CJ and Jenn in Jose Olé

If you love sushi and are big eaters like me and Shane then you understand the frustration of having to pay a ton of money for good sushi but then you get really frustrated because you're not even close to full. $10.00 for a roll? You've gotta be kidding!

We did some research on a website that I've begun to use down here to help pick a restaurant to go to or something to do, yelp.com. I was looking for a sushi place and found The Sushi Factory. It had good ratings but I was nervous because it advertised "All You Can Eat Sushi". If you've ever been to a buffet that served sushi you know it sucked and your stomach still turns just thinking about it. Well we decided to try it out. It was awesome! It costs $26 a person (kinda pricey but if you eat three rolls you're more than good and it comes with miso soup and a gross salad!) Well the first time we went we ate over 120 pieces of sushi between four of us. It was me, Shane, Jennifer and Shane's Jennifer ("J-Ra" for Jennifer Ramierez or "No name" as I've begun to call her because she has no middle name... it's a long story) so you know Shane and I ate probably 50 pieces each. To boot, the sushi was awesome! They had baked sushi and really spicy tuna rolls. We've been there three times since we found it out and last Tuesday we went with our San Jose friends; Rula, Kalid and his girlfriend Karen.

I guess we should introduce you all to our San Jose friend, Rula. I met her when I was in a training the first week I started working in the SJUSD. It was a training for the ELA curriculum they use. It was fun but wierd because I didn't know anyone. Rula was at my 5th grade table. She teaches in Campbell (a nice area to teach... very wealthy compared to my downtown school). It's her first year teaching and she is my age so we started talking and she was trying to direct me to a "teacher store" and finally discovered that I was new here. She didn't even know me and she invited me to a music and art event that a friend of hers was putting on at the San Jose Art Museum. It was fun and ever since then she's been showing us around SJ and we've become quite good friends. Every Sunday she comes over for "family dinner" at our place and Jennifer gets all fancy with her cooking.

A little about Rula- she is Lebanese but wa born here. Her parents are from Lebanon and her mom still has a very heavy accent. The first time we met her parents they became our SJ mom and dad. Her dad is a top car salesman down here and is really a nice guy. Since they are Arab it has really taught us a lot being their friends. Her dad's name is Muhammad but being a car salesman he goes by "Andy" to keep from running into prejudices. It's pretty interesting. Kalid is Rula's brother and he is a manager of car salesmen. He's still ever the salesman, when we were out for sushi he was "selling" his girlfriend into eating 3 more pieces of sushi, it was hilarious! He's a really fun guy to be around- really loud and obnoxious. Rula has a sister who lives in the Lake Stevens area of Washington so hopefuly we'll bring her up with us at some point.

Rula is seriously the nicest person I've ever met. I would NEVER do all the things she did for us when she found out we were new here and knew no one, but then again I'm a bit of a jerk!

Our school has the week off but I spent 4 days working in my classroom. At the beginning of the year I had 3 days to get stuff prepped for the school year. My routines I planned to do had to change because instead of the 24 students I had on my roster I ended up with 31. I've felt that all year I was just "getting by" because I wasn't as organized as I wanted to be.

Last week I had the opportunity to go and check out other teacher's classrooms and I saw some really great ideas. Being in P.I. (Program Improvement) we have all this "extra" stuff we have to have. They have this check lists (three I think) that have over 200 things they should see when they come through your classroom. There are simple things that almost every classroom has like a posted schedule to standards posted for the students to see in every subject area (I personally hate this one because it makes the students learn just to pass the tests. My hi-cap kids often just check the standards off and say, "I get all of this so I can slack the rest of the year" and it is a real pain to try and get them to push themselves. My below-grade-level students, 17-23 students, aren't encouraged by seeing all these standards up all over the place. Many of them just shrug their shoulders and give up!) .

I brought the dogs with me and Stella took a nap and Luna chased my tennis balls all over the room. After I finished I took them over to the play field and let them run around. It's all fenced in and they had a blast. I let Stella off her lead b/c she's so good at staying close. Luna on the other hand was chasing birds (and their shadows on the ground) all over the place and would just ignore me. I feel bad giving Stella all this freedom and Luna none but Luna is a turd when it comes to coming to us. Stella can't really be trusted in the house all by herself and Luna can so I guess it all evens out. Stella is cutting her "big girl" teeth which will be a nice change from the sharp little puppy teeth. Looking back at her schedule we think she might have been even younger than we thought when we first got her. Using her guesstimated age she'd be almost 7 months old and I think that is a little late for her to be losing her milk teeth. I know Luna lost hers earlier.

Well I'm off to clean the house and do the dishes. Since Shane started working at Vitamin Shop and Jennifer is in the middle of "test season" I'm having to hold down the fort quite a bit. I'm learning how to cook, which I guess is good! Maybe I'll become a Stay-at-home-dad!

Well the other day we went to the store and left the girls on the deck. They normally hang out there and their food bag has always been out there so we thought it would be no big deal to leave them for an hour or so. Stella ripped a head-sized hole in the side of the bag and ate a ton of food. We weighed her and it came to almost 4 lbs of food. To give you an idea of what this is like it would be like a 200 lb. man eating almost 27 lbs. of food. The dog looked like she swallowed a soccer ball.

When I got home I took her for a few walks trying to get her to... well... poop some of it out. The first time- no dice. The second time we ran around the park a few times and she ended up puking and pooping a bunch. I thought we were mostly in the clear then. I was wrong. All night, every 45-60 minutes she had to go outside. The next day was much of the same. She is finally back to her normal size (this happened on Saturday) and appears to be fine.

At least we have one good dog... I've also included a picture of the girls laying out in the sun prior to the buffet Saturday night.

My excuse for not posting anything in a while is that our camera was broke so we couldn't get any new pictures up. We bought a new camera this week so now I can start posting again! Let's do a quick recap of all we're doing down here:

Home-

We just got word that the initial lender we were going with isn't going to work for us so we're in process of interviewing two other ones. We've got a place in mind but we aren't sure we'll get it. We are confident that God has a house for us. We've kind of decided that if we don't find anything we like by summer we'll just find a house to rent (about the same as what we're paying now) with some yard the girls can run around in.

CJ's School

It's going well. Almost my entire class is one or two questions from passing on the practice tests we take for the CST. I'm focusing on test-taking strategies and trying to get them pumped up for passing. I've had two kids bring knives to school- one got expelled, one is just in pre-expulsion. They didn't have any intent of hurting anyone but they still brought a weapon to school so...

Jenn's School

She's doing well and is already at the half-way point for her second quarter and has begun the crazy testing phase that each quarter seems to have where mid-terms lead right into finals. She'll be working late each night studying so she may not be calling too much!

Luna and Stella

Stella is 30 lbs. now (3x the weight she was when we were home for Christmas) and she's still a clumsy puppy. Luna still beats up on her everyday to let her know who's boss. She's a really fun dog but Luna will always be number one! We're looking forward to taking them on their first backpacking trip in the next few weeks.

Wii

Shane talked us into buying a Nintendo Wii. We split the cost and a friend of Shane's Jennifer got us a deal or we couldn't have afforded it. It's a lot of fun. I'll post some pictures later.

Email, call, write.. we miss our family and friends in WA!