i woke up today at 7:17.  I normally leave around 7:30, because every minute you leave after 7:30, you have to add 5 for traffic.  I hate the suburbs.  It took me 15 minutes to make it past the light at College and BU because the damn light that shouldn't be there anyway was out and blinking.  I managed to make it to Oak Park with enough time to just make it in the door by the bell.  Which i shouldn't have to worry about because the teacher has taken to showing up about 2/3 of the way through announcements, like 4 minutes after the bell, anyway.  but the lame news is that the meter i've been parking at for the last two weeks QUADRUPLED it's price over the weekend.  It used to be 25 cents gets you an hour... so now i have to get there even earlier to find a parking spot and probably hike the rest of the way.  bullSHIT. 

observing went fine.  the first year kids were doing nach erzählungen for der froschkönig.  the second year kids were doing nach erzählungen for rumpelstilzchen.  the third/fourth year kids were finishing their skits for Emil und die Detektive, and starting on this poster about Berlin that I found a bunch of web pages for them to use.  next week I'm going to start getting my hands dirty with the entire class instead of just helping out one-on-one, by doing 'was machst du gern in deiner Freizeit' with the Ger I kids and reflexivverben with the third and fourth year kids.  it should be fun times.

class was fine.  we were supposed to start a half hour early and get out a half hour early because there was this guest speaker from McGraw Hill talking about teaching culture in the foreign language classroom.  he was pretty cool, his stories about how he's from venezuela, and the stupid things he did accidentally when he went back there after living in the US for fifteen years, were pretty funny.  I saw Inma there, my professor from last semester, and i saw Rott, who was my advisor for a while, still technically is, and has no idea who i am.  i should have gone up to her and just started talking to her.  but she probably would have just said "i dont know who you are" to my face and i would have looked like an idiot.  i pointed her out to sarah, and my irritation must have shown through.  her response was "ok, i'll trip her if she comes near us" then we went to class, where we did stupid busy work activities and definitely didn't get out a half hour early because my teacher has about as much sense of how long things are going to take as my 3 year old cousin.  she also passed back our midterms where she definitely added wrong and gave me a 87.5 instead of a 92.  she probably did it because she's lonely at her office hours.  every week she begs us to stop by.  looks like i'll be making an appearance this week. 

karate was good.  rory and i made fun of sensei brien about story time and he proceeded to tell us a twenty minute long story while the rest of the class warmed up.  then we did a lot of ab and glut exercises that supposedly will help our kicks come exam time.  when the hell is my exam again?  then we worked on kata, and he mostly had good things to say about mine.  so that was cool.

ok, now i'm really going to bed so i can get up for observing tomorrow. 

Scribbled by Matt at 11:23 PM CDT

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An Update on the Grandma
We totally gutted Gram and Gramps' basement last sunday.  When we arrived, I had to climb in through the window because you couldn't get through the doors upstairs.  It's kind of sad to see the changes.  I mean, the changes are all very very good.  But the Nostalgic Matt that doesn't ever want anything to change remembers the basement as it was when I was a kid and it was our playroom.  There was a blue shag carpet that had been there since the sixties, and probably had more dog crap and other things I don't want to think about.  It went in the mid 90s.  We took the one fifty year old couch and tossed it, took the newer couch and gave it to Ian and Meagan for their condo, and got Gram a new daybed.  All of the  BetaMax tapes are in boxes under the tv (they got rid of the betamax player in the mid 90s, but "there's good movies in there").  Most of the time was spent sending people to distract Gramps so we could throw stuff out when he wasn't looking.  Gram is a little more amenable to throwing stuff out but they came from a time when they didn't have much, so everything Gramps has been able to accumulate means something to him because he had to earn it, and everything else is saved because 'you never know when you might need it'.  Uncle Sam and I drove the couch over to Bartlett on Friday, so that was fun.  I hadn't been to Uncle Eddie's house in maybe 20 years even though he lives a half hour away.  Uncle Sam laughed when I said that.  His response was "don't feel bad.  I've only been there five times in my life and I used to live a block away"

Gram's health is holding.  After the fiasco with the bronchoscopy she went back in this past tuesday and had it done.  The procedure collapsed her lung, so she had to stay there for an extra two days and she was PISSED about that.  AND it turns out that the procedure didn't really accomplish anything, because the tumor is completely blocking her lung, so they had to get their scraping from the top of it and I don't think it showed anything.  SO she might have to go back to get the test done with a needle.  I don't know if she will.  Also, we realized that she's been lying to the doctors if Gramps is in the room with her because she doesn't want him to know anything.  So mom had to tell the nurse that Gram has emphysema, and not to ask Gram anything unless she clears out the room first.  Sigh.

Random School Updates
School is still going.  So for my monday class I was supposed to turn in a bibliography for this one paper a few weeks ago.  My teacher finally got it back and she marked a bunch of mine that she didn't want me to use and asked me to come to her office hours.  She spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the library's webpage worked and I spent most of the time explaining how to search for things (what she had told me to come so she could help ME with).  Then she selected a bunch of stuff and told me to go get it from the library.  I didn't bother telling her that the books she told me to get actually weren't in the library, I had to get them on interlibrary loan.  We'll see how this goes. 
The tuesday class is fine.  We spent most of the last two weeks talking about sexual/gender identity.  We had a guest speaker who was definitely very informed and very passionate about the subject, but sometimes I wonder if going for all these rights for specific groups is the best way to go.  I mean why should there be a zero tolerance policy for harrassing LGBT students?  Why not just make it zero tolerance for everyone or not at all?  Singling out one group is only going to bring them to the limelight.  People are morons.
The Wednesday class is fine too.  I think I'm supposed to be researching something for it for this week but I don't remember.  The teacher is alright, but you can tell she's used to working with undergrads and doesn't really expect much from us.  We don't do much in the class.  We started to workshop lesson plans this past week, and she said we could write something new or bring in something that we'd done, so I brought in one from my literacy class and I was in a group with two kids who had hastily written one the night before, so on one hand I looked a hell of a lot better than them because mine was all laid out in the TaskStream format and I had put in info for everything, but I also looked lazy because I did it months ago.  It's kind of stupid assignment.  We should have done something with other people in our content area or something.  I dont know. 
Observing is going well.  I've still been doing random things and helping students one-on-one and not done anything ::on my own:: yet.  She had me find a bunch of websites about Emil und die Detektive for the kids to look at to get some info about Berlin.  I wrote them on the board and about six kids copied them down.   they're supposed to print some pictures off to make posters this week.  We'll see how it goes.  I should find my old Berlin photos.  :) 

Weekend Update:  Without Norm MacDonald
I went down to Urbana for a fun filled weekend!  Saturday morning Helen and I finally went to redeem the gift certificate she gave me last christmas for the Rock Gym 101 class at Upper Limits in Bloomington.  It was a lot of fun.  We learned to belay (onbelay! andale?) and tie knots to keep us from falling.  Then we were turned loose in the silos to climb.  Helen beat me to the top of the first easy route in the silo and all the rest we made it some portion of the way up before getting stuck.  But we both had a really good time and are planning to do it again sometime.  It's not too bad to go back, only $14 entrance fee plus about $10 rentals to have the run of the place for the day.  and if I wanted to buy equipt, you only need a harness, shoes and a carabiner.  Although as my dad said, the rope costs $300.  but he's got two in the garage.  one rapelling rope and one climbing rope (there's a difference?).  I definitely want to take the rapellling course.  Then I'd feel comfortable doing what dad said he used to do, walk the back way up to the top, attach a top-climb rope, rappell down, then climb back up.  I was telling dad what we did and the equipt we had and I was trying to remember the name of the belay device...
Me:  yeah the thing... kind of a cube with a bar in it... APC? ATC?
Dad:  uhh, we used to just wrap the rope around ourselves. 
Dad's stories are funny.  The belay device he used was a figure-8, not the ATC, and he used webbing, not a harness (a 20 foot long belt that you wrap around yourself several times).  I guess I won't be borrowing his equiptment anytime soon.  Maybe the ropes though.  :-D  I wonder if mom would let me screw a bunch of those climbing footholds into the chimney.

Coming home there was a train crossing the main road in Bloomington, so instead of waiting to get on the highway we decided to find the scenic way.  We drove around a bit and ended up on US-150 which turns into University in Champaign, and runs parallell to I-74 the entire time, so we just took that.  About fifteen miles outside of Bloomington I saw the wind generators that I'd seen from CR300E outside of Gibson City.  No wonder you can see those things from twenty miles away.  Theyre HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE.  We decided to take an adventure and go find them.  And man, it took forever to get to them.  No matter how far you drive, they're still another mile away over the next hill.  Three gravel roads later, we finally made it to the base of one.  And they're so spread out too, they must cover a good mile wide by 5-10 miles long or so.  We took a bunch of pictures and then returned to our route. 

We got back to Champaign, fed Helen's mom's cats and Barry's cat, went for a walk around Urbana, and then met up with Jen and Andrew for dinner at the Courier.  We all got delicious milkshakes, and heard amusing stories of Jen dealing with and catching criminals at the Rantoul Walgreens.  idiots.  Then we went to Crane Alley for some drinks and desserts.  I got a glass of chianti, Helen got a Bacardi and Sprite, Jen got an Amaretto Stone sour and Andrew stuck to martinis.  then Jen and Helen each tried a cosmo.  Then we went back to Helens where we chatted more until we all started falling asleep, at which point Jen and Andrew left to go stop by a swing dance. 

Today we fed the cats again, did some grocery shopping.  played with the cats and watched tv until the sneezing made us leave.  then we carved pumpkins!  I made mine look like a skull.  It turned out alright I think.   Helen made hers look like her boss, which turned out really well.  She's good at capturing the important details like that.  :)

You can also see the pumpkin man Gram made for her last year, and the Snoopy skeleton.  And Wendy! from Great America!

Now I suppose I should go to bed.  I have to get up in six and a half hours to observe.  I hope I don't have homework...

Scribbled by Matt at 1:22 AM CDT

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i probably just should have stayed in bed thursday.  not that it would have solved all of the problems, but a handful of them it wouldn't have hurt to do without...

i got up to observe and left early (7:35) hoping to make it to Oak Park by 8:45.  (on monday i left at 8:15 to get there at 10:00 - got there at 8:45, and on tuesday i left there at 8, and got there at 8:45)  so leaving at 7:35, obviously I'll make it to Oak Park by 8:45, right?  I got there at 9:15.  What. The Fuck?  So I sat in my car until 9:40 and just went to observe third and fourth period in the German class.  My name was apparently 'Mike' on Thursday.  I figure if the teacher has called me Dan and Joe on Monday, Mike on Thursday, I only have to go through Steve, Ian, and Eric before she gets to Matt.  This only makes sense if you know my cousin's names on my mom's side.  So anyway the classes went fine.  After fourth hour the teacher asked me to show her how I found abunch of information on the internet about Emil und die Detektive which the third and fourth year students are reading, so I showed her what kind of things I search for, and we printed out a bunch of lesson plan information that she can use for games and movie viewings and stuff... I walked out of the building and got to my car at 12:40.  Apparently my meter had run out around 12:35.  There's $10 I didn't need to spend. 

So I go home and call mom to figure out car stuff.  Micki has a car for practice and mom is at school without one, but she has no students because it's parent teacher conference day.  Mom of course has picked this day to forget her cell phone again.  Which wouldn't have been a problem except Uncle Sam called to say Grandma was in the hospital.  So I call mom's school, ask Becky to go tell her to call Sam right away, call dad to tell him to call Uncle Sam, and I get ready to drive mom's phone to her so she has it. 

When I get to school, mom tells me that it's lung cancer and grandma probably only has about three months.  Mom's not doing well, none of her brothers are doing well about this.  So I turn around and go right back to Maywood to visit gram.  Gram's pissed that Sam told mom because she didn't want to tell mom until Saturday when the school week was over.  That's grandma.  We think grandma has known about this for a while now. Maybe as much as a year, and just didn't tell anyone.  I know she was in to see a doctor while we were in Ireland, but no one ever heard anything from that meeting.  Thursday night she was pretty bad, she'd be smiling and talking to people, but then every now and then she'd just totally break down, because she knows that everyone has been telling her to go see a doctor but none of us have ever pushed her to do it.  Apparently she's just kind of been sitting back hoping that everything will go away. 

So I've spent all day thursday and all day friday at the hospital.  Friday on my way in (I can't resist bitching about moron drivers!), as I'm turning left off of 1st Ave, I notice that there's a girl who wants to turn left out of the parking lot, north onto 1st, so I pull a little further than I need to so she can turn behind me.  I have the right of way obviously, but I can't make it, there's oncoming traffic, and I dont know if it will clear up behind me to give her room to go, so I figure I'll be nice... The idiot is on a cell phone and she pulls out, even though there's oncoming traffic in both directions.  She sits half behind me, half blocking the left southbound lane.  An old dude in a van pulls up, can't get past her and screams out "get off the fucking phone!"  then he starts honking, then she starts yelling "what are you yelling at me for, it's THIS idiot's fault" and she's pointing at me.  This is what I get for trying to be nice to people.

Friday Gram was supposed to have a biopsy done.  First they were going to do it with a needle, but apparently they couldn't do that because either the tumor is so big that they're worried about hitting it, or there wasn't enough fluid to do something... I dont know... I hear one thing from some people and something else from other people.... as usual, gram is mixing up stories and making things up so Grandpa doesn't know what's happening.  (He knows that something's up, but no one has told him anything important yet).  So they couldn't do a biopsy with the needle, so they went with plan b to do a bronchoscopy, but you can't do a bronchoscopy if you're on aspirin or blood thinners, and grandma is on both.  So they told her to come back tuesday and we'll take it from there.  we were all pretty surprised that they let her go.

Mike was at the hospital taking charge most of the time.  It's good to have a doctor, a judge, and several police officers standing around the room, as family of the invalid.  You don't get any crap from anyone.

And how this got started in the first place?  Thursday Mike locked himself out of his house.  So he walked over to Gram and Gramps' to get his keys.  He saw that Grandma was basically blue and said "you're going to the ER right now."  She later said that she had been having trouble breathing all week, hadn't told anyone but Gramps, but made him not tell anyone else, but she'd decided that she either had to say something to someone on thursday or just accept it and die right then and there.  Knowing grandma, she says she was going to tell someone, but it's more likely she wouldnt have.  So thank God that Mike came in when he did.

She's home now, on oxygen.  She's at a high enough dose that she can't have one of them portable ones, she needs the giant tank on constantly.  The not being able to breathe well thing has definitely affected her appetite.  When I was pushing her in the wheelchair, a couple times I had to maneuver her around things and I basically just lifted up the wheelchair with her in it.  I don't think she weighs more than 80 pounds.  It's kind of scary.  So now there's talk of making the basement into a bedroom for her... which is another Major Event, because my grandfather has not voluntarily thrown anything away since 1935.  Which is what comes from being the child of italian immigrants during the depression I assume, but nevertheless, it's a challenge to get him to throw out a couch that wasn't comfortable in the sixties, but to him is still 'fine'

and now micki is babysitting, mom is at a bagpipe dinner for Auntie Karen, and I'm trying to get dad to go to his coworkers wedding so I can clean up the laundry room after the pipes backed up while he was in the shower without him knowing about it.  i guess three showers, several loads of laundry and several loads in the dishwasher were too much today.  my room smells like a sewer.  mother fuckers. 

Scribbled by Matt at 6:13 PM CDT

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Monday I had to get up ridiculously early because I was driving down to Oak Park for my first day of in-the-classroom observing.  I woke up at 5 to get ready, figuring I had to leave by a little after six to get there a little after 8.  I check the school’s website one last time to make sure I had the bell schedule right, and notice a tiny little note at the bottom of the page that says they’re on a late-arrival schedule on Monday the 15^th.  WTF!!!  Thanks for telling me!  I didn’t have to be there until 10:15 it turns out.  So back to bed I went!  Left at 8:15… and stupid traffic… I got there at 8:45.   I walked in the door and went to sign in.  “hi, I’m from UIC, here to observe”  “oh, I think someone called down about you… what’s your name?”  “Matt Harring”  “hmm.”  I look down at the sheet and quite clearly they have “Joseph Harrington” written down.  So my CT is kind of a nutcase.  She’s apparently really disorganized and haphazard it appears.  But she has some great ideas about things, so I think I’ll survive.  And she apparently likes that I’m ‘good with technology’ or whatever the kids are saying these days, so maybe I can help her on that and get a good review.  :-D  the first class (German I) she referred to me as Dan.  The second class, (German II) she referred to me as Joe.  The third class (Ger III-IV) she didn’t introduce me at all, but I was still walking around helping people who had no idea who I was.  Awesome. 

Class was fine Monday night.  I’ve already forgotten what we talked about.  Oh right… Input activities.  Most foreign language classrooms do a ton of output activities, where the student is expected to produce the language, but not so much input activities, where the focus is on helping the student to process the information that is being presented.  For instance, given a list of sentences, put them in order.  The student has to understand what the sentence is saying and use clues to figure out what happens next, but they are being presented with real language, and not expected to say stuff without knowing what’s going on.  Both input and output activities are important to have in the classroom in a balance, but the trend is to go with more output activities.  It was interesting, I’d never really thought of that before. 

Karate Monday night was fun.  We were doing sparring drills the entire time, which has NEVER happened before, especially in Mr Brien’s class.  Mr Brien taped off a bunch of 6’ by 6’ squares and one of us would stand in the center of the square and someone else would shift in and throw punches and kicks and try to get us to back out of our square.  We had to shift sideways and keep them at bay, or sometimes shift sideways and throw stuff back at them.  Mr. Brien kept walking around yelling “this is YOUR house!  Make them PAY for coming into YOUR house!!!”  it was hilarious.  And somehow, I kept being the person guarding the house so-to-speak, when he would forget to tell us to switch.  So I would always have the ten minute slot of defending and then only a minute and a half slot as the attacker.  He’s really losing it sometimes.  Last week, he had Rory and I demonstrate this one drill and he told both of us to be the offense, so when we started sparring he got confused and told one of us we were doing it wrong….  Anyway… that lasted almost the entire evening and then we did some 4 point sparring and he’d pick opponents for us.  My footwork needs some attention, and Rory and I still are the ones most often yelled at for getting too close.  I don’t know what it is, but you’re supposed to be a full step away from each other, step in with a plan, and then shift back out when you’ve either succeeded or been thwarted, but he and I still get in too close and just stay there throwing things left and right…  Sensei Brien told me to take my heavy bag and throw it around and kind of shift around it while hitting it, and that will help, so I got to try that.  There’s this girl in class who is seriously over 350 pounds and she’s pretty terrible.  I don’t know how she has a green belt, but anyway, she comes three times a week and I assume she tries really hard, but she absolutely is terrified of sparring.  When we sparred Monday night, she sat out until the very end, but then one of the black belts offered to go an easy round with her… I think it just made it worse because the guy’s intentions were good but he really has no clue how to ::help:: people.  He kept letting her score without trying, which was the absolutely worst thing to do.  He should have told her up front that he was going to go light and had her focus on something specific.  My inner psychologist felt bad.

Tuesday I went to observe again.  This time I had to be there at 8:45, so I figured, ‘oh, I left at 8:15 yesterday and got there at 8:45, that might have been a fluke, so I’ll leave a little earlier and see what happens…”  WRONG.  I left at 7:50, and just barely made it there by 8:45.  I wanted to get there and be in the classroom before the bell rang to end the period before, but I was just barely walking in the class with the rest of the students.  I spent first period helping one boy catch up with his conjugations of sein He did pretty well.  And I think I helped him.  Second and third period I didn’t do much but the teacher had these photocopies of the equivalent of the high school yearbook from the German exchange students, their Abibuch, and I thought it was a fantastic idea for authentic language coming from students at the high school level.  These are the kinds of descriptions of high school aged students that are written by high school students.  So that was cool, and I ganked a copy before leaving.  

Class Tuesday night was fine.  It was Stacy, our professor from last fall, talking about students and sexual identity.  It wasn’t really anything different from our class last fall, so most of us from the fall 06 cohort kind of tuned out.  I zipped back to naperthrill for tootoring, and worked with DN.  He got an A on the last test he took!  And I think she marked one wrong that wasn’t wrong but I don’t know if he corrected it later or something.  Then he asked if we could work on the multiplication flashcards, and he got it a lot better than I expected.  He even said ‘oh it’s like adding, only faster’ which I thought was so impressive.  We went slow, and worked on counting by each of the numbers… 7 x 6… that’s seven 6s or six 7s… 7…14…21…28…35…42!  Then we worked on brainstorming for a writing assignment.

Today I had to catch up on my ED 432 work.  I’m supposed to bring in 5 copies of a lesson plan to go over, and I have no idea what to do, so I just brought one from 504… I figure that’ll be good enough.  And we didn’t even end up needing it.  I did finally do my ‘first five minutes’ activity.  I stood up there and introduced myself in German and kind of repeated myself for a minute or two until someone caught on and answered me.  I had them laughing a lot, and I think had I had another minute or two they would have gotten it.  I slipped up once or twice with my German, but I don’t think anyone noticed.  Well… only the other Sara would have noticed if anyone, but I don’t think she did.  For the most part the class seemed to like it.  in fact they liked it a lot more than I expected them too.  I heard a few people say that they were glad they didn’t have to go after me because I was a hard act to follow, so that was kinda cool.  The only negative input I got was from a few people who said it was too challenging.  If that’s all they have to say, then I’m fine with it.  that’s the whole point.  Was that in a class period, and with the support of their classmates, everyone would be able to respond to me, even if they didn’t 100% know what was going on, they’d at least be able to say “ich heiße ____” and well, they’re not going to fill in that blank with their own name and not know what they’re saying.  And in doing that, they are going to know that they survived the first day of class where the weird ass teacher didn’t speak a lick of English, yet they successfully completed the task.  So suck on that people!

Scribbled by Matt at 10:37 PM CDT

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Another successful rafting adventure!  This year we went to do the Upper Gauley River in West Virginia, which I have been told from some sources, is the hardest whitewater river in the United States.  This claim seems rather odd, as I can’t find anywhere that has the guidelines for how they are rated, or any sort of listing of rivers by rapids…

Anyway.  We were to meet up at krajniak’s at 6:30 Thursday to head out.  The drivers were to be Joe, Krajniak and Alina, but due to last minute car difficulties of Alina’s, Isla became the third driver.  Most amusingly as she has no license.  Isla picked me up late because of work, yet the rest of them had only arrived and left for food when she and I showed up with our dinners.  Boo yah.  We headed down to Alsip to pick up Sid, Jen and Andrew, and then we were off.  Sid and I hopped into Isla’s car to avoid the baseball-related themes, and lack of legroom in Joe’s car.  We made it to Indianapolis before talk started popping up about finding a place for the night.  I thought that was kind of lame, we could have made it further but we ended up staying in Centerville, about 40 min SW of Indy.  Oh well. 

Friday we got up at a decent time and hit the road again.  Sid and I annoyed… serenaded Isla by singing along to her mp3 player to such tunes as The Naked Gun themesong, and deuling banjos… and spouting quotes from Ghostbusters 2 most of the way.  Our car was the only car lacking a GPS navigation system, and we spent most of the ride mocking the other cars for their superior technology that did not really help them at all.  When we got off to get groceries and supplies in South Charleston, Isla Sid and I made it back to the highway first, by taking the route we’d come in on, not the one that the doo-dad told us to.  We missed one turn just north of Glasgow, and as we went back to it, we saw Joe continuing past us in the other direction.  We eventually found Krajniak, who had made two wrong turns, and we found our way out of that mess.  Joe’s road choice did actually end up beating us there, but he wasn’t following his GPS, and he did get a speeding ticket along the way.  Then Krajniak bypassed the stop to get the key, but still managed to be the last one to reach the cabin. 

Friday night we unpacked and picked our bunk buddies.  Sid and I took the room with two single beds… I had previously vowed to take the hammock out in the yard, but it was broken L  We went for a hike in Carnifex Ferry Battlefield State Park which turned out to border our cabin’s site, which was pretty cool.  We had a good view down on the Gauley River, but you couldn’t tell where the rapids were because the dam wasn’t open.  It’s a huuuge difference!  We hiked around in the woods for a while, scared a lot of deer around, climbed a few rock formations, and the like.  Then we went back to the cabin for dinner.  The girls all got their wine and got in the hot tub while Joe, Krajniak and I did dinner.  We made burgers and hot dogs which turned out pretty good.  The conversation in the hot tub turned to religion and all that and it got irritating to listen to so I wandered off for a while… but I did have to return for s’mores. 

Saturday morning we got up and headed out to the rafting headquarters.  We’ve now been there three times so we can find it pretty easily.  Right at US 119 and WV 60.  after much going back and forth, we discovered that we were in fact doing the Upper Gauley, which is the harder section of the river, we were all pleased about that.  The river is only commercially run on days when the Army COE opens the dam to let water out, which is about 15 days per year.  It’s the Summerville Dam, which is also near the town of Gad, making it the Gad Dam, and it’s on the Gauley River, which makes it the Gauley Dam, but they seem to like the more boring Summerville Dam better.  Don’t worry, when the trip leader told us that, I did in fact smack Krajniak with my paddle for good measure.  We put in right at the base of the dam, and the rapids started immediately, which was awesome.  Our guide said that the Gauley River is one of the top five rivers to run in the world, but I don’t exactly know how they determine that, so I’m just assuming it’s considered hard because the rapids are constant… like the Colorado might have three class VIs but nothing in between and this one has five class Vs and a constant stream of IIIs in between or something.  Who knows…  according to American Whitewater, the Gauley has five class Vs that are at the lower end of class V.  I don’t even know what that means either.  we paid extra for wetsuits, which I don’t think we needed under the conditions but it was alright.  The air temp was 60 and the water temp was 65, so every splash felt damn good.  We made it through all the Class V’s before lunch without a hitch.  I think our guide was a little disappointed in our raft’s ability to paddle together.  Sid and Jen in the front weren’t exactly paying attention to each other.  In the other raft, Joe got bumped to the front because the guide said he has no rhythm.  We stopped for lunch and watched some of the other rafts go through the rapids there while we ate.  Then we were off again!  Sid and I jumped off of Jump Rock.  Wheeeeee!  Then at the last class V the guide attempted to throw sid and I from the boat.  He took a bow after losing half the raft for the cameraman on the bank. 

Then we went back to the cabin for another night of sitting around in the cabin.  Since the river didn’t have any good spots for us to fall out and swim for a while, Sid and I were not able to take our yearly taking-a-picture-of-each-other-taking-a-picture, so we were forced to do it in the hot tub.  I hate hot tubs.  They’re so damn hot.  I feel like I’m a boiling chicken getting ready for dinner.  So I got out immediately afterward and went to shower.  We made shish kebabs for dinner on the grill… chicken, steak, pineapple, onion, green pepper and mushrooms.  Everyone else either sat in the hot tub or watched satellite tv.  Joe said he’d go hiking with me, but then alina and some others said they wanted to hike in the morning.  I knew that that wasn’t going to happen, so I wandered off on my own for a while.  Gone Soft! 

In the morning, we packed up the cabin, threw out our food scraps and trash, (left without hiking) and headed down to the New River bridge overlook.  We took a few pictures and then back to the cars!  Isla drove for the first three hours.  Somewhere on Rt 35 in Ohio I took it upon myself to name the three cars.  Joe became Herbie the Love Bug, Krajniak was deemed Car 54 (Where are you??), and we started out as the General Lee, but then became General Speedy Lee, and then when the Scooby Doo theme song came on Isla’s mp3 player we became the Mystery Machine.  I drove starting at the lunch stop in Chillicothe, somewhere in south central Ohio and Sid and Isla dropped off immediately.  This is better than two years ago, when I was nominated least-tired and had to drive from Tennessee all the way to Louisburg KY even though I’d only had like ten hours of sleep in the last 72.  We stopped for gas in Dayton and then again near Gary Indiana. 

Scribbled by Matt at 11:03 AM CDT

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Mr Brien's comment to the orange belts.

karate tonight was entertaining.  we did a lot of sparring practice in preparation for the tournament that i'm missing this weekend.  my sparring has gotten a lot better these last six sessions, but i'm still not very competitive.  i should just hang back more.  i tend to get bored and then throw something and then get kicked on the shoulder, which shouldn't count but they give it to them anyway.  Rory and I continue to get yelled at for staying in too close.  Rory's judo training has also made him throw crappier punches at karate, which is amusing.  we sparred a bit last thursday and had to ref our own matches which was entertaining.  some dude tore a ligament in his ankle or something, and some idiot punched rory in the nose. 

class tonight was fine.  i had to give a presentation on Competency Based Language Teaching.  i started working on it sunday in urbana, but didn't get very far.  but i had time to let my head mull it over which helped.  i did most of it last night then finished up in the computer lab today at UIC.  i'm more looking forward to my "First Five Minutes" presentation on Wednesday.  I think I'm going to do the getting to know your classmates names ice breaker from Italian 101 at UIUC.  that was one of the few ice breakers that i enjoyed.  our professor for my monday class this semester is kind of technologically inept.  last week she started class 20 minutes late because she forgot her password to the UIC wireless network and we had to wait for some tech guy to come type his in.  today she couldn't connect her laptop to the digital projector.  it turned out that the cable wasn't plugged into the wall.  another twenty minutes.  then an hour before the end of class her laptop battery died and she ran across campus to get the power brick.  seriously.  is it so hard to figure out that "i'm not good with technology.  i should come to class five minutes early to make sure things are working" ?  i mean, i dont normally care, but this is becoming the norm, not the exception. 

i spent the weekend in urbana! where it was ninety degrees.  it's october.  what. the. hell.  on friday i got there after tutoring.  crap i need to call about not being there this coming friday.  we made thai food and watched tv.  saturday we went to the farmers market, then rented the movie Crash.  i couldn't get it to work on my laptop... i think that that my combo drive is starting to crap out.  it comes and goes as to whether it plays discs or not.  so we watched it at her mom's house.  i thought it was pretty good.  a little predictable at parts, but it had a good message.  mainly that everyone is a little bit prejudiced and that it just breeds more.  i took an online test for class last week (the Race IAT) that says I have a strong preference for white people.  i dont think the test actually measures all that much more than the internet's ability to confuse me, but hey, it's from HARVARD, it must be right... right?  then we fed helen's moms cats, then we drove over and fed barry's cat and dog.  his pets didnt seem to mind two strangers wandering around the house and giving them food too much.  then we thought about going for a run but ended up just walking around campus.  i made helen walk past my old apartment on coler to say hi, and then we walked around champaign and back down the quad and over to krannert. 

sunday we cleaned Helen's kitchen, found cat barf on her back porch, then went to do some errands.  we looked at doors and halloween stuff at Menards, and Helen bought a router to make some christmas presents.  luckily she waited til now, she got a free "router accessory pack."  AND she bought me a MANLY HAMMER.  :-D  a 22 oz Fat Max.  so now when we go do Habitat I don't have to borrow hers anymore.  we stopped by Helen's mom's and I made Tom-the-cat's paws twitch when i rubbed his belly.  then we attempted to do homework, went for a run at Meadowbrook (I'm finally starting to not call it Castle Park all the time), and then ate with Helen's mom and Barry.  chicken!

now i should probably get to work on one of them *useful* things I'm supposed to be doing.

Scribbled by Matt at 12:25 AM CDT

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So I show up to this middle school in Glen Ellyn.  I ring the buzzer but no one lets me in, so I walk over to the teacher who has door duty, announce myself and ask to be let in.  He tells me to go to the office, but no one’s there so I stand there for at least fifteen minutes.  I was told to be there at 7:45, I was there at 7:45, the school day starts at 8:06 and it’s now 8:00.  people are coming and going, some of them seem to know what they’re doing.  finally one lady comes over and starts to tell me what’s going on.  Now apparently all this while, she knew that I had my first two periods off, so that’s why there’s no rush, but I’m kind of wondering, hey I want time to look over the plans, make sure I got everything.  We finally get to my room.  I’m an 8^th grade math teacher, subbing for someone who is out getting trained to use her SmartBoard.   Also, it’s a half day, so my periods are only 20 minutes long.  

Ten minutes later the secretary comes back.  Would it be possible for me to come sit with the in-school suspension kids for my two plan periods?  I have no problem, I got nothing better to do so I go along.  She takes me to this conference room where a lone black kid is doing math problems.  I say hey, and plop down and start doodling Marvin the Martian.  Then I hear a crinkle sound, like from a bag of chips.  I look up and the kid looks up.  Ok, there’s two of us.  We’re in a room that’s not much bigger than a closet and we’re sitting about five feet away from each other.  WHERE COULD THE NOISE BE COMING FROM????  A few minutes later, another crinkle.  I look up, the kid looks up.  I look down and out of the corner of my eye I see his hand fly up to his mouth.  A few minutes later, another crinkle.  I look over at my sheet telling me what the rules and regulations are for in-school suspension.  It doesn’t mention food, and the kid is more or less doing his work so I decide not to give him a hard time.  A few minutes later, another crinkle.  I look over.  The kid has his hood over his face trying to hide his mouth.  He’s managed to hide his eyes, not his mouth.  A few minutes later, another crinkle.  This time I see out of the corner of my eye that he’s trying to shake a lost chip out of his sleeve, still thinking that he’s being discreet about all of this.  This poor kid gets an F in deceit.  I debate telling him to go get a napkin and eat like a normal person, decide he’s actually punishing himself (not to mention embarrassing himself) more than I ever could and so I refrain from saying anything, and hold my laughter until I leave.  Well we know this delinquent won’t be graduating to a life of crime any time soon!

Now it’s time for math.  Third period was fine.  We corrected their homework and then they did their homework for tomorrow.  Fourth period took a quiz.  Fifth period was a little less on-task.  But they got the work done.  The three kids who were working I let go at the bell, the rest of them I made clean up the mess they made.  Seventh period there was an aide in the room, so the kids got to work a little better.  Also, I was a little more forceful in suggesting that they do their homework and extra credit than I had been in fifth.  Eighth took a quiz.  Ninth period was a zoo.  The kids knew they were getting out at 11:30, we corrected the homework in record time and now they decided it was time to party.  One kid spent the entire period ripping up paper and was walking towards the fan with the intent of ‘making it snow’ when he realized I was watching him.  I shook my head and pointed at the trash can.  Another girl was shooting twists of paper with a rubber band at every single person she could hit.  When she noticed that I was watching, she immediately went into this loud “oh I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’ll stop speech” AS SHE’S LOADING UP TO SHOOT SOMEONE ELSE.  These kids are morons.  Finally the bell rings and they all get up to leave and I tell them that no one is leaving until the floor is immaculate.  Which resulted in 29 of them standing by the door, asking “is it good enough yet” over and over while one kid does most of the cleaning.  I hope they missed their busses.  :-D

Then Micki and I went to visit Gram and Gramps for lunch.  We ate grandma food, did crossword puzzles, a sudoku, and sat around outside while grandma made things.  I want to be able to be handy like them.  Gramps wired his garage from his house and then the shed from the garage.  The two of them make all kinds of crafty things (which I try to collect).

Then I tootored.  My little third grade buddy at 5:15.  he’s doing pretty well.  We worked on place value up to the ten thousands today.  I can definitely see improvement which is good.  Then at 6:30, I was with the jr high girl, who told me she got straight A’s for the first time this fall!  It’s like I’m being useful!

Helen arrived while I was out,  and went for a run.  When I got home we made pasta and watched Sister Act, then went to Oberweis for some ice cream!

Today (Saturday) we got up early (by Matt’s standards) and went to watch Micki’s XC meet.  She took 11^th in the JV race.  Not too bad, there were hundreds of girls out there, but I couldn’t tell if she was satisfied or not.  There were schools from as far away as Mahomet there, so it was a pretty big meet.  

After her race, Helen and I headed up north to Six Flags.  Joe had 4 free tickets from Deloitte Day, so we got in for free and there were hardly any people at the park.  I don’t think I could go there anymore on a regular day.  We took it easy and just wandered slowly from ride to ride.  I was about to list each coaster we went on in order and frequency, but I wont bore you with the details.  We did do the Déjà Vu, which I’ve never been on, because it’s ALWAYS closed when I’ve been there.  luckily Joe’s work also gave each of us $20 in Great American dollars, so we didn’t have to pay for food either.  Which is good because a small ice cream was six freaking dollars.  I had a footlong corndog for lunch which hit the spot and then it was back to more coasters.  We did a water ride and got soaked.  But one trip on batman completely dried me off.  I called James to see if he was there, and we bumped into him, Emily, Matt S. and his girlfriend a few times here and there.  so that was cool.  Helen won a Wendy from Bob the Builder stuffed doll and Joe won a Marvin the Martian.  I failed to win the giant karate spongebob, but did manage to earn a consolation monkey.  (we don’t tell him he’s a consolation monkey because we don’t want to hurt his feelings)  Then we ended the day by going on Raging Bull, as it is Joe’s favorite.  When we were done, there were no people in most of the lines so we moved from the front car to a middle car and rode it two more times without even bothering to get back in line.  My favorite is still the Viper.  I don’t know, everyone else seems to love Raging Bull.  I mean I appreciate the speed, but that’s all it really has in my mind.  I need to go upside down.  J  after that, Helen and I went out for thai food in downtown naperthrill for dinner.  

Sunday we headed down to Tinley Park to play with Helen’s baby niece.  Lil Kathryn is almost 14 months now.  She kind of walks while holding on to people’s fingers, and sometimes she just walks on all fours, not crawling, but walking on all fours.  She has some speed to her.  We picked up some toppings from target and made a gluten free pizza for dinner and some ice cream.  Hersheys has special dark syrup!!!!!  In case you were wondering.

Now I should get back to work on homework, or better yet, go to bed.  But we all know I’m going to go back to preparing pictures for the internet…

Scribbled by Matt at 1:22 AM CDT

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finally got my first sub call of the 2007-8 skool year for tomorrow.  well i'd gotten two before this but when i called and left a message the other times they never gave me another call, so i assume that in the hours before i got the first message they found someone else.  anyway.  it's at a middle school in glen ellyn or one of those towns in the glenbard school district.  so THAT should be fun.  because, as the man (mr. krabs) says, "I like money"

last night's class was fine.  and by 'fine' i mean kind of stupid.  we read this book about four teachers out in cali and how 'their VISION' affected how they approached teaching.  the book was pretty lame.  it told the stories of four HS teachers who started teaching only to find out that ::gasp:: teaching was NOT exactly what they expected.  and how each of the four dealt with the reality of the situation and how they *FOUND THEIR VISION*  they found their vision by moving to a different school.  now the book never came out and said that you need to move around until you find your fit, but by never mentioning this trend, and never bringing it to the front, i kind of feel like it tacitly condoned the teachers leaving, and i was kind of bothered by the fact that it never mentioned anything about the students.  i got the impression that i was reading about teachers who said things along the lines of "I dont want to teach here because it's not what I expected and it's not how I invisioned MY classroom to be"  well tough shit.  then our professor made us close our eyes for like ten minutes while she, in excruciating detail, described walking down the street and entering a building and walking to the classroom and who we passed in the halls an dwhat we said to them and what they looked like and and and and.... and then we had to write OUR vision.  mine was rather sloppy and the people i discussed it with told me to get in gear.  hmm.

today i went to mom's classroom to talk to the german kid, bring some worms, and chat with Jeff about the inline marathon.  so one of mom's kids is out because they had their appendix out yesterday and mom is trying to explain this to the class and in doing so mom kind of mentions that she's not entirely sure what an appendix does... and this little girl, 7 years old, says "oh, well when humans evolved, they used to need the appendix for their digestion, but then they evolved and now we dont need it anymore, but what sometimes happens is that it explodes and then it affects your large intestine and sometimes people die if they don't have it taken care of right away"  I almost said "holy shit" out loud because a seven year old just did a better job of explaining what the hell an appendix is than i ever could.  where do kids learn these things? 

mom also said that the other day when the school had an assembly to watch the Jump Rope Warrior.  why they were watching this weirdo, i have no idea, but anyway, apparently he did amusing things like jump rope with lots of kids  at the same time and stuff... anyway... so mom tells me at one point he asks kids to come up to not only jump rope with him but to challenge him to dance while he's jumping and he picks C, my little buddy from last year.  i wish i could have been there, he could not have picked a more streetwise little punk to challenge him.  from mom's description, i'm pretty sure that C did the 'soulja boy' dance and tried to get this dude to do that dance while jumping rope.  why a 7 year old knows a dance that goes to a song with lyrics that include sexual references that even i don't get is kind of frightening, but a funny frightening.

karate tonight was good.  mertel was back from his tour of european karate tournaments so we had a good workout.  we sparred for over a half hour which is something new.  i have a nice bruise on my arm from the other night when rory and patrick and i sparred at BU and i think i added a few more.  i still need to figure out this damn letter that says i'm ineligible for fall testing.  idiots.

Scribbled by Matt at 11:47 PM CDT

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for some reason my 448 professor went on for a while about this.  just becuase there are a lot of coincidental factors, that does not mean they cause something... just because kids who get good grades on test do well in a foreign language class does not mean that all kids are going to succeed in my German class.  we talked about the influence of motivation, aptitude, intelligence, learning style and all that good stuff on second language acquisition (hereafter referred to as SLA) in class on monday.  it was weird.  class is sooooo theoretical and philosophical sometimes it's irritating.  i've discovered that i can BS my way through pretty well though.  age, motivation and aptitude were shown to have the greatest effect in SLA.  SURPRISE SURPRISE.  i'm glad we spent 3 hours discussing this.  i'm all for encouraging us future teachers to have well thought out philosophies of education, and i'm all for us knowing what we're talking about, but just once i'd like to have a professor tell me 'this is how it is' and then we spend time talking about what we can do with that in the classroom.  is that so much to ask?

today's class was fine.  we discussed the speaker from last week.  he told us that we need to have diversity and race and gender and sexual identity and SES and all that stuff forefront in class discussions.  sometimes you have to step back and say "yes, it's important, but that's HIS thing.  i'm going to have it in my class sometimes, but is it MY goal?"  anyway.  so we talked about how you could do that successfully in the classroom.   i was talking with another kid from my 432 class (the big one before student teaching) and she asked me if i had my placement all set yet.  i told her that i still needed a background check but i wanted to see if i could submit the one i had done for my sub certificate... she made a joke about all the crimes i've committed in the last two years and i said "well i've only molested seven kids" which got a whole lot of weird stares from a group of middle aged women who happened to be coming out of a classroom right as i said it.  whoops.  i guess you shouldn't make comments like that around people in education classes.  well i probably shouldn't make comments like that at all but sometimes they slip out.

before class i went to grandma and grandpas to get my weekly republican indoctrination.  we also watched Maury, and this new guy Steve Wilkos, who seems to be trying to be a more in-your-face Maury and just comes across as someone who looks like they're trying too hard.  i did a sudoku and then gram gave me an apple.

after class was tutoring.  it was fine.  it's good to see D's progress.  at the beginning of the summer i could give him 5 numbers and tell him to order them from least to greatest and he'd struggle with it but now he's doing much better and is moving on to bigger and more complex topics.  i usually play a round of War with him at the end of the day as kind of a 'cool down' and today he asked me
D:  "why does a king beat a queen?"
me: "why do you think it does?"
D:  "i dont know... but it does prove that men are better than women"
just so you know he said it with a mischievous "im not really serious" grin on his face.

then i went and sparred for an hour with rory and patrick at BU.  they're doing the october shotokan tournament that i'm missing to go rafting and patrick needs to practice.  we got a lot of weird stares from the people playing basketball but overall it was good.  we all got some good hits in.  i'm going to have a nice bruise on my left shoulder and my right bicep thanks to some of Rory's less well placed punches.  Rory and I both knocked the wind out of each other a couple times.  it was rather amusing.

i was originally going to head down to urbana this weekend, but joe called me up last minute with Deloitte Day passes to Great America, so it looks like Helen and I are going to go ride roller coasters on Saturday!  and then visit little Kathryn on Sunday.  so that will be a lot of fun.  Has it really been since Memorial Day that I saw the little kiddo?

Scribbled by Matt at 11:15 PM CDT

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Another week of class down.  For some reason it seems like this semester is going quickly.  Probably because there is sooooo much work.  Grr.  Monday's class was boring as hell.  449 was so much practical and application work.  448 seems to be a lot of theoretical stuff.  I understand that it's good to have the various theories of language acquisition in the back of your head but putting it there is painful. 

after class Monday I had to zip home to go to karate.  One of the eastern european ladies took all the green and below to the other half of the gym to work on kata.  belt testing starts up in november, so i gotta get ready for this.  for the most part i wasn't sore, but my thighs were a little stiff at the end of class.

Tuesday was alright.  We had a guest lecturer on african americans and urban education.  It was a 35 year old black man with a phd in education who came in the room wearing ripped denim shorts and a grungy tshirt.  he swore a lot, and after every swear he'd say "i'm sorry, but i gots to be FRANK"  it kind of got old.  his point was good enough though, that the reason ::diversity:: is a problem is because no one ever talks about it for fear of being labeled 'offensive' or a 'troublemaker' which makes sense.  He seemed to think that as long as you preface it "We're going to have a discussion and it's going to be really awkward.  It's going to make you uncomfortable.  And if it makes you toooo uncomfortable, say something immediately."  then it would be fine to talk to your students about it.  I think I'll wait til I have tenure before I take that step.

Last night's class was fine.  I got there early to print out my response paper to the Dewey book.  The College of Ed computer lab was closed for a class so I went down to the UIC computer lab in the basement and found Carolyn and Lauren there already.  We all printed out our response papers and then spent the next thirty minutes looking up our cohort members on MySpace, and reading weird news from CNN.  A blind man crashed his ATV into a tree and died, a carnival worker crashed his car because two of his friends were having sex in the backseat, a teacher sued the school for not letting her bring a gun with her in Oregon...

We spent the first half of class talking about our practicum placement.  I'm going to be at Oak Park River Forest High School this semester it seems.  Good, the colors will be orange and blue and the mascot is the husky.  So I won't have any problems getting it confused with my high school.  or my college for that matter.  Melissa from my cohort went there, took German there, and says that the teacher is pretty nice but pretty disorganized.  So we'll see how it goes.  Can't be worse than the last school I was at where I hardly saw anyone speaking German at any time.  Then we talked about the Dewey book we had to read for class last night.  I'd had to read Democracy and Education for ED 402, and Experience and Education for 402 and 429, so I was expecting some hard hitting philosophical stuff that I could hardly follow, but this one was a lot easier to read.  Someone in class asked why this one was an easier read and the teacher responded "because this one was written for teachers"  we all had a good laugh and then she followed that up with saying that his other books were mostly written for other philosophers.  I was in a group with Irritating Opinionated Guy, which went fine because then he did most of the talking and I could just sit there.  Girl Who Talks Too Fast had some good ideas about how to deal with kids who don't want to say the pledge of allegiance.  SHe said that she lets them do whatever they want as long as they're respectful to the people who do want to say it as well as having a solid foundation/reason for not saying which they would be prepared to tell the principal if he asked them. 

After class I called Krajniak because he asked people to come over and help him drywall his garage.  He never answered his damn phone, so I called Jen, wondering if she were there.  She was and she answered so I stopped by.  Isla and Jen were there but no one was working in the garage, they were just sitting around.  We made fun of Isla for having dog poop on her pants.  Made fun of Jen for buying tickets to go to Seattle to watch her favorite band in concert (who she's seen live three times in the last two weeks - Chicago, Kansas, Texas).  I guess I might go over to Krajniak's today to help. 

Last but not least, Ireland pics are up! 

Scribbled by Matt at 11:41 AM CDT

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Thursday night Helen came up after work.  She arrived while I was at karate.  we had a substitute instructor because Sensei Mertel was at a tournament in Germany.  there's no class this week because all the instructors are at the world championships in Poland. 

Friday morning we packed the car and headed for the Great White North.  It was an uneventful but really long drive.  We left a little before noon.  around 1 helen decided to study for the GRE.  around 2 we played the alphabet game.  Helen won.  then we played the other alphabet game.
Me:  I'm going to duluth MN and i'm bringing an apple!
Helen:  You suck at this
around 3 we decided to stop at the next Wendy's we saw.  around 4:15 we decided to stop anywhere we saw.  We were passing through Eau Claire at the time and figured it was big enough that we'd just stop somewhere there.  after coming to the last eau claire exit, which coincidentally had no restaurants, we turned around and went back one mile which claimed it had a Hardees 1.7 miles to the west.  after driving 5 miles, i got gas and we said screw this, headed back, went one more exit south where there was a sign for a DQ.  after driving half a block, the road abruptly turns south.  we drove down that until it dead-ended.  no DQ.  got back on the highway.  we knew that the first exit in Eau Claire had a mcdonalds, and we knew that it was right off rt 53.  well coming from the north, you can't see the mcdonalds and there is no sign for it.  so we went past eau claire, turned around again, went back north and got off at the mcdonalds.  they were training people.  so behind the counter i could see 16 people standing there.  one kid was taking orders.  he took ours.  he took two more.  they got their food while we stood there.  finally someone noticed two trays with reciepts on them waiting to be filled, realized that other people had been served out of order and we were still standing there expectantly.  we got our food and ate and got back on the road.  one hour of my life.

we arrived in Duluth around 7:30, a little ahead of Joe and Alina, coming from Minneapolis.  JOe had called ahead so the hotel let me check us in.  Helen and i wandered down to the Starbucks and walked around the strip malls to stretch our legs after being in the car all day.  When Joe and Alina arrived, we drove back into the city, found the convention center and the two of us checked in.  joe determined that we did not in fact pay $75 for a garbage bag with duct tape on it.  then we went to the olive garden to carbo-load.  i wanted the steak and chicken meal that micki got a few weeks ago, but i decided to be good and just go with the baked ziti.  then it was back to the fairfield and a good 5 hours of sleep.

Joe and I stumbled groggily around in the morning and eventually made it out the door.  there were two other inliners coming down to breakfast as we were.  i didn't expect to need a window scraper in september but apparently its like 50 degrees colder in minnesota than it is in IL, so after scraping off the car, we headed back into town.  we parked at the DECC and waited in line for a bus to bring us to the starting point.  the race travels from Two Harbors 26.2 miles southwest into downtown lakefront Duluth.  we sat next to some dude on the bus who was on the board of directors for the marathon.  this was his 12th time skating.  someone in front of us had just done the metrodome marathon in st. Paul.  i dont think i could handle 71 laps around the concourse of a stadium.  sheesh.  they said that this year was the coldest and windiest that duluth had had on race day.  which was GREAT.  joe and i were in wave 8, and at 8:12 we were off!  we stayed together about 2 miles and then joe took on off ahead of me.  the wind was brutal, coming head-on and constant throughout the race.  but it went ok.  the scenery was awesome.  for at least 18 of the miles i'd say we were pretty much right on the shore of lake Superior.  Helen and Alina were waiting at the half-way point taking pictures.  around mile 16 i saw two ambulances come flying towards each other, both drivers shrugging their shoulders and looking at the other.  around mile 18 i saw an old man fall into a ditch.  he seemed fine.  the good folk of Duluth decided that the best way to end a marathon was about a mile and a half along the I-35 interstate.  so that was cool.  except for the two uphill on-ramps and the grooved pavement.  but i finished strong and i wasn't very tired or sore or anything.  just hungry.  joe came in at a nice 2:11.  helen says the clock said 2:48 when i came in, some dude who came in a little after me said he got a 3 flat, but my official time online says 3:06.  either way i probably should train more next year.  one or two skates a week for six weeks definitely doesn't cut it.  the wind and hills must have hit me harder than i expected.  a 3:06 works out to a 7 minute mile pace and i know i was doing under 6 minutes for all of my skates around lisle and chicago when i went out on longer runs. 

after the race we picked up our stuff and headed back to the hotel.  we argued the management into giving us an extra hour to check out so we could shower, and then we headed across the street to crapplebees for lunch.  i got a burger and fries, but i probably should have gotten the you-pick-three entrees for $10.  :)

then we decided to do a little sightseeing before heading our separate ways.  so we went to barnes and noble to find a book on hiking, and then drove back north to Gooseberry Falls State Park.  the falls were nice.  we hiked up to the upper falls and then slowly made our way back down.  then we drove the marathon route back into town and Joe and Alina headed back to Minneapolis and Helen and I headed back to IL. 

the route home was uneventful.  We stopped a little north of Eau Claire to find some gas.  it was almost as fun as finding food the way north.  i called mom somewhere around portage and she freaked out that i was driving all the way home.  but we didnt want to waste money on a hotel or waste sunday morning driving so we made it all the way. 

today we made pancakes, i did my homework, and then we went for a ride around town on mom's scooter. 

and i FINALLY put pictures up on my webpage!  i made albums for Steve's wedding plus the inline marathon.  email me or let me know if you want the password to view the photos!  i decided to not wait until i am the super html guru to do this stuff but just do what i can do.  i've been using photoshop to generate the pages and then i edit them in dreamweaver, and i just discovered that i can tweak the photoshop template in dreamweaver to save me some editing time.  i am awesome.

now i suppose i should go to bed.

Scribbled by Matt at 1:17 AM CDT

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I just realized that Gianna's dress could pay off my student loan with enough left over to make a years worth of car payments. 
The cost of the band could pay a year of dormitory room and board.
The cost of the wedding itself could buy half a damn house.  Or 5 Hyundais. 
The honeymoon was a shower present from Gianna's aunt. 

it must be nice to be rich.

I went to gram and gramps today because it was gramps' birthday.  Apparently I misunderstood mom when she said "oh, you dont have class? then you can go to westchester."  she meant I was free to go with her at 4, but i went for lunch.  and i took the brownies she made for him.  it was ok.  they talked a lot about uncle Eddie.  it seemed like grandma almost cried when she was talking about how mean she thinks he is to her.  and gramps kept repeating "i dont know what's wrong with that kid"  i was trying to explain this to mom later and all she could say was how eddie is 50 years old and why dont they leave him alone.  i get that gram and gramps treated Eddie pretty lousy for most of his adult life and yeah that's bad, but mom still blames her parents and never tries to see it from their point of view.  sometimes i think i understand mom's family better than she does. 

as usual i did my weekly reading of a newspaper and got my eyes and ears full of the news.  general patreaus was on, talking about the status of the war, and this senator gave a long winded speech using lots of buzz words to lead up to a question that he obviously felt was really important, really trying to portray the war in the most negative light, but then in his question he referred to Iraqis as "those people."  I dont know why it stuck in my head but i'm usually pretty perceptive about things like that and I thought it odd that he would use that term, referring to the iraqi population that negatively, when he was trying to get the US out of the conflict.  i mean, what the hell?

Sensei Brien today said that he hoped we liked his lectures today because for the rest of the session he's going to be making us work all-out all the time.  this doesn't sound hilarious unless you've been taking classes on and off with sensei brien for ten years and realize that "story time" is absolutely never going away when it comes to him.  there's nothing he likes more than to tell us some long rambling story about a korean grand master, or a ten year old black belt who used their karate, then tell us what would happen if we did blah blah blah and then look at us in that now what do you think about your karate skills way. 

I put my new wheels on my skates last night.  And i traded my bearings down to my old skates, and finally put the new wheels i'd bought for them 4 years ago on.  so now i have street skates with ABEC-9s and new wheels, and my snowlerblades are now my official hockey skates with ABEC-7s and new wheels. 

although i'm never going to get to try them before saturday if it doesnt stop fucking raining.

happy birthday Helen!

Scribbled by Matt at 11:56 PM CDT

Updated: Tuesday, 11 September 2007 12:08 AM CDT

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Facebook just told me to go watch an "R-rated trailer for the movie Shoot Em Up" It was the dumbest thing ever.  They put clips of Clive Owen shooting and clips of that dude from Sideways talking and looped them together so they actually had about thirteen seconds of actual footage in a four minute trailer.  It does not bode well for this movie.  Its billed as some great action flick, so i'm expecting something minimally better than Smokin' Aces which was the worst movie I've seen thus far in 2007. 

Class tonight was fine.  I got there early and skated to Taylor St. to go buy my books for 432.  Another Dewey!!!!  SIgh.  Then I skated back to EPASW for class.  I got there early of course.  Carolyn was already there and we made fun of each other for being early.  Apparently she didn't throw her bouquet at her wedding, so maybe it's not as weird that Steve and Gianna didnt throw the bouquet or the garter.  Maybe it's just not done anymore.  For class today we were supposed to write a one page response paper to the quote from Henry Adams  "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops"  Roughly half the class was up in arms about how egotistic this quote is as it says nothing about the input of the student.  The other half was adamantly opposed to the first half, because they all had some wonderful teacher who inspired them to go into teaching that they vied for time to rave about, and praise this quote for it's insightfulness.  I love how everything is so black and white for these people.  I looked down at my own paper, which was about how random things influenced me.  I mostly talked about my dad and technology.  My point was more that we're all just going to be who we are, and maybe something we do will impact someone, but most likely it's not going to be something we're trying really hard to do, but rather something small to us that's important to someone else.  I like that I don't think like anyone else in my class.  It makes me feel superior.  :-D

Then to further my superiority, we were broken into four groups and we were told to make a visual representation of this article we read that dealt with the difference between transformative teaching and mimetic teaching.  Mimetic being a fancy word for a lecture style classroom, while transformative is more hands on and crap like that.  All the other three groups went on and on about how mimetic=bad and transformative=good.  Our picture was a teacher with a giant jug of "knowledge" (which looked like water) pouring it into cups.  The mimetic half of the page was students looking at the cups and the transformative side was students doing stuff with the 'knowledge' like putting out a fire, watering a plant, feeding a dog, and running lab tests on it.  because we felt that the author was trying to say that there is a time and place for mimetic teaching, not that IT'S BAD.  anyway.  that's my rant against the good folk of ED 432.  i didnt put hair on the students i drew at first and someone made a comment about charlie brown, so i made them all have a curly q of hair on their forehead and a black zigzag on their shirt.  oh, and the teacher said she's going to try to get me in to Hinsdale to do my practicum hours (60 hours including 20 lessons) which would be cool because it's not too far from me, its NOT IN THE CITY, yet it's on the way to the city, and i'm already a sub there, so hopefully i could pick up some afternoons or something to continue earning some cash.  the THUMBS are PRESSED. 

now it's time to go write my sister a letter of recommendation for national honor society, because the application is due tomorrow and she 'forgot' to ask anyone else.   micki watches tv constantly and forgets to do anything.  i saw her to do list for today (she stayed home from school) and there was like two things out of twenty crossed off.  i remember those days!  man, high school was lame.

Scribbled by Matt at 12:04 AM CDT

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rory and i saw War on friday.  there were some good gunfights i thought but Jet Li is definitely not doing as much fighting action anymore.  i thought the twist at the end was well done though.  kind of a similar theme to other action movies that came out this summer though (of course).

Saturday I was supposed to go up to Blue Spring Lake in wiscansin to party at Joe's grandparents lake house.  Joe's dad was going to meet up with us and drive the boat while we skiied and whatnot.  but alas everyone was sick except for about four of us so it got cancelled.  i spent the morning working around the house and then i went downtown to see Joe and Alina's new apartment and go for a skate along the lakefront.  their place is cool.  terrible parking.  but they're on the 12th floor with an incredible view of the lake.  i don't want to know what they pay a month.  well ok,  i do want to know.  alina's cats have the run of the place.  and her frogs take up the rest of the area.  at best count i think i saw 25 of them here and there.  and a gecko.  joe and i went for a 15 mile skate and kept a sub-6 minute pace the entire time.  joe could have done it faster i know, and i dont know how much faster i could have gone with good wheels, but i'm confident i could at least maintain that pace for the marathon in two weeks.  one amusing thing... as we hit the lasalle st beach area i thought i recognized the loping gait of one runner and it did in fact turn out to be my cousin, James, on his evening run along the lake.  He and Joe both work for Deloitte, and both commute to Minneapolis for two different jobs every monday through thursday.  how odd.  we debated going further south but ended up turning around at Navy Pier where there were eight billion people out on the town for saturday night.  come to think of it, it might have been the last saturday night for fireworks.  i'm not sure.  we headed back and ordered some italian take out while Alina cleaned out her cricket cage (frog food) and I sneezed a lot. 

late saturday night helen arrived, after her four hour drive, for Steve's wedding!  We went for a run Sunday morning, knowing that we were going to be eating a lot.  just how much we had no idea.  even though the invitation said "black tie" i decided to be a little different and wear my black suit with my snoopy tie.  i figured with the Pulia family it'd probably be ok.  other than dad and uncle Eddie i was the only one not in a tux.  oh well.  the full catholic ceremony was pretty long.  helen is willing to pay joe $20 not to have the full one in february.  i think i'll add some to that too.  but it went well.  the bridal party was freakin huuuuuge.  thirteen groomsmen and 12 bridesmaids.  plus a bunch of junior bridesmaids/groomsmen, three ring bearers and two ushers.  a ridiculous amount of them were from the bride's side.  which fit in well with the reception which was 300 people, 63 of which were from Steve's side.  in between the ceremony and the reception we went to uncle Jimmy's house to chill.  we drank a lot of sangria and ate crackers, and tried (in vain) to avoid Shane, the giant white German SHepherd who sheds like nobody's business.  we spent the last ten minutes using a lint brush to clean ourselves off.  then we were off to the reception which was at the Abbington, near us in Glen Ellyn.  it was a really nice place.  and the foooooood!  they let us into the hall at about 6:30.  helen and micki and i skipped the receiving line and went straight to the food and the bar.  the seafood buffet was a bit... too seafoodish for me, but i tried a few things.  i could have made a meal of the roasted peppers in balsamic vinagrette alone.  after the appetizers and our first of many free drinks, we ventured into the line to go say congrats to the couple and their families.  it seemed like uncle sam auntie moe and janice (steve's mom) were getting along alright.  i was at Table 7 of 25, with Helen, Micki, Nicole and Brankica (cousin Mike's fiancee/cousin Dan's girlfriend - both of whom were in the wedding party), Meagan and Ian (cousins), and Phil and Maria something-or-other, who used to live across the street from Uncle Sam (father of teh groom).  I felt awkward about the two random adults who were at a table of the groom's cousin's and company, but they seemed to do ok.  and i guess Phil was somehow connected to the bachelor party, as he made references to taking care of my cousin mike who couldn't keep up with the hardcore party posse's drinking.  then came the soup course (minestrone) and the salad.  They were on top of that one and brought Micki and Helen plain salads with no nuts or gorgonzola.  then the pasta dish.  rotolo, which although doesn't look anything like ravioli, tastes a lot like it.  mainly because of the ricotta.  then lemon sorbet.  then the main course.  we'd called ahead and they had Helen's grilled chicken, plain veggies, and baked potato all ready which was awesome.  i had the steak and it was pretty damn good.  the cake was good and the ice cream in the random chocolate cup was pretty good too.  then i irritated helen by going off for random family pictures that took way too long.  we got one of the entire family minus Melissa who apparently did all the make-up for the bridal party but still didn't come to the wedding.  the photographer doesn't put them online, only works with proofs (what is this the 1800s?) so we have to figure out how to see them.  no one ever called us when Joe's wedding pictures came in.  i think if i remind gram every week when i go visit it should work out.  who knows.  then there was a lot more drinking and a lot more dancing.  helen didn't realize that my cousin eric, who drank more than the rest of us combined, is still only 19.  he has more pictures of himself totally plastered, or on the way to being totally plastered on facebook than anyone i know.  i guess we always took it for granted that he's a lush.  he's been drinking since he was about 8.  when you step back and look at it from someone else's point of view... yeah it's really weird that uncle Jimmy and Auntie Karen haven't done anything about it.  Dan and Brankica kept drinking somehting they referred to as "Pulia-tinis" and i have no idea what's in it.  i am curious though.  most of the fam left around midnight.  Helen and I left around one, as the groom started getting lap dances from the groomsmen.  i got an awesome picture of Uncle Sam dancing to 'Bringin' Sexy Back'

i think the main thing is that nothing exploded.  Gram and Janice didn't say a word to each other.  there were no problems around Ron, the Token Black Man.   it's sad that in this day and age, that had to be an issue.  Joe gave a toast but no speech, so he wasn't allowed to bad mouth the bride, with whom his wife is currently feuding.  Uncle eddie wore a suit.  which he bought just for the wedding, but the pants dont fit and there's a huge rip in the jacket.  (if this sounds like it shouldn't be surprising he wore a save the wales tshirt to Joe's wedding).  i definitely like Katie and Justin's idea to have the DJ call out commands for the guests to go take pictures in a certain order.  i think it helped them flow along a lot better.  they of course didn't have a 30 member bridal party which i'm sure also helped a lot. 

today Helen and I walked to Starbucks, which we forgot was a 5.2 mile round trip hike.  uphill on the way home.  and it was hotttttttttttt.  we got home and played Scrabble.  we got bored and quit.  helen was beating me 139 to 116.  i blame the round where she got two double-word scores.  at least she didn't use all seven letters on that round as well.  i grilled sausage and corn on the grill for dinner and then she had to go home (well not really) and mom and dad went off to Kingsley for a couple hours. 

tomorrow i have to go to UIC and watch some dumb video that's on reserve at the library, then go to class, and then fly right back to naperville to tutor.  fun fun fun.  i hope the traffic doesn't blow. 

i should also get my new wheeeeeels tomorrow.  i think my plan is to skate once more on the crappy wheels to really run them into the ground and then put the new ones on.  but i wont use them for any big skates yet.  i'll use my backup skates with the old bearings to train on for the big skates and use the new stuff for some short skates, to break them in, but not overdo it. 

and that's my weekend in a nutshell.  happy labor day. 

... I said a brat! beef kielbasa! hot smoked sausage! cheddarwuuuuurst!

Scribbled by Matt at 1:24 AM CDT

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Day three of class went fine.  It was The Big One.  the last class I take before student teaching.  I like how in this last class i will take as a student in a Master's program, the first thing we did was set up a bunch of rules and regulations for 'how the teacher knows we're being active participants'  and all that crap.  we had to brainstorm lists in a small group setting of things like "showing up for class prepared"  and "challenging each other's ideas while maintaining a respectful attitude" and "being prepared to share personal experiences and connections"  and of course the morons that i call classmates are nitpicking every damn detail.  there's one boy in the class that 2 girls in my cohort absolutely despise for this.  he was arguing everything.  but at least we did stuff.  our teacher let us out a little early, but after we'd discussed a bit and done some potentially useful work.  (ie "what's a goal you have for yourself as a teacher - irritating, but probably a good question to ask yourself at this point in the game).  as she let us out she made some sort of snicker about 'if no one has a problem with being let out early' and then made some sort of comment about people who complain that they paid money to be here.  now i dont mind she let us out early, but there are limits.  and who the fuck are you to tell me what to do with my money?

day two of class was a disaster.  i drove 45 minutes to get downtown.  it took me almost an hour and a half to get home thanks to the damn eisenhower.  and class?  it lasted NINETEEN FUCKING MINUTES.  the professor read us the syllabus.  and made his little "i'm italian and i wear a wife beater" speech that i've heard twice before already even though i've never taken one of his classes.  now don't get me wrong.  i like the idea of valuing individuals over culture.  i think it's ridiculous that it is legal in scandinavia for a muslim man to come and forcibly take his sister back to whatever shithole she extricated herself from to be executed.  so murder is illegal, but kidnapping for the purpose of execution is fine because it is being respectful of culture?  and france won't extradite a murderer back to the US because they don't believe in the death penalty?  now i'm off track.  all i wanted to say was that tuesday's class was retarded. 

all in all i'd say my experiences at UIC are ok.  it's a good school.  but i can easily see how UIUC is an exceptional school.  this kind of stuff didn't go on there.  never at UIUC did i not know what textbooks i'd need before the first class.  here i'm lucky if the professor even ordered tehm at the bookstore by day one. 

Updates of a Steve/Gianna Wedding nature:
Lil' Caprice is back in the wedding, but Melissa still is not coming.  Steve's half sister is back in the wedding, as is his mom.  I'm not sure about the best man.  Grandma is pretty pissed because none of her siblings are coming in for the wedding.  Her brother in Kentucky is off the hook because he's got some health problems and is going blind, and is a far drive.  But she has another brother and a sister who live in the area.  Aunt Anne isn't coming because she doesn't want to buy a new dress.  So wear an old dress!  Wear jeans and a tshirt!  no one cares!  Uncle Paul is not coming because "it's a holiday weekend" and he doesn't want to waste it.  How do you like that?  I normally try not to be the vindictive person who holds grudges, but i can see how Gram can get that way.  at some point you have to draw a line. 

Updates of a Kingsley nature:
apparently my little buddy from last year had a bad day today.  and all the administration said to Kristin (his teacher this year) was that he's doing so much better in her class and she doesn't understand.  understand what?  it's not ok to admit to having a bad day?  just because today's meltdown (and i dont know what happened or what the result was) wasn't as bad as some of the ones last year, does that mean she should pretend it's no big deal? 

in lighter news.... I ordered new skate parts!  i was going to go for the 82mm wheels with 82A hardness, but the 80mm/82A ones were like 2 bucks cheaper per wheel.  i think i can handle sacrificing a tiny bit of speed for money.  and i got some ABEC-9 bearings too.  i should be getting them next tuesday or wednesday.  i figure i'll put them in the next weekend.  let's just hope this doesn't turn out like David's book which toured more of the US than I did before making it's way to Lisle. 

ok, now i'm off to go kick people.  ki-yai.

Scribbled by Matt at 7:48 PM CDT

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I had my first class of the semester today.  Foundations of Second Language Teaching.  I went down early to do some errands around campus.  First I got my damn UPass.  You know so I can ride the CTA once or twice for $50 a ride.  THen I went to get my books.  There were 3 required and 2 recommended.  I've never bought the recommended before (who can afford to) but I figure with books about how to teach foreign languages I should get them.  So I got the two recommended.  And I didn't get one of the required books because I have a second edition and they were selling a third edition.  I showed the professor mine and she said I'd probably be fine but I might want to copy ch2 from someone because it looks like that's the one that's been updated the most.  So I'll look into that.  Of course that was the cheapest book of the lot anyway.  Sigh. 

Class was fine.  I thought Inma was going to be teaching it but it was someone else.  I guess that's fine.  Inma was ok but she was a little too lenient on us.  This lady was ok so far.  I mean she didn't seem to have her head on straight but it's the first week of class and this is her first time teaching this class so I'll give her another week for that.  She doesn't know how to hook a computer up to a projector, or use a damn VCR though.  I swear... I should teach a course for teachers on how to use technology in their classroom.  Sarah, from my cohort, is in the class, plus three people from the other methods course from the spring including the outspoken usually wrong french lady.  and there's the forty year old german lady who is a year ahead of me in the program.  she seems like she is also one of those outspoken I-Disagree-With-You-Not-Because-I-Disagree-With-Your-Statement-But-Because-I-Disagree-With-Everything people.  greeeaaaaaat.

we spent most of the time discussing 17 common thoughts/debates in second language teaching.  we were supposed to rate them 1-5 if we strongly agreed - strongly disagreed... one of the statements was that 'people learn language by imitation'  I put that as a 2 because I figure most kids learn their first language by imitation, but you can learn a language by studying if you're motivated or whatever.   Now all of these statements were purposefully bland and you could really change a lot by altering the context so whatever.  But the 40 year old german-teaching lady got all up in arms about this one, citing the often spouted "goed" said by some kids and her claim was that this is not an imitation.  but isn't it partly an imitation?  they're imitating the word "go" and they're imitating the adding of "ed" to make something past tense.  the only other odd moment of class was when the prof had us discussing these statements in groups, she made us change our groups halfway through... so I moved to a different group and some other girl took the chair that i had previously been sitting in.  so then when we were done, I got up to go back to my seat, but the girl in my seat did not get up.  We were on a fifteen minute break, and I went and talked to the prof about my book (for which I went over and had to rummage around in my bag under the desk where I had been sitting).  Then I went and sat down in the only available seat - the one that the girl in my seat had been sitting in.  10 minutes later, right before class resumes, the girl gets up, takes a step towards where I'm now sitting and then loudly says "oh, well I guess I'll just stay here then" and goes back to my old seat.  Now am I the one breaking some sort of etiquette thing here by not trading seats back?   Isn't there some sort of statute of limitations on this?  I just ignored her.  We watched a video on The Human Language and our teacher went on and on about what a great great linguist Noam Chomsky is. 

then i went to Shotokan.  Rory broke Bob The Dummy.  Or at least knocked him over and spilled water everywhere.  Sensei Brien laughed and then said that if Rory ever let loose on a person like he did on the dummy he'd probably kill them.  Sensei Brien says things like that a lot.  His stories have gotten more motivational and more irritating recently.  Then we did a few sparring drills and went home.

Now its time for bed.  More assisting with the German kid tomorrow.

Scribbled by Matt at 11:59 PM CDT

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Thursday I went back in to mom's class to help out with my little German bud.  I got him to write me a list of all the english words he knows.  Those of you out there of a german-speaking persuasion will be pleased to know that the first word he said, was indeed... "sausage."  We can all rest easy, knowing that that stereotype has been validated.  The rest of the words were much more boring and were the names of animals and various household objects.  I made a point to tell mom not to take off for him capitalizing nouns as he's learning spelling.  I also drew a human body and he filled in the german words and i'd put in the english equivalents.  I think I'm going to do that with a few more pictures.  I think it will help.  I was also thinking of drawing a picture and including some directions to color it.  Like "The boy is wearing a yellow shirt."  I think it'd be a good way to assess his vocab progression.  Now it's just a matter of discovering if coloring is still a fun assignment for a 7 year old. 

After skool, I left for Urbana.  As I was leaving the school (it's on the border of naperville and bolingbrook, and i have to drive from the north end to the south end of bolingbrook to get to I-55) the sky is pretty gray.  As I get a little farther, the sky is black.  I turn on the radio and hear the dude on WBBM say "if you're driving through bolingbrook, abandon your car and seek shelter IMMEDIATELY"  apparently a tornado was spotted about a mile from where i was.  but it was moving east and i was heading southwest so i said whatever.  then i get on the highway and they say "there's a tornado cloud spotted over mokena.  it will be in flossmoor in 5 minutes"  shit.  i'm going to be passing through flossmoor in 4 minutes.  oh well.  as soon as i got to I80 there were clear blue skies.  also by this point, the tornadoes had all reached downtown chicago thirty miles away.   mom called me of course worried that my car was 80 feet in the air being thrown towards kansas.  apparently micki's school locked down and wouldn't let any of the kids leave.  mom hadn't heard that the tornados were all well past bolingbrook by this point so she was still at school.  i got to helen's work site just as she was leaving.  i got to see the collection of buckets of mud out back.  there were seriously like fifty 5 gallon buckets out there.  it was insane.  we went back to urbana and i imposed myself on her 'thursday routine'  which consisted of ugly betty of which i'd never heard before, but they were showing the pilot so that worked out for both of us.  then we ate some pasta.  i think i made the gravy too runny by adding too much wine.  whoops.  oh well.  and we went for a run.  i ran down washington to lincoln and then back up illinois st.  while on lincoln i got stopped by two very confused freshmen who were looking for a party on High St.  i was nice and gave them directions.   i made it about a mile and a half without stopping and then walked on again off again for the last mile back. 

friday we went to the habitat houses on bradley near the tracks.  there are two next door to each other going up at the same time.  they're the same ones where we put up the drywall nailers a few weeks ago.  helen, paul and i put up the kitchen cabinets and then put the doors in the rooms in which they are going to be hung and took them off the frames.  helen also ran amok with her nail gun putting window sills in.  :)  after that we went and read for a bit.  amusingly enough i was re-reading State of Fear by Crichton while all these tornados were zipping through the area.  we went for a walk in the rain, and then got ready to go out for Sarah's birthday.  we walked over to the bus stop, planning on taking the MTD around so there wouldn't be any DD's needed.  but we waited like 20 minutes for teh damn bus, finally decided it wasn't worth it and went back for my car.  I figured I'd drive to Sid's and then if need be I could leave the car there overnight and still take the bus home.  Of course as we drove past the bus stop the bus cam ambling down Anderson.  only 18 minutes late!  sheesh.  saw Sid and Doug's new apartment.  I really like it.  Huuge bedrooms, huuuuuge closets, and a nice kitchen and sitting area.  Sid has now lived at all three buildings on the north side of the 1000 block of Clark St.  I'm impressed.  We watched Sarah shoot zombies on the Wii for a bit and then we wandered upstairs to see Jen and Andrew's new apartment.  Many comments were made about them, as well as Joe and Alina "living in sin."  More importantly Jen and Andrew fed me some jambalaya.  it was good and spicy and meat filled.  then i got suckered into driving to downtown champaign (we couldn't all fit in Jen's new Mini Cooper) and we met back up with Sid and Sarah at Jupiters.  which apparently has really good pizza.  i stole a slice of the barbecue chicken and it wasn't bad.  I tried some new irish beer (since 1710) and then fell back on my staple 7&7.  and Sarah's parents paid for it!!!  i talked a bit with Heather about her student teaching in CPS experience and her new job at Franklin in Champaign.  She's a science teacher, but like an extra science curriculum teacher.  i dont quite understand it.  it seems a bit like our old tech ed program but more sciency and less techy or something.  and we talked to Jen about Walgreens goings on.  then we left around 1130 and Helen was asleep by the time we got to the car. 

Saturday we went to the Farmer's Market.  I bought some more sweet corn and Helen got some peppers.  Peppers!  We bumped into her friends who told us that the Urbana Library was having a book sale.  We went to Strawberry Fields and then to the book sale where we bumped into Emilia and Aurora again. surprise surprise!  I went a little overboard and got 19 books.  but they only charged me $6!!!  12 of them are either in german or about things german.  I feel like i should continue to collect All Things German for my someday classroom.  one of them i thought was a really good sized pocket German-German dictionary, but it turns out it's book 2 of a set "Per - Z"  dammit.  well i just went on amazon.de and the book is only €1,88 which is less than 3 bucks, but it's fifteen euros shipping.  i dont think i want to pay twenty bucks shipping for a used book that costs 2 dollars.  damn.  if only people were still in austria.  oh well.  then i lugged my giant bag of books back to helen's and we read for a while before going to the 32nd annual Urbana Sweetcorn Festival!!  I got an ear of corn and helen got a huge back of kettle corn.  then we still had a few tickets left, but didnt want to waste them on soda, so we got sno-cones from the boyscouts.  the sno cones sucked.  they were way too weak.  but it's ok.  the money went to a good cause i guess.  and it was just a kid serving it.  i was rather disappointed that they didn't have corn dogs.  The Fryer Tuck truck which i have on occasion bought a corndog from before (farmers market, taste of champaign), was even there, but not selling corndogs.  maybe they just sold out?  Sid, Sarah, Jen, Andrew, Doug and others were showing up later for Parliament Funkadelic but I couldn't stay that long so we left earlier. 

I had to come home on Saturday because my birthday present from the parental units was a tour of Chicago on the Chicago River on kayaks.  They offer an architectural tour and a ghosts/gangsters tour.  I took the hybrid, which talked a little about the history of chicago, the first gangster Roger Plant, the history of the merchandise mart, the Eastland disaster and a few other cool things. 

I suppose I should go to bed.  Fall term starts tomorrow and I have errands to do at UIC. 

Scribbled by Matt at 1:26 AM CDT

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I went to mom's classroom today.  She has an ELL student from Germany!  He doesn't speak any englisch!  You should have seen his face light up when mom asked the class "what's your favorite color" and i looked at Jonus and said "was ist deine lieblingsfarbe?"  then i asked him his favorite place (school)  his favorite snack (apfelkuchen) and what he likes to do in his freetime.  his answer to the last one was 'to have garage sales' so either i didnt ask him properly or he recently had a garage sale and had a lot of fun with it.  i'm guessing it's the latter.  then we read The Grouchy Ladybug in English and German so the class could get a feel for what it's like to sit somewhere and have no idea what anyone is saying.  At the end of the day he dragged his mom back into the school to meet me.  So that was amusing.  I also saw my little buddy C from last year as i came in.  He yelled "Hey Mr. harring!!" from all the way across the school.  I probably should have told him to use an inside voice or something, but i delight in causing more problems for his social worker and psychologist because i think they're morons so i screamed "Hey bud!  Have a good summer?" right back.  heh heh heh

Then I went up to grandma's.  I was supposed to go up today and spend the night because her new TV was supposed to be delivered today and the installation people come tomorrow to hook it all up, but apparently the truck was stolen from the Circuit City, so who knows when it's coming.  The installation people were pretty pissed when they called tonight to confirm their time tomorrow and gram told them that she didn't have the tv yet.  but i went up anyway to help her move furniture in the family room where the new tv is going and the porch where she has a ton of new furniture coming.  she ordered all new stuff for the porch, a table, four chairs, two couches and two end tables.  it should look pretty good.  but i like the empty space that's there now.  it would be a perfect workout room.  we went out to dinner at bakers square and then we went back and she whupped my ass at boggle. 

then gram was in a talkative mood so she started telling stories about teaching second grade in detroit in the 40s.  she showed up to her first year of teaching in a run down school in the ghetto and the other teachers immediately came over and said "we have to apologize.  the district promised us a well qualified teacher with lots of experience, so we kind of stacked your class with every problem child to give the rest of us one easy year."  so that was her intro to teaching.  she had one girl Rosie who was 10 years old, and was only in school 'because she's been hit by cars 4 times and she's here to stay off the streets'  Gram said that she'd teach Rosie to wash, to cross the street, and to comb her hair but that's all she'd be able to do with all the other kids in the room too.  the principal didn't like it but after Rosie attacked him one day and it took all his effort to manage her he conceded the point.  Gram also had one boy who was very smart, but only came to school one day a week.  when she talked to the mom, the mom said "oh but i send him to school every day!  he just sometimes goes down to the river to play instead.  and that kind of worries me because i've had two kids drown in the river already."  Gram said she didn't quite know what to say to that.  had she had more experience it would have been something like "THEN WALK YOUR KID ALL THE WAY TO SCHOOL EVERY MORNING" but as it was she had no idea if the lady was serious or what.  her last story was about a boy who was the same age as my oldest uncle.  they grew up across the street from each other, played together at the park and went to school together.  the boy's parents were abusive and they used to kick him out of the house for doing drugs and such.  gram noticed one day that the boy would often sleep in the little wooden play house in her backyard, so, not knowing what else to do, left a sleeping bag there and would occasionally put an orange or a banana there for him.  and on the day that my oldest uncle was sworn in as a judge (by the chief justice of the supreme court no less) gram was so proud of him and she went to buy a newspaper, and the headline was that the other boy, the same age as uncle Mike, had died.  he'd been working in a car wash and was apparently hopped up on drugs (gram called this 'mainlining') and somehow died on the job.  the parents sued the car wash and got a lot of money out of it.  what a terrible story.  those parents should have been horsewhipped, not given thousands of dollars.

lastly, grandma's favored political candidate is Mitt Romney, because her aunt Alma used to be George Romney's (his father) secretary at Nash-Kelvinator in Detroit.  Alma used to get calls all the time from wives of NK employees who wanted to thank Mr. Romney for never holding business meetings at the dinner hour, and never funding any corporate dinner where alcohol was served.  they wanted to thank him for helping their husbands come home to dinner with the family and always have time to play with the kids.  apparently the Romney family are mormons and that's why George Romney was held back from running for president himself.  who knows, if the son has the same morals as the father, and if being in a cult doesn't hold him back, maybe he's worth watching?  i dont know.

i'll stop rambling now.  time to go back to working on da room and doing laundry for da weekend.

Scribbled by Matt at 10:18 PM CDT

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I ventured into unknown territory today as I took a detailed look of that which resides Under My Bed.  I threw out my 7th grade math homework!  Sadly, my cousin Corrie was born, grew up, and probably threw out her own seventh grade math homework since mine was shoved into a box under my bed.  I also found a lot of old pen-pal letters from seventh grade foreign language class.  Two german kids and an italian kid.  I think I wrote them all once.  And then they never sent a second letter.  Well the italian kid and i went back adn forth a few times i think.  hmm.  I also found my old boy scout stuff packed neatly in a box.  I hope i can give that to bubba some day.  I also took my old spiral notebooks from all my old college classes that were in a pile under my bed, ripped out the blank sheets, unspiraled the notebook, threw out the spirals, recycled the used paper, and now have about 1000 pages of loose leaf sitting in a folder.  This is how I spend my saturday.  Really sorting through all the damn paper is what's really eating up the time.  There is SO DAMN much of it.  It doesnt help that mom and Micki are watching a movie with Spencer Tracy about the trials at Nuremburg, and every time they hear something in German they yell "matt get up here!  listen to them speak german!"  I appreciate their attempts to keep my german skills honed but seriously.  this is annoying.  i'm trying to work.

I've decided I have too many books.  I tried to go through and cull the herd so to speak.  I think I picked out about 8 to donate.  Including the three novelizations of the ninja turtle movies.  This will not do.  Objective third party needed.  Please.  I'll pay you in... books.  :)  Speaking of books, I got new bookshelves.  The ones I had in my room I stole from my mom's classroom in 2002 to bring to urbana, because mom didn't want the three tiered ones anymore, she only wanted two tiered shelves.  We rearranged her room and she decided she wanted three tiered ones again, and mine were the only ones we could find that fit width-wise.  Target had some good ones on sale but they were an inch too big, so I got the new ones and mom's were returned after their five year vacation.  Now i just have to put them together and put books back on them.  woot. 

In other news I picked out the TV that I will inherit when grandma dies.  How awkward.  She wanted a new tv for her family room and told me to get the tv that i would want for my house and that's what she would get.  So... I picked out a Samsung 50" DLP tv with 1080p resolution.  It is fucking awesome.  Now I have to go up Tuesday to set it up and call DirecTV to see about upgrading her to a HD reciever with the DVR.  rory says that should be pretty cheap but i have to sit through a half hour of them trying to get me to upgrade other features and packages. 

 oh well i guess i should go back to being productive. 

Scribbled by Matt at 12:09 AM CDT

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Life Goal # 497:  Go skitching - done.  I went for a skate today.  Dad came along on his bike.  But I wanted to do hills, so after the 2.5 mile loop down and back up Green Trails to Greene and then some more meandering around the paths dad declared himself done.  I kept going for another couple miles and as I get back to Trinity and Abbeywood I see him zipping up Trinity on mom's scooter.  I took off down Abbeywood and dad came along behind me calling out the mph until I hit 20.  I wonder if I could have gotten 25...  Then I remembered I wasn't wearing a helmet and stopped trying to go for top speed but rather for sustained speed.  I held about 12 mph for a mile or so.  Then, once again forgetting I had no helmet on, I decided to grab onto the back of the scooter and get a ride home.  :-D  Don't tell mom. 

After that I went to a make up session of Shotokan for the one I missed in Ireland.  The instructors called attention to the fact that my knee wavers sometimes when I block, and my left punch is a little slow.  I've noticed that I do usually drop my arms when I punch, so in a tournament my opponent would be able to see it from a mile away.  Lame.  gotta get back down to the basement and batter my bag again.  Rory said that on the show Human Weapon in the Karate episode there were some crazy okinawan dudes with some messed up hands that were little more than calcified knobs stabbing their fingers through plywood.  I gotta get on that.  After that we did some kata drills.  we went through sho-dan easily, and then they made us do ni-dan backwards, which was hilarious.  well, not backwards, but mirror image.  rory and i were among the few people who managed to end on the right note.  san-dan was easy as it was the one i used to do up until this spring.  yon-dan is the one i'm learning now.  i fixed my helping block problem, but i still need to work on the one weird slow turning double reverse outward block thing.  then i stumbled through heian-go-dan, tekki-sho-dan and jion.  after the kata fun we were told to get our fist guards on for some blocking drills.  i dont know why we bothered to put our fist guards on.  we were basically smacking forearms against each other for a good half hour.  i still can't open my left hand all the way without some niiiiice shooting pains going down my arms.  wonderful.

i started getting my sub crap in at all the old districts again this week.  and a few new ones.  i wonder if they'll take a 1 year old tb test result in lieu of a 90 day old one.  can't hurt to ask.  stupid TB tests.  i got one in 2005 the first time i applied for these places.  then i got one in 2006 for practicum hours at UIC.  i want to go in with my best ah-nold accent and yell "it's NOT a TUMOR...CULOSIS" or something to that effect.  i wonder if i'm spelling it right.

Scribbled by Matt at 12:54 PM CDT

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