Dear Megan. And Jules.

Dear Megan.

I'm sorry I'm the worst blogger in the entire world. Please forgive me. I have been typing until my eyeballs shrivel up and pop out of the sockets. It has not been fun. But I have some fun things to blog about over Christmas. Stay tuned. I think. At the very least, I have cute kids to post pictures of. Sorry I stink.

Love, Sara.

PS, how do you find that youtube of mark telling the horrible rabbit-killing story at the baby shower?

Dear Jules.

I know you tagged me. See above.

Love, Sara.

Oh the sleepiness of me!

So here I sit. It's parent-teacher conference day. The parents come in from 7:20 until who knows when. 9:30 maybe? Or maybe it's 10:00. I have absolutely know idea. I'm hoping it's 9:30. I teach family & consumer science. cooking, early childhood careers, life skills. While it's all very valuable information, it's not a course parents particularly value. I had a record-breaking 9 parents today. Only one was of a child of concern.

I am B-O-R-E-D. I did bring work with me to do, and I did some of it, but goodness I'm more exhausted than I am bored. I am sitting in a gym looking at all the long lines of parents wanting to talk to teachers. Poor parents, I'm sure they're bored to tears also. Even worse? Some poor kids got roped into walking around trying to sell their wares. I just had a group of 3 boys walk by. One is holding a pumping thing full of coffee. One is holding an open (nasty!) box of Krispy Kremes and one is carrying a basket with the cups, sugars, and all the other necessary accoutrement's. It's now occurring to me that I probably should spellcheck this blog.

I rarely use this as a forum to vent, but today I am venting. I detest parent-teacher conference day. Here's what I say. If you have a child in school and you are visiting the teachers, it is a long, painful and often unpleasant day for those teachers. Surprise them with a little treat. A brownie? A Reese's cup? A cup of tea? What I would give for a cup of hot water right now. I feel like something crawled in my lungs and is trying to die. I slept with the humidifier on last night though, and I'll chug the tea today in hopes that I can stave off the illness. It might help if I slept more than 4 hours a night, don't ya think?

I'm done now. I get to go back to my room and recover for a little bit before I have darling students. My students really are darling though.

I think I might go out to my car and take a nap.

Nasty people.

So once upon a time I wanted to see how many people had been to my blog. It's not many, friends. Not many at all. Occasionally go and look to see where people are and what not. Today I looked at search threads. You can see what people searched to get to your blog, but then this one also tracks what people search within your blog. There was an interesting search thread that some nasto searched today. When I say interesting, I don't really MEAN interesting. I mean the weirdo was really psychotic. Why would you search someone's blog for those things????!!! I mean, it's not like you're searching the whole world wide web. No no, these were searches WITHIN my blog. And they were all from the same IP address. In Ashburn. Over like 5 minutes. So nasty ashburn person whose IP is 65.216.218.133, go get your jollies somewhere else. You're nasty. And not the good kind of nasty.

Show yourself Nasty Mcnasterson.

3 blind mice, see how they run....

Soooooooooo as I am wont to do, I went on a blind-ish date tonight. Sheesh was this guy a doozy - all kinds of asking crazy questions and even trying to hold my hand!! He might as well have driven me up a canyon and displayed all the hey-nanner-nanners.

Ok, I'm kidding. I had a fabulous time. Except maybe I laughed too much. I do that sometimes, but they were all genuine laughs - not a single "I should laugh because he meant to be funny there." Real laughs. It was delightful, actually. Questions were good, conversation was fun. I hope he asks me out again soon.

In a hurry much?

To say it has been a crazy couple of days is a gross understatement. At least I knew I had to do a load of whites today, otherwise tomorrow would be a bit.... breezy. So I separated out all my dirty clothes and made a big pile and threw them in the wash. In a hurry? Yes indeed I was.

I was a little curious as to why the was was so clanky. We sometimes have a clanky washing machine, so I didn't think too much of it. Maybe the load was extra big or unbalanced or something, oh well. That is, until I went to put the clothes in the dryer. I opened the lid and this is what I saw:


What's that?? Can't tell what that is?? Well, you hopefully see that something is wrong. It is a load of whites with some big old black thing in there. Let me help you out....

Yes. My croc went into the wash. It is now very clean, I think. I'm awesome.

ummm huh?

So I'm doing my masters degree. And because it's a cohort we are doing it in an elementary school near mount vernon. THE mount vernon. Washington's Mount Vernon.

Because are classes are in an elementary school we get to see some rather entertaining things. I was walking down one of the halls one day and saw this envelope posted on the wall. I'm really not sure what goes in the envelope. And I'm a little disturbed by the smiley face only having one eye.


This one is for Paul. There was a lady on his mission who answered the door. In a horrible old-lady-500-years-of-smoking-voice she said "Hi, I'm Mrs. R. You can call me the Dragon Lady. Can I take your coats?" Well apparently Mrs. R is teaching music in Mt. Vernon now. Who knew??

shake it baby, shake it

Some of my favorite people are Darin, Adam and Mel. I love it when we do things all together, it's always a lot of fun. We had conference together, you know, a lovely breakfast spread. And we've had a few wii parties.

Mel and I are boxing and cannot for the life of us figure out how to actually make it hit each other so our match went on forever!

DHP and AJ dueled it out on the boxing also. They had an even harder time and worked up a good sweat trying to knock each other out. It was awesome.

Our first wii party, this is Darin after he'd just boxed. He was a little toasty. And he found some beady things on the end table. And they stuck to his head. Look how pleased Mel is with her man.

I had a wii party a couple weeks ago. And another about a month before that.

Stirfry Sunday

I've got a little stirfry of pictures for you - over the last month I have done or come across all this:


I went to a mongolian bbq the other night for the very first time. It was a fabulous evening with good company and fun conversation. I thought the big huge round grill was cool, and how they're all there snapping your food around and all. I wish they'd snapped mine around a bit more though, some of it was still a bit tough.

A couple weeks ago I actually got to go and be social with people after school for happy hour. I wasn't all happily drunk or anything, but it was fun to visit and de-stress together!

I made cinnamon rolls for conference. Darin and Adam invited me over for breakfast and to watch conference at their house on Sunday. We made french toast, and I had some extra frosting so we made some stuffed french toast too, and then the cinnamon rolls. It was fabulously sweet and disgusting, and that's all we ate all day long. But it was all SOOO good.

See my cinnamon rolls?

See Adam eating a cinnamon roll in seemingly one bite? He got most of it in, too.

This is a picture I found in some papers I had in my office. I am really really not sure how it got in those papers or even how old it is. But, it's a beautiful (?) picture Katie drew for me long long ago. I turned it over the other day when I was packing it up to take it home and she had outlined everything on the back side of the page in pen, so really, it was 2 pictures in one. Awesome. Thanks Katie, love you!!

sunrise, sunset, sunrise sunset

sunrise

sunset

sunrise

sunset

sunrise

sunset

I took these while driving. I've got some mad skillz, eh?

Do the Camcam

One of my dearest friends was in town this weekend. We had lots of fun. We met up at Maggianos in Friendship Heights for a fabulous dinner. A four-hour dinner (like a 3-hour tour).

I'm not exactly sure what Marcus has on his head. A sticker? A name tag? No idea where it came from.


This is Jeff being 82. And Chris next to him...


Cammie blowing out his birthday candles in these strange little lemon cookies.

Cammie, his friend Kim from freshman year at Ricks and me.

the whole bunch! jessica, jeff, chris, cam, marcus, steveo, me, kim and laura

I've gotta punkin, I've gotta punkin, I've gotta punkin, hey hey hey hey!

Every year we take the preschool I run with my high school students to the pumpkin patch out in Chantilly. We have a fabulous time. And the preschoolers are ADORABLE!!!

While we were there I took the opportunity to take advantage of some of the fun things around the pumpkin patch, it was a gorgeous (but freezing!!) day!

The colors were so bright and beautiful, and then a fabulous blue sky, the contrast was amazing.





This one was fearless. They had a little booth where the kids could come up and milk a real cow. She did it a couple times with the farmer there. Then she just did it by herself. She is hilarious - and not afraid of anything!!
The cows were in 2 pens. One for the milking, one for the resting.
It came time for the farmers to switch the cows. The cows were not so keen on moving around and getting all their milk squeezed out of them by elementary school kids. So the cows, both of them, took off. Up and down the hills, verging on getting in the sponge pits for the rope swings, almost going down the slides. And all the while, farmers are chasing after them. One cow was even on a lead rope. The farmer had about 20 feet of length on it, had his heels dug into the ground and was dirt skiing behind the cow. Apparently they don't know the FIRST thing about herding cows.





I'm not a huge fan of pigs, but the 3 sleeping was just so screaming for a picture. I had to.






This character was in this cage just a-talkin' to himself. I'm not quite sure what he was saying - something about how they do things in France or something. Honestly, I was a little scared to get too close.
I think the kids will be talking about the loose cows for a long time!!! We had a fab day at the pumpkin patch. Can't wait for next year!

DUH!

So I had to take my new car in for oh something, I don't remember. My first oil change or something? who knows. It was a lovely day, and I was sitting outside. I looked around when I saw a sticker on the wall.

I thought, "oh those rowdy teenagers. putting their stickers all over. What's the duh about anyway? I mean, I think it's a funny sticker, and if I had a fat stack I'd probably post them where I could.... but....hmm...."

Then I look around and see this one....

Way across the driveway in the window.

See it?
Then there's these, back where I'm kinda sitting...

Now, as for cars, I would think the honDUH would be the one to have this sticker. No. Apparently its Hyundai. I don't get that. But it's a company sticker and they stuck them all over the place. Weird. The next time I went back I saw even more, but didn't take pictures as they were in more populated places and I was already feeling a little self conscious that day.

Family Night

So in the singles wards we have family night with some geographically arranged families. but once a month, we meet all together as a ward family for a fabulous outing - or inning or 8. September brought us Matball. It's a rendition of soccer/baseball. It's not how I grew up playing it, but still decently fun none the less. I decided to document the evening.

Here we have the fabulous Annie. She really is fabulous.


The outfield. You can kind of see one of the bases taped off on the left side of the picture there. White tape, crossing over the painted red line. We're poor and single, we don't exactly have big gymnastic mats for our mats in matball.

Camille at bat, Annie as catcher, and Viddy reffing the game

Look at all those hotties..... adam, mikey, christian...

It was a rousing game, and went into an extra inning to end the tie. Much fun, way to go FHE Grandparents!

Ward Retreat

As a ward we went way up in the mountains of Maryland and had a cute little cabin-out. It was good fun, always is. While we were there we did lots of just comfy things. There was a bonfire and lots of games to be had. And I took some pictures.

Saturday morning we had some visitors in the pasture by our cabins.

This is Kasey and Mel. Mel and Darin are a pair. Kasey's sweetie is far far away so she didn't get to come, but I think she gets to come back soon -YAY!!!

See all the games we played? or.... they played? I wasn't feeling well and didn't play a lot.

This is the dinner bell.

This is hottie Adam being all manly and stuff. He was strutting with the football.

These are some of the coolest. Darin in red, Adam in blue.

The totem pole.

We stayed in these super rustic log cabin things. They were so 1832.

My feet. I got bored in the morning devotional. I wasn't quite awake yet, but was still very ADD. But my toes were all kinds of cutely painted!