Oh my! Um, if you go to the my space page of one teenage mother, you can find teenage mothers from every place in the US who, groupie like, cluster around her. I think that I am seriously underexposed to this small town 19 year old married girl with several children life. Oh, and then there are the 17 year olds with the "baby daddy" and bad grammar.

One of these ladies says she wants to meet "real moms not ones that like to *pretend* they have kids." I guess thats what all the cool girls do these days. I'm missing out!

I thought my friends have had children a little earlier than is best, but they are worlds more educated and stable than that.

1. I hate those credit card offers that come in the mail all the time. Evidently there is an equivalent to the national do-not-call list that you can sign up for. I did it- hopefully Capital One will not continue to waste so much paper on me. Go here.

2. A girl with a peanut allergy died after kissing her boyfriend. Yikes!

I hate the tradition of sitting around in a big circle on Thanksgiving and saying what we're thankful for. At least this year at Steve's parent's house we didn't do it... Every time it happens, I feel dumb and don't know what to say, because it is either trivial or cliche. The worst was the year that my aunt had survived colon cancer. I mean, when the person across from you is thankful that she didn't die, what are you supposed to say? "I second the motion"?

As a special present for this holiday season, i am totally sick. bleh. This must be the cold from hell...

Part of my general obsession with wanting to be a grown up who owns a house is my liking of mid-century modern style. I drool over it. I already have a set of 1950's square dinnerware, and some 1950's clothing. I want my gramma's old '57 T-bird. I want a bathing suit like Gidget's. However, what i really need is THE house. An Eichler house. Eichler built about 11,000 homes in the 50's and 60's- all but 650 in the bay area. His houses, I must say, rock. Hard.

The picture to the left shows how the "classic" Eichler looks when you open the front door. You go through the doorway, and come out into the outdoors again! Many but not all of the homes are arranged around a central atrium. There are sliding glass doors from this atrium into various parts of the house. (Of course, you can also navigate through hallways inside the house.) The atrium means that the main living areas of the house (living room, family room, kitchen, dining) often have glass walls on two sides. So much light! So much warm air escaping through the single pane windows on a winter night!

They're like a budget version of the houses I always stared at in my dad's architect magazines when I was growing up... I certainly can't live in that one famous glass house that you always see, but I could buy an Eichler! You can buy a shitty one for the same price as a normal shitty house up here. And then it just is harder to unshitify because it is a quirky house with no attic, radiant heating in the floors, doors from the bathrooms into the backyard, and extremely flammable mahogany paneling.

Maybe, (big maybe) I will get my funky 50's house and I will dance in front of the wall of sexy windows. Or maybe I will live in a boring 80's house with sprayed on stucco and tan carpet.

well, i hope i haven't ruined ginger ale for myself.

if you ever have to have a medical procedure which requires you to poop all your poop out first (ie the sigmoidoscopy i had a few months ago) do NOT add the nasty salty laxative to a drink you like. it was so horrible tasting that every time i look at ginger ale i feel a little bit sick.

blech.

One of my students wrote me a letter asking if I knew how to make a "reviving machine" and if he should get some "animal DNA" to help build said machine.

I wrote a response (assuming that the reviving machine would revive people from the dead) focusing on the effect it would have on people's psyches and the Earth's limited population capacity.

Um, wait. I teach 3rd grade, right?

I have a ceiling fan in my dining room, and I hurt myself with it too much. I'll stand next to the table and s-t-r-e-t-c-h my arms up into the air. It feels so good until all of a sudden fan blades are hitting my wrists over and over. Man. You'd think I'd learn...

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh no school today

therefore i will waste my day with sleeping and interneting.

of course, i also realized that i left an important piece of paper at school and can't get my shite together for next week's spelling and vocabulary homework.


(i'm boring)

ugh. It is aggravating, to say the least, to sit here and hit refresh over and over as I wait to find out how this damn election may or may not significantly harm my career as a teacher. Suck! At least as the hours pass, things are looking better, tenths of percentage points at a time.

Update: Every single proposition on the ballot failed. Every one. Which means that basically it was pointless to have a special election anyways! (And my teaching career is safe from being screwed up for a while at least.)

duuuuuuude. Did you know that if you swallow a toothpick it can go through your esophagus, puncture your heart, and KILL YOU?

I got a haircut! It is a bit shorter, and much funkier. I also will probably be doing a little modeling thing for a clothing line sometime in the near future. (My hairdresser is a photographer and took some pictures of me last winter.) I had a ton of fun doing this last time, so I'm looking forward to it.

As far as the job goes, Steve will be working in San Jose, in a position that seems like will have a good amount of job security and opportunities for advancement. We are darn happy. 10 months of looking finally paid off! :oP

steve has a JOB

Tonight I got to be one of those people who calls you in the middle of dinner to talk to you about elections... It was actually pretty simple. I mostly left messages on people's answering machines, told them what the propositions are for, and reminded them to vote NO on 74, 75, and 76.

The propositions will majorly impact me.

74- Increases probationary periods for any new employee of a school district from 2 years to 5 years. Teachers can be fired without a chance to defend themselves at any time in their careers.

75- Limits how nurse, firefighter, and teacher unions can spend money. It means that we won't have as much say politically.

76- Among other things, it lowers state spending $600 per student. ($4 billion total) California is already 44th in per-pupil funding out of 50 states! No wonder our test scores are 46th in the nation....

So go vote.