It is 7:33 pm Sunday evening.  I am cooked. My brain can’t put two thoughts together and I’m only here so I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I have kept my New Year’s Determination (to post a blog a week) into the second month of the year.

Where did the weekend go that it took all my brain power with it??

I worked.  I sat at my computer for countless hours and prepped my courses and organized my files and inputted data and frizzled my neurons.

Who knew that thinking took so darn much out of you??

However, I am happy to announce that my ELA 9B course is organized, if not to my complete satisfaction, at least to my temporary satisfaction. I have been bingeing and purging at work – bingeing on prep work and purging my files. With all the new ELA curricula up and running I am happy to announce that I am ridding my computer drives of all the files that are strictly “old curricula” and only keeping the stuff that I can take forward with my into the Brave New World of New Curricula-Ville. And this, my friends, is a task of mammoth proportions.

No, seriously.  You don’t even know.  Some of my colleagues – the ones who have watched me switch in and out of folders within folders like a microscope zooms in on a few microns and then zooms out again, becoming a telescope of ginormous power, to catch a glimpse of the Milky Way, switching angles and zooming back in again because darn it all, I know that teensy file in is there somewhere!! – they would know. My files need cleaning.

This is the year.

So Friday before leaving my classroom I saved my ELA 9 folder on a USB and brought it home, along with a little marking and a goal to tweak my semester plan.  This weekend was dubbed “Project Organize ELA 9B”. And I did it!  *hugs self*

Marked all the notes and recorded scores?  Check.

Marked all the first drafts of RAFTS compositions?  Check.

Recorded marks in markbook?  Check.

Made little encouraging comments in margins of students’ work?  Er, not quite.  I’ll chat that up in person when I hand them back.

Planned out the Communication Unit in excruciating detail?  Almost.  It’s in detail, but perhaps the adjective excruciating is a tad much.

Planned out the Relationships and Survival Units in enough detail to know what I’m doing when for the rest of the semester right down to the week?  Check!  And this one makes me especially happy because any time I know what I’m doing in any up and coming week I feel like Superman in Total Control of My Universe. *smiles with white teeth, flowing cape flapping in pedagogical winds*

Made a chart showing which outcomes are being primarily taught when and which will be assessed where so that I know that they will all be covered in good order in good time before the finals?  Check!  Ha!!  Yay!!!!  *grinning like a maniacal fool*

Plugged in the USB and deleted every file from the ELA 9 folder that is no longer relevant?  Check.  Just fyi, this involved opening every single folder within that folder and checking every single file within every one of those folders to see if it’s still useful. *open folder* open folder within folder* open single file* decide to or not to re-save in another folder or as another name* close file* delete old file* reopen original folder*  x a kabillion.  Yowza!! This is an agonizing process and if anyone knows of a more efficient way to do this I’d be thrilled to chat with you sometime about it.

So, there!  See?  About 20 hours later I got all that done!  But that isn’t all I got done this weekend!

I have spent time hot-tubbing and watching the sun come up over the neighbor’s roof.  On Saturday morning I noticed about 30ish ravens flying at various times overhead, all of them flapping madly into the sun, straight east. Some were cooing like ravens do and the odd one was cawing but not one deviated from its course or paused to catch a wind current.  One flew over like a bird on a mission.  Then a while later, two more.  After a bit about 15 flew east.  Here and there over the course of the sunrise, they all flew madly east.  What’s with that?  Roadkill Party, my Hubby suggested.

I ran errands:  shopped for groceries and picked up prescriptions and restocked my wine rack and picked up some fresh flowers.

These took me at least an hour to figure out because I had some flowers already in vases that needed refreshing but the vase I had them in was too bottle-necked for all the stems so I had to haul out fresh vases and that required some cleaning and organizing and well, there went an hour.  Which reminded me to water my plants and the one on the piano overflowed – I will need to re-pot that one but it didn’t happen this weekend.

Laundry did though. And some minor housecleaning:  bathroom got sanitized and the kitchen got scrubbed, sort of. Made the best ever most healthiest in the universe peanut butter chocolate chip cookies (all natural peanut butter, unprocessed oats, agave syrup, baking soda, a flax egg, and dark chocolate chips – that’s it!  So good!) so I’d have sustenance while plunging into my messy cyber world. Ate most of them but froze a few for the week ahead.

My parents came over today for brunch.  I prepared a salad bar with chicken baked in a mustard-maple syrup sauce (recipe courtesy of my sister with whom I’ve been chatting off and on over the weekend about her new kittens and recipes always come up when we chat, no matter what the initial topic may be!) as well as a ….

 

Yes!!!  Pineapple Upside Down Cake!!!  I hadn’t made one of these in years but I had a fresh pineapple threatening to go soft on me and …. well …. there you go. My mom used to make these using canned pineapple rings and into the center of each ring she’d pop a maraschino cherry. Oh!!!  I wished and wished for a jar of maraschino cherries – all fake red with food coloring and floating in candy syrup!  But I had to do without. Didn’t cut the pineapple into rings anyhow, as you can see.  But Yummers!!  Delish.

Visited with parents and did up all the dishes and sat chatting with Mom about her days as a waitress and brushed all the excess hair out of the cat.  And after they left I took a half hour nap.  Played countless rounds of online scrabble with my favorite opponents.

And between all that?  Prepped ELA 9B.

Got ‘er all done. And now I’m going to dip into the rest of the salad bar fixin’s and take a plate of veggies out to the hot tub where I can watch the stars come out and mentally prepare myself for the coming week.

Take care out there, Folks! And see you next week!