Lots 'o Hits

So I don't usually check this too often but I was wasting time online and checked my school blog stats. 

They tripled last month! 

 I'm still trying to figure out how they would be so high, and not some kind of fluke.  Either way, it is exciting to think that perhaps people are interested in what is going on in our classroom.  Are you?  Go to More Than ABC's!

On my to do list:

See what comes next if people kept coming at this rate.

And why?!

Need Book

Thanks to Facebook here is a list accredited to BBC about books people might read in a lifetime.
They figured most people would only have read about 6 of them. It seems to be a rather odd list, perhaps most popular for a period of time?

Regardless, I just requested from the good ol' public library ( after paying a few fines arg!)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton



As I am in need of a new list of books to read (and Anna Karenina isn't catchin' on yet) I might fill a few more in.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (all)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – most of them..
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Brunch Check List

I'm so excited to have a friend I don't get to see very often over for brunch tomorrow.

1. I love hosting people at our house.

2. It gives me a deadline which I usually need to get something done.

3. I get to have a glimpse of that "magazine" life when everything is tidy, neat, and put away.

So....here are the must do's, and some should do's.

• make food.


• put clean dishes away (this is on every list...)


• vacuum


• de-clutter living room, kitchen, office, uh.....everywhere


• trash out

I should also...

• clean the bathroom


• clean up more sticks from yard project :)


• water the grass


• do my laundry


• make my custom picnic table cover


• be excited !!! I am!!

Memorial Day To Do

To Do:
Inside -

• do laundry and put it away (this one always comes back on my list!)
• organize some special garage sale finds so everything is 'ready to go'
• iron a few items if it isn't over 65 degrees
• empty dish washer
• vacuum
• clean and put tons! of shoes away
• make dessert for party Monday
• find steak marinade recipe
• work on crafty bookmark project

Outside -

• pull up landscaping border that is hidden / buried / useless by west fence
• replace landscaping border on east fence to border the grass
• plant more shasta daisy, basil, zinnia, and now pole beans
• trim low hanging brances on trees and bushes
• transplant some day lilys into a 'bald' spot
• weed
  

Cool Weather Gardening

Sneaky people dropping off plants for me!

Planted!



Peony Shoots (Should be big!)


Strawberry Blossom - I'll get at least 1 berry

Not much has been happening with this gardener this week. The garden that is in the ground continues to flourish but I haven't done much more.

However, there is finally some spring scent in the air. I know, Colorado is a bit slow. A new lilac shoot decided to show off and be the first to bloom. The smell is wafting through the house and does give me some motivation to continue planting.

Goals this week:

• Plant lettuce in ground
• Water seeded marigolds / pansy's in brick beds
• check amount of border / transition material that we already have to see where it will fit
• Get rhubarb and plant starter plant (or two?)

A To-Do List (an organized list too)

I'm in a list making mode and not so much a 'doing' mode so here it goes. I'm going to try categorizing my to-do list into sections that relate to each other to see if I am more productive or just more blindly ambitious.

Yard work and Gardening:

• Create a plan for back 1/3 of yard


• Transplant plants that are in the vegetable or flower garden area


• Have dad use rototiller machine to chop up soil


• Learn what loam is


• Add loam to soil per friend who has a degree in this stuff


• Take out weeds that are churned up


• Run irrigation system to appropriate areas


• Purchase seeds


• Plant


• Weed


• Weed


• Plant


• Weed

Housework:

• Put laundry away


• Do more laundry


• Vacuum


• Rearrange game / DVD cupboard so the door closes


• Finally get rid of pile of junk in pantry that has been there for ever


• Run and empty dish washer


• Recycle (its overflowing)

Work:

• Log PBS hours


• Turn in 2 credit forms


• Mail License at Post Office this week


• Create Pioneer outfit for rendezvous day


• Collect 5 graded assignments per subject by the end of next week

Personal Goals:

• Read 1-2 hours per day


• Continue to not have overdue fees at Library


• Cook something real


• Eat less sugar (jelly beans were the downfall today, cream the day before, cupcakes the day before, etc.)


• Actually do something on my to-do list....tonight


• Continue to compost
• Update my list with accomplishments by Friday

Tonight I Need To...

So...

I've been avoiding a whole bunch of work so here is my to-do list so cyberland or my brain or something holds me accountable. And if you're feeling nosey here's why:

• Finish grades Friday evening ( Biggest and worst goal. Don't want to do it and eek! due Monday and Jenny's arriving)
• Vacuum tonight (just a good idea)
• Clean bathroom tonight (another quick good idea)
• put laundry away before Saturday night (hence, Jenny's arriving)
• Put fabric away tonight (it's annoying to have to step over to get to the closet)
• Do yoga tomorrow morning (it is good for me)
• put books back on bookshelf tonight (there is a piece of furniture called a bookshelf for a reason, use it silly Karin)
• Whiten teeth with free whiteners that came in the mail ( cause its free!)
• Recycle on Saturday (the bin is getting full)
• Go to the Library on Saturday or the mobile library (see last post, plus bored with no Harry Potter to read)
• March Budget update with receipts (getting behind...oh no!!!!!)
• Make a salad lunch for tomorrow (salad is good for you, and if I do yoga I don't have time to make my lunch)

Church

I've missed a few weeks and need some virtual accountability. I'm going to church this morning! No if's and's or but's. Just need to get this butt in gear.

Today also includes:
getting dressed
going outside
putting laundry away
an if needed trip to grocery store
making chili (deciding between white and regular, although I've never made white before)

Big goals...I know.

And now as I stare across the room wondering how to get the first two goals accomplished I see an ominous dark spot on the wall and fear I may also need to kill a bug today. Guess that might get me going a bit sooner.

I'm here....do I have to work?

This week is going to be a marathon work week. I have 2 nights with classes until 7:30 and tonight until 7:30 helping with a a parent night at school. Then Friday is "valentine's" day so that will be an epic day of drama and otherwise irritating activities I fear. There is a lot of fun activities going on but the sheer exhaustion of working 11-12 hour days several days in a row with no (it seems like) end in sight is tiring.

That being said I'm writing down my to do list so I make the few hours between two activities useful.

• Grade 4-5 sets of papers
• organize math chapter 8 copies
• file professional development papers into binder
• start hole punching poetry books for binding :)
• organize copies
• file away book orders

and try to stay focused and feel productive to get something done!

Finally

So, I've thought about starting a blog for a long time and after reading 3 friends blogs in the last week I'm trying it. We'll see what I do!