Swamped

...All I do is work, so you'll have to excuse my lack of correspondence lately.

Things in 6th grade are pretty busy these days - having to lesson plan from scratch EVERY DAY is time-consuming. I devote my entire Sundays to lesson planning (and yard work - there's always that), and there's still not enough done to coast through an entire week of work. I can't wait 'til the routine sets in and I don't have to kill every, last available second working on Ancient History (as awesome as that is).

In other news, Alayna started Preschool at the Peace United Methodist Church. She's going a few days a week, just to get back into a classroom setting after months of pool and sun and Netflix. Here's some pics and videos from the last couple weeks to bring you all up to speed.

Enjoy.

- Brian

Some guy who was having a charity garage sale made Alayna a balloon-version of herself. Creepy. As. Hell.

Sabotage!!

Baby Sister. $5. Crowd Favorite.

F***!! A Gigantic Chimp!!!

Fun with a Sprinkler...

Abby.

DUCKS!!!!!

Bizarro Yoga, Hough-Style

Ready for her first day at school...

Alayna's new preschool classroom at the Peace United Methodist Church...

Sprinkler Time!

Taking an important phone call...

At McDonald's (this room smells like moldy death...)

Post-ER visit. The Cannonball figured it'd be a good idea to take a swan dive into the edge of the bathtub.

Cruisin' Around on the Back Porch

At the Library...

Good times...

Alayna, talking to herself on the way home from school. She's a special child.

Shenanigans

Up the slide...

The Cannonball

Abby's Harmonica

Duplos at Downtown Disney...

Matching Letters

Play-Doh Time on the Back Porch

Pipe Cleaning 101 - four hours of edge-of-your-seat excitement

Adventure time.

Abby starts talking...

The Houghs vs. I-75, Pt. II

Hi gang.


You know, I was going to write an entire entry about our epic return to Florida, down I-75... but I'm feeling really, really lazy today.


Instead, I'll briefly sum up the highlights for you. Let's save some time, folks:


1. We set out from Clare in the morning with way more shit than we had traveled north with.


2. Ohio did not want us to leave, and threw numerous traffic jams to keep us in its crappiness.



3. The Houghs manage to reach a Super 8 Motel in Tennessee in the evening and endure a horrible night with the kids (we failed to pick up milk for Alayna, and therefore had to suffer through a handful of 2 - 4am toddler tantrums...)



4. At a Chic' Fil-A (however the hell you spell that) in northern Georgia, Abby projectile-vomited all over herself, the car seat, several restaurant chairs, the floor and yours truly. On the plus side, the food was pretty good.


5. Finding Nemo was viewed back-to-back a half-dozen times, at the very least.


6. We ran out of stand-up comics to listen to on the way back, and were forced to listen to Dane Cook for a few hours. He's just as terrible as everybody says he is.


7. We arrived back home at 10:30pm. Our house was still standing, nothing was damaged or stolen, and moles had completely turned our front lawn into Verdun.


Anyway, after a night or two of relaxing, we had ourselves a very, very lame New Year's Eve countdown (Kris and I stayed up watching a movie, then switched over to ABC for the Dick Clark Mega-Stroke Rockin' New Year's Eve for the last ten minutes of 2010).

By the way, I don't know who said substituting weird eye make-up and an obnoxious wardrobe for genuine, musical talent was perfectly acceptable, but that Ke$ha chick needs to be pushed out to see and left to die. My God, she's horrendous...


In better news, we managed to obtain a brief - but radical - three-hour engagement with Lt. and Mrs. Foltz recently.

Yes, they're still alive. In Rwanda.

They were in town for the big MSU game (which didn't turn out so hot for them, unfortunately), having taken some time off from their current adventures in Africa. The Houghs don't generally get to associate with fellow Peace Corps Volunteers (traveling with kids = : ( ) so the opportunity to do so is always welcome. This time around, we got to hang out with kids instead of Gulders, so it wasn't quite as cool, but we had a good time nonetheless.

To sum up our visit: they lead waaay more interesting lives than we do.


Speaking of boring lives, I went back to work on Monday. Hooray for me. My students were just as anxious to get back to their studies as you can imagine. If there's anything that kids love more than school, I sure as hell don't know what it is.

Having taken two and a half weeks off from class, they probably weren't in the best of shape to tackle a long-winded PowerPoint lecture on the American Revolutionary War in Mr. Hough's class.

Oh well... at least there wasn't any bloodshed to be had. So we had that going for us.

Huzzah.


Speaking of going back to school, Alayna started at her new school this week, too - Star Child Academy. It's a direct competitor of her old digs, Primrose Schools, but it seems to be more focused on curriculum and education than songs and playtime. This is reflected in Alayna's ability to greet her parents in Hindi (Hindi?!) and Spanish (okay, that's understandable), and the fact that she can identify numbers and letters more readily now. I'm a big fan of that. I also like the fact that they have cameras installed that stream footage of your child's classroom so you can watch what they're up to via cyberspace whenever you want.

If only they had that in my classroom...

So, things are slowly turning back to normal around here. The girls are adjusting to their old schedules, and me and the ol' ball n' chain are readjusting to waking up early and having to wrangle our kids without grandparent assistance.

The weather down here, however, took little time to adjust to. Not a lot of snow to be had around these parts.


Ohio Sucks,

- Brian

One Down, Nine to Go...

holy crap, do i ever hate grad school.

nothing about getting a masters is cool. nothing. that first class i took was absolutely horrible, i learned absolutely nothing that would either benefit me as an educator or my students, and if i have to take nine more classes at this rate - a horrid 72 weeks of excrutiating crappiness - i'm going to stick a gun in my mouth. if i have learned anything from the last eight weeks, friends, it is this:

do not go to grad school.

sorry for the pessimism. though, while i'm on a rant of sorts, if that wasn't enough, the job situation still isn't 100% concrete for next year. yes, that's right - again. no one seems to know what's going on with the school next year, who's staying, who's getting canned - so that added stress hanging in the background isn't helping out much either. i'm close to punching out greeters at target, if that says anything.

but, i suppose there's really nothing much i can do about the crappiness of grad school or the economic clusterf*%# the education system down here has landed itself in - i might as well just clench my teeth, close my eyes, and brace for the worst.

in closing, here's a weird video of our kid bathing with a parrot. enjoy:

- Brian

Grad School = Big Pain in the Ass

i already hate grad school, and i haven't even started classes.

as stated before, i have no head for financial figuring-out, using fax machines, scheduling through various departments, calling different agencies and waiting for 3 to 5 business days for answers to simple questions, etc. etc. - all important aspects of the applying-to-graduate-school process. it should come to no surprise, therefore, that i've been having one hell of a time with the whole ordeal. this is absolute hell, folks. and is turning out to be even more of a pain in the ass than the peace corps application i had to undergo. not very much fun.

as it stands - and again, this is from what kris and i can gather (she's been doing her best to help me out with this, as i'm clinically retarded with this crap) - it looks like all i have to do in order to obtain my professional certification (the five-year renewable teaching certificate that allows me to keep my job) is complete my second year of teaching and take the graduate courses outlined in my masters program. that's it. i was convinced that i'd have to take a crap-load of undergraduate courses, thereby stalling my graduate classes and blowing handfuls of loot just in order to keep my job. that would've sucked big time.

then again, when you owe over $26,000 in student loans, what's another $20,000? i've already come to the realization that these loans are never going away, that i'll have to pass them on through subsequent generations as family heirlooms. i'm sure my great-great-great grandchildren will appreciate this.

...though by that time i'm sure we'll all be ruled by space gorillas and robots, so it won't really matter. (see picture)

fortunately, that's not the case. i get to start right away with the mega-hard classes... which i'm not looking forward to in the slightest. like i said before, folks - i hated college (classes). i'm not good at studying, i'm easily-distracted, i can't stay on top of due dates, and i'm arguably the world's worst procrastinator. so, more or less, i'm screwed with this whole grad school nonsense.

so why am i putting myself through this gauntlet of hell? because the houghs are on a timetable, that's why. when kris and i moved down here to florida in january of '07, we expected to live in florida for four to five years - long enough to obtain teaching jobs, finish grad school, and find work elsewhere. i think i've spelled this out before. ideally, i'd like to find a teaching job in illinois or indiana - somewhere in the midwest, close to michigan (there's practically a zero percent chance i'm going to find any work in michigan any time soon). it'd be nice to be able to make the drive from our place to home in less than 10 - 12 hours. now it takes about 22... and that was driving straight through, without a kid. that drive would be absolutely hell now.

sure, you can fly. but around the holidays, you get screwed with ticket costs and all those crap-fees. $700 - $900 to fly home for christmas for four or five days? not worth it, as far as we're concerned.

and so, with grad school out of the way - hopefully by the fall of 2010 - i'll be in prime positioning to start scouting out job prospects in the great white north.

...at least that's the plan so far.

- brian