Scarlet Lily and Feather Nester have beat me to it, but just in case, please feel free to check out these "informative" [deliberate quotes there] and funny blogs:
Cake Wrecks
The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks
Cake Wrecks had DH and me laughing so hard we almost cried, and I'm using the latter blog as an example to my students about how not to use quotation marks.
Thanks, ladies!
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The ins and outs of living next to a high school
I know it's closing down on summer because two days ago I heard our awesome marching band (#1 in NYS last year! They even got to play Main Street, USA in Disney World. Pretty cool.) practicing. If you're going to live next to a school, it's good to listen to a quality marching band as opposed to ones that "try really hard".
On the flip side, I just heard a girl screaming at her apparently very recent ex-boyfriend in the parking lot. If you're going to dump someone, maybe don't do it in a place where there's good echo quality. I didn't get a lot aside from repeated "WHY!?!?!? Right before school?!" and a lot of F-bombs from her, and "I don't want to talk to you!" from him. Ah, young love, so complicated. I don't mean to sound callous; I just didn't expect the literal Young and the Restless soundtrack to come floating through my window.
On the flip side, I just heard a girl screaming at her apparently very recent ex-boyfriend in the parking lot. If you're going to dump someone, maybe don't do it in a place where there's good echo quality. I didn't get a lot aside from repeated "WHY!?!?!? Right before school?!" and a lot of F-bombs from her, and "I don't want to talk to you!" from him. Ah, young love, so complicated. I don't mean to sound callous; I just didn't expect the literal Young and the Restless soundtrack to come floating through my window.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Canine Indignities
Well, as I write this, Penny lies curled up as a groggy doggie on the chair behind me, as she just came back from the vet: We took Bob Barker's long-touted advice and spayed our pet. Aside from yucky sutures down south, she has the added humiliation of having to wear one of those cones, or lampshades, as some call them, because she kept trying to pick at them:
Doesn't she look out of it? :-( Her little pupils are all dilated and she can barely stand up, poor sweet girlie, but she should get relatively back to form by tomorrow. At least we got her a new bed: She peed in the old one, unbeknownst to us, and we had to throw it out; no amount of cleaning product could get the eau de chien scent out for love or money. Eurgh. Now we can start her on adult food, too...our little girl's growing up! It happens so quickly....
Doesn't she look out of it? :-( Her little pupils are all dilated and she can barely stand up, poor sweet girlie, but she should get relatively back to form by tomorrow. At least we got her a new bed: She peed in the old one, unbeknownst to us, and we had to throw it out; no amount of cleaning product could get the eau de chien scent out for love or money. Eurgh. Now we can start her on adult food, too...our little girl's growing up! It happens so quickly....
My Take on The Dark Knight
I don't use this blog for movie reviews, but I'll make an exception.
We saw The Dark Knight yesterday. Wow. It rendered me speechless, I have to say. When we came out, we both remained fairly quiet because we both had to process it a bit, which always marks a quality film for me. Without giving anything away, I'll write that Christian Bale did it up right as the Caped Crusader, complete with gravelly voice (I think it's a bit much, but I understand the need for it, I guess) and tortured dual life. I really liked Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes; her feistiness worked a lot better than sanctimonious Katie Holmes' version. Morgan Freeman, well, do I really have to say anything? He's Morgan Freeman.
Aaron Eckhart worked surprisingly well as Harvey Dent, the alternate White Knight of Gotham. Won't say much more than that, but he played his part admirably, as did Michael Caine and Gary Oldman, who I think can do just about any accent or role he chooses and do it well, even his ridiculous Dracula. [Sidebar: F.F. Coppola chose Keanu Reeves for that part solely for box office draw; he didn't seem him as right for the part of Jonathan Harker at all. Neither did anyone who wasn't a teenage girl. But it worked.]
But I have to give the greatest credit to Heath Ledger. His version of the Joker blew me away. It was brilliant: psychotic, diabolical, evil to the core. I don't take anything away from Jack Nicholson's, but Jack's was bright-colors-comic-book, over-the-top in an obvious way. I think what made Ledger's Joker so frightening, at least to me, was that this type of person could almost exist in real life. He played it darker than I'd ever imagined, and it made the entire movie. His family should take pride in the fact that his last role, though not a happy one, was unquestionably triumphant in his portrayal of this demented character.
All in all, good script, solid acting, and a lot of thought about the dual nature we all have, and which side we'll go to in a given situation. Oh, some reviewers complain about the 9/11 vibe in the beginning with mention of terrorism, but I barely noticed it. And there's this whole mob side plot that does fit in, although it's a little garbled. Just focus on the Joker. If you have any interest in the new Batman series (and thank goodness we got away from the stupid Clooney-Schwarzenegger-one-liner version, ECH), you should see it. It's the full 2.5 hours, but you won't care. I say best film of the summer, hands down.
Friday, July 25, 2008
O Canada! (I return!)
Bonjour! Ca va? Je ne parlez pas francais!
Hello! What's up? I don't speak any French! (I don't even know if I spelled any of that right)
Oh, we had such a wonderful time. So relaxing, so fun. I think we're already planning for next year. You'll all be pleased to know that Penny also had a wonderful time--I don't think she's run around so much in her young life. Right now she's sacked out on the bathroom floor, recovering.
We were in Tadoussac, Quebec, about two or three hours northeast of Quebec City. Here's a map. Tadoussac is right after the break in the river that crosses the map, on the right-hand side:
To give you sort of a reference, here's a map of the province of Quebec. If you can see where it says either Chicoutimi or where it points to the St. Lawrence (in blue), that's more or less where Tadoussac is. Thank goodness for audio books: It took us thirteen hours to get there!
T's mom C. and stepdad A. have a house there; A. has been coming to Tadoussac his entire life. It's a community of "Anglophones" and French Canadians, so I could speak to about half the people. Basically, it's a small area with lots of little boutiques, a small grocery store, a few good restaurants and cafes, and lots of places around to hike, kayak, and whale watch. It's a tourist destination for quite a few people, and the Hotel Tadoussac was where they filmed the movie The Hotel New Hampshire, also a wonderful book by my favorite author, John Irving.
Basically we spent our days reading, playing games, eating marvelous meals that C. and A. cooked for us (A. loves to cook and boy, can he), taking little day hikes, swimming every night after dinner in one of several surrounding lakes, going to different beaches, and wandering the area. Just very relaxing and good to spend time with T's family, especially his brother and sister, whom we rarely get to see. I'll put up a few of the better pictures here:
View from the porch
C and me, before going whale watching
C, T, and R (C and R are twins)
Those lumps are actually beluga whales--we saw a pod of five but weren't allowed to get too close
Our first hike--walked the rocks and saw a few Minke whales
Penny got so exhausted after one hike that T had to carry her
View of Tadoussac from one of the many outcroppings; the big red roofed building is the Hotel Tadoussac
I just loved the low-lying clouds. The ferry to get to Tad is in the foreground
There's a ton of sea glass to be found!
Sibling love between C and R
I was messing with the "illustration" setting on the camera
Our little family
Hello! What's up? I don't speak any French! (I don't even know if I spelled any of that right)
Oh, we had such a wonderful time. So relaxing, so fun. I think we're already planning for next year. You'll all be pleased to know that Penny also had a wonderful time--I don't think she's run around so much in her young life. Right now she's sacked out on the bathroom floor, recovering.
We were in Tadoussac, Quebec, about two or three hours northeast of Quebec City. Here's a map. Tadoussac is right after the break in the river that crosses the map, on the right-hand side:
To give you sort of a reference, here's a map of the province of Quebec. If you can see where it says either Chicoutimi or where it points to the St. Lawrence (in blue), that's more or less where Tadoussac is. Thank goodness for audio books: It took us thirteen hours to get there!
T's mom C. and stepdad A. have a house there; A. has been coming to Tadoussac his entire life. It's a community of "Anglophones" and French Canadians, so I could speak to about half the people. Basically, it's a small area with lots of little boutiques, a small grocery store, a few good restaurants and cafes, and lots of places around to hike, kayak, and whale watch. It's a tourist destination for quite a few people, and the Hotel Tadoussac was where they filmed the movie The Hotel New Hampshire, also a wonderful book by my favorite author, John Irving.Basically we spent our days reading, playing games, eating marvelous meals that C. and A. cooked for us (A. loves to cook and boy, can he), taking little day hikes, swimming every night after dinner in one of several surrounding lakes, going to different beaches, and wandering the area. Just very relaxing and good to spend time with T's family, especially his brother and sister, whom we rarely get to see. I'll put up a few of the better pictures here:
View from the porch
C and me, before going whale watching
C, T, and R (C and R are twins)
Those lumps are actually beluga whales--we saw a pod of five but weren't allowed to get too close
Our first hike--walked the rocks and saw a few Minke whales
Penny got so exhausted after one hike that T had to carry her
View of Tadoussac from one of the many outcroppings; the big red roofed building is the Hotel Tadoussac
I just loved the low-lying clouds. The ferry to get to Tad is in the foreground
There's a ton of sea glass to be found!
Sibling love between C and R
I was messing with the "illustration" setting on the camera
Our little familyP.S. I still haven't seen The Black Knight; we're saving it for Sunday. :-)
Thursday, July 17, 2008
More Web 2.0/ Au Revoir for the fair north
So I'm done with the class and I'll try to recap what I've learned and share some helpful sites, some of which you've probably heard of but some you may not have.
Overall, we looked at a lot of sites that have to do with searching and networking, online collaboration, that sort of thing. I honestly will use some of them to enhance my teaching because, as the one article I read put it (and I've thought for a while now), the entire educational system needs a giant overhaul because its methods lag about 20 years behind the rest of the world in terms of getting information to students and processing it. I admit this with a sigh, because I like teaching grammar and vocab in something of a vacuum, and I don't think anything will top reading a chapter of a book (a REAL book, not online and not on a Kindle) and analyzing it in class. However, I think as the educational system continues this lag, students will become more and more disconnected from school because it has so little to do with their lives outside of school.
Think about it: They text, they IM, they spend hours on MySpace, Facebook, and playing RPGs (role-playing games for those who don't know: Going online and playing a game while hundreds of others log in and play the same game at the same time), some of them blog...It's everywhere. Yet we rarely access this way of living in the classroom. It's a sort of changing of the guard. I don't think computers will ever replace talking and writing on real paper, but they do have a place and we as teachers need to respect that when our students go into the working world, it's one dominated by these interactive sorts of sites and ways of communicating, so why not teach using those same methods sometimes?
Now that I've lectured (sorry if I went on; I feel strongly about this), let me cue you in on a few cool sites:
del.icio.us
In case you haven't heard of this, Delicious (or del.icio.us) is an on-line bookmarking site. You know how annoying it is when your bookmarks are all on your work computer and you go home and rats, what was that site? Now you can just save them all on Delicious and access them from anywhere. You can add tags to remind you what they're about (like the ones I use for my posts: "puppy", "work-related", "fun stuff", etc.) and you can share them with others if you want--and you can see others' related to yours. Like if I have a site I like about composting but I want to know more, I can find others' bookmarked sites about it. Cool stuff.
- Backflip.com and furl.net are similar
The Education Podcast Network
This network has all sorts of podcasts that you can learn from on tons of different subjects. I like the idea of podcasts because you only have to listen; you don't have to sit in front of the computer.
www.teachertube.com
Like YouTube but for teachers. Pretty self-explanatory. It's more informational and cuts through the ridiculous videos.
www.zohowriter.com
Very similar to GoogleDocs--It's a free online word processing program that lets you share documents and edit and save and all that without having to save it all to Microsoft Word...or pay for it. They've got spreadsheets and things, too. Nifty. I always worry about someone hacking in, but that's always a concern and a risk, yes?
Grokker
It's a search engine that searches specific sites and then categorizes everything for you into specific headings, kind of like putting it into folders so you don't have to.
Technorati
This one's another search engine but it searches blogs, posts, videos, and the like. It's more opinion than fact, but it has its place.
www.squidoo.com and rollyho.com are others but I didn't like them as much as search engines. I did like that the latter allows you to search under specific categories, like "research" or "news". Check them out as you like.
So that's my technical update for you. This evening around 3am we're beginning our journey to beautiful Tadoussac, Quebec for a week in my teeny car with us and the puppy. Wish us luck, because it's about 12 hours. We're doing it like this so we can avoid major traffic, cross over the border nice and early (no lines), and arrive in daytime so we don't have to find the place in the dark. We have books on CD and tape and a multi-charger unit for the car (three jacks and a USB cord--niiiiice. Got it at Target for ~$25.), a full tank of gas, it will be dark out, but we will not be wearing sunglasses. Hit it. (like the Blues Brothers reference there?)
I will have computer access but may or may not post--I'm on vacation, man. I plan to read, play games, chill with my in-laws (T's brother and sister will be there, and it's his mom/stepdad's place), go whale watching, hike, and have lots of fun. Sounds good to me!
So enjoy your week and don't tell me anything about The Dark Knight because I probably won't see it until my return, at least not in English, and since I don't speak Quebecois, I doubt I'll see it up there. No Batman, Le Chevalier noir pour moi.
Be good, my dears!
Overall, we looked at a lot of sites that have to do with searching and networking, online collaboration, that sort of thing. I honestly will use some of them to enhance my teaching because, as the one article I read put it (and I've thought for a while now), the entire educational system needs a giant overhaul because its methods lag about 20 years behind the rest of the world in terms of getting information to students and processing it. I admit this with a sigh, because I like teaching grammar and vocab in something of a vacuum, and I don't think anything will top reading a chapter of a book (a REAL book, not online and not on a Kindle) and analyzing it in class. However, I think as the educational system continues this lag, students will become more and more disconnected from school because it has so little to do with their lives outside of school.
Think about it: They text, they IM, they spend hours on MySpace, Facebook, and playing RPGs (role-playing games for those who don't know: Going online and playing a game while hundreds of others log in and play the same game at the same time), some of them blog...It's everywhere. Yet we rarely access this way of living in the classroom. It's a sort of changing of the guard. I don't think computers will ever replace talking and writing on real paper, but they do have a place and we as teachers need to respect that when our students go into the working world, it's one dominated by these interactive sorts of sites and ways of communicating, so why not teach using those same methods sometimes?
Now that I've lectured (sorry if I went on; I feel strongly about this), let me cue you in on a few cool sites:
del.icio.us
In case you haven't heard of this, Delicious (or del.icio.us) is an on-line bookmarking site. You know how annoying it is when your bookmarks are all on your work computer and you go home and rats, what was that site? Now you can just save them all on Delicious and access them from anywhere. You can add tags to remind you what they're about (like the ones I use for my posts: "puppy", "work-related", "fun stuff", etc.) and you can share them with others if you want--and you can see others' related to yours. Like if I have a site I like about composting but I want to know more, I can find others' bookmarked sites about it. Cool stuff.
- Backflip.com and furl.net are similar
The Education Podcast Network
This network has all sorts of podcasts that you can learn from on tons of different subjects. I like the idea of podcasts because you only have to listen; you don't have to sit in front of the computer.
www.teachertube.com
Like YouTube but for teachers. Pretty self-explanatory. It's more informational and cuts through the ridiculous videos.
www.zohowriter.com
Very similar to GoogleDocs--It's a free online word processing program that lets you share documents and edit and save and all that without having to save it all to Microsoft Word...or pay for it. They've got spreadsheets and things, too. Nifty. I always worry about someone hacking in, but that's always a concern and a risk, yes?
Grokker
It's a search engine that searches specific sites and then categorizes everything for you into specific headings, kind of like putting it into folders so you don't have to.
Technorati
This one's another search engine but it searches blogs, posts, videos, and the like. It's more opinion than fact, but it has its place.
www.squidoo.com and rollyho.com are others but I didn't like them as much as search engines. I did like that the latter allows you to search under specific categories, like "research" or "news". Check them out as you like.
So that's my technical update for you. This evening around 3am we're beginning our journey to beautiful Tadoussac, Quebec for a week in my teeny car with us and the puppy. Wish us luck, because it's about 12 hours. We're doing it like this so we can avoid major traffic, cross over the border nice and early (no lines), and arrive in daytime so we don't have to find the place in the dark. We have books on CD and tape and a multi-charger unit for the car (three jacks and a USB cord--niiiiice. Got it at Target for ~$25.), a full tank of gas, it will be dark out, but we will not be wearing sunglasses. Hit it. (like the Blues Brothers reference there?)
I will have computer access but may or may not post--I'm on vacation, man. I plan to read, play games, chill with my in-laws (T's brother and sister will be there, and it's his mom/stepdad's place), go whale watching, hike, and have lots of fun. Sounds good to me!
So enjoy your week and don't tell me anything about The Dark Knight because I probably won't see it until my return, at least not in English, and since I don't speak Quebecois, I doubt I'll see it up there. No Batman, Le Chevalier noir pour moi.
Be good, my dears!
Monday, July 14, 2008
More Penny
Well, Scarlet asked for more Penny pictures, and since she just got back from the groomer's, I thought I'd post these since she won't look any better than this for quite a while. You can finally see her eyes--T didn't even realize they were that high up on her face!
Before, when she looked like a little mop ragamuffin:
We really do brush her; you just can't tell.
After--you can see her sweet face!
Although I'm not used to her looking like this yet, I already think she looks more like herself. I can't explain it. Now all we have to do is change the kitchen floor so it matches the gorgeousness of The Pen, as we call her.
Before, when she looked like a little mop ragamuffin:
We really do brush her; you just can't tell.
After--you can see her sweet face!
Although I'm not used to her looking like this yet, I already think she looks more like herself. I can't explain it. Now all we have to do is change the kitchen floor so it matches the gorgeousness of The Pen, as we call her.
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