Sunday, April 29, 2007
A Day at the Beach
Since it was Shane's first weekend off since Christmas we decided to head to the beach with the dogs. He was excited to see Luna swim (it's the most uncoordinated swimming I've ever seen) and we wanted to socialize Stella and possibly get her to swim some.
We went down to Santa Cruz. They have this little beaches where they are entirely enclosed by bluffs so you can let your dogs off leash and they can run. We were going to do it with our dogs but it was a little too much with all the people, dogs and water so we kept them close- maybe next time. When we first got there we took Stella to the water and we were running around in the waves and she was just having a blast- it was hilarious! She even swam a bit.
Luna hates swimming but Shane had to see it so he made her a few times. He even figured out how to set her down between waves and they'd come from behind her and carry her in like she was boogey-boarding. The second time we tried to take Stella out she was really nervous. It might have just been too much b/c she kept just wanting to be by us and not play.
Stella did dig her first hole and it got so large at one point that she could almost be buried in it... instead we buried Luna in it and Luna had no problem with it whatsoever- she didn't even care!
We look forward to taking them there when it's a little bit less crowded so they can run and play and we can get Stella more used to the water.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Happy Hollow
We decided that since it was a nice day to head out to the San Jose Zoo... sort of. It's kind of the cheap version of a zoo. It was complete with squirrels, cochroaches, guinea pigs, and ducks. It did have a jaguar and some other animals but no elephants, giraffes or anything like that. It was a lot of fun and for $5 you can't beat the price.
They had an area where you could feed the animals and it had goats, pot-bellied pigs, a couple cows, and some other animals. We spent quite a bit of time there. My personal favorite exhibit was the one where they had 4 parrots up in the trees and about a dozen guinea pigs running around the bottom. A squirrel had made it up in the tree and was eating right out of the parrots' food, it was pretty funny with the guinea pigs alone but the squirrel made it even funnier! We had fun and we're going to try and go to the "real zoo" in "the city" (Everyone who lives in San Jose calls San Francisco "the city". SJ is a big city for us!) and check it out. It's supposed to be awesome!
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Spense comes for a visit
Spense, my buddy from MCC in Bremerton, came down to hang out with us for a few days. We were planning on taking him on a little hike and just hanging around in SJ but what we ended up doing is playing a lot of Wii and watching movies.
All in all it was a fun visit and though we were disappointed that the hike only lasted a day it was still nice to just hang around and mess with Spense. It was a pretty event-filled weekend- hiking, strolling on the beach, haunted house, playing video games, mini-golfing etc. I'm kinda glad to be back at work and sleeping regular hours!
Shane is going to have his first weekend off in six months (excluding Christmas) because he finishes his weekend classes this weekend. Provided he does fine in his Bio class he'll be starting Palmer in July.
There's only 8 1/2 weeks left of school and my students are getting it- I'm treating them like they are in middle school now. No messy, incomplete or late assignments are accepted, weekly reports are sent home, and instead of a standards-based grading system we are now working cummulatively (how middle school grades). This means everybody's grades are dropping. Statistically students in the district drop a whole grade level (A students become B students, C students become D students etc.) and I'm hoping that by slapping them in the face with the realities of middle school early my kids will do better. We'll see if it works.
Well the plan is we're coming home in June for a week so I hope to see many of you then!!
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Ellen's Visit and other stuff
Ellen came to visit us and her and Jennifer went shopping almost every day. They are on a mission when they shop, like it's an Olympic event. You'd better be in good shape to keep up with them. It was a good visit and since Jennifer was on her spring break she got to just relax with her mom. My spring break is this next week, it stinks we don't have it together but I'll probably get more done around the house.
Some events that have happened as of late is Stella got her first taste of chocolate. She stole a King Size Hershey's bar off of the kitchen table while we were out (I bought it for one of the kids in my class) and she ate the whole thing, wrapper and all. After this she was on such a sugar high that she got into EVERYTHING. Normally she doesn't get into anything but she chewed up pencils, pens, mail, paper, toys, etc. The floor had not a square foot of carpet without some chewed up piece of something. She was okay but she was tearing around the house for a few hours and then she crashed at about 7:30 and slept until the next morning.
We had some bad news recently. We dealt over the phone and fax for most of our leasing stuff for our apartment down here and we had agreed to an 8 month lease. We signed all our paperwork and faxed it in and then when we came down they had us sign it again b/c they would always rather have a "in person" copy than a faxed copy. What we didn't catch on the second round of signing is that a new person was handling our account and they signed us up for a 12 month lease instead of an 8 month. Our faxed copies were discarded (we have copies but there was no dates on them) and we're now stuck here for a few more months. It isn't that big of a deal except that we had found a nice 3 bedroom house to move into and the landlord was awesome and was willing to let me work off some of the rent during the summer months and he essentially was completely remodeling the whole house. We really wanted to move there but I'm trying to remain faithful that God has a plan for us.
Oh, I guess we haven't mentioned this yet. The housing market down here is really getting weird so we decided not to buy. Right now houses are sitting on the market for a really, really long time and so we decided that if we decide to wait this out and see where it goes and then buy a house we'll have about a year left before we move back to Washington so it wouldn't really be worth it. We instead have decided to just rent a nice place close to school with a yard for the puppies and plenty of room for everyone.
Well, that's all I can think of right now. Spense is coming down this week and we're going to go backpacking so that should be fun. We're going to try and teach Stella how to swim... I'll post pics when we get back!
God Bless,
CJ
Ellen's Visit and other stuff