorts of crazy funny things now too.
Leila


Eddie

  • Finally we got to spend Christmas with our family!! It was great to spend time with our family after being so far away in Florida for over a year. We visited with both of our families, saw grandparents, hung out with the kids, watched movies, played games, etc. We ate ridiculous amounts of food, baklava (courtesy of Dan!), and Dan's mom made us breakfast (with bacon!) every morning! We definitely enjoyed ourselves. 



I got to go skiing at Mt. Ashland with my dad and brother, Sam. It was pretty cool. Sam and I hung out and cruised down the slopes. Hopefully, we'll get a chance to go again in the spring. 
Here is Chester, the new addition to my dad's family. He's pretty cute, I'd say the cutest of the 6 dogs (yes, 6! it's ridiculous)

  • I also got to spend some time with my sister, which I'm going to post those pictures on another post, because there are a fair amount of pictures!
  • For New Years we went out in downtown Portland. I'm pretty sure Dan and I hold the record for having the most boring new year's eve's (always falling asleep at home) and one absolutely amazing new year's eve (2006 in London!). So this year we tried to even it out some! 
We went to the Cheesecake Factory with Ashley for dinner and ordered WAY TOO MUCH food!

Here we are playing Blink (the fastest game in the world!) waiting to be seated. Basically it was a fair game between Ash and I, but Dan...well he put in good effort.  :)


Miranda joined us downtown and we ended up walking all around downtown Portland looking for a decent place to go. After $60, a couple of hours of dancing, a new years countdown, getting lost a few times and 5 huge blisters later we headed home exhausted! 

Here I am trying to seduce Dan onto the Dan floor....haha! It worked, he's a good dancer!


  • New Years Day I had to pull myself outta bed at 630am (after being out until 3am!) to head to Eastern Oregon to visit my best friend Natalie! I'm also going to post more pictures of that on another post, because I had too much of an amazing time to not talk about it more. :)
So that was basically our winter break in a nutshell! Now, I am enjoying a couple more days of partial freedom (I'm working at my student teaching site a little bit, getting ready for next semester) until the MAT program starts back up on Monday. Dan is getting back to painting. He also is getting into working out and made a little isometric workout station in our house (it's pretty nifty!). We're waiting to hear about getting into Art school still. 

Thanks for those that updated us on how their holiday's went!