Phew!

I have survived the first 2 weeks of school. This has brought such a huge change to my daily (used to be "lack of") schedule. Up & out of the house by 7:30 a.m., I teach 6 classes and have one planning period. 4th hour seems to be a good hour for planning, as it gives me a break right in the middle. I am teaching 4 different classes, all of them fairly small, fortunately, but it's been a long time since I had most of this stuff. I need to get a bit further ahead of the kids than I am right now. I feel like we've gotten bogged down a bit by a lack of basic concepts in some of the classes. I don't want to move ahead if they don't get it, but we're still in chapter one in all four classes. I try to get a little more planning done before I leave school (except that's hard to do when you're falling asleep!), then bring 3 of the 4 textbooks home (I have 2 copies of the 4th, so I can leave one at home and one at school). Go through the mail, spend some time on the computer, bare minimum housework, cook dinner, more lesson planning. Oh, and I'm taking an online course for my alternative certification. Not enough hours in the day.

I did finish the Inside Out socks, and have picked up another pair that I started last year, frogged & restarted on a different size needle. They are the Conwy socks from Knitting on the Road: Sock Patterns for the Traveling Knitter, in Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, in the Jeans color, which is what she used in the book. I think I can snitch a little time out of my day to do 8-10 rounds on a sock, don't you?

I had a really nice surprise about a week ago. A yarn order I'd just about given up on ever seeing finally arrived. All the way from Germany, in a shoebox, in just under 8 weeks:
There's no indication as to why it took so long, but I think the seller was as relieved as I was when it finally arrived. The darker blue at the bottom is already starting to become a sock. Somebody thought it looked like a good place to take a nap.

Note the stack of textbooks in the background. Those are the 3 I bring home every day.

Oh, and my son is currently sporting stitches & pins in his right hand. It was about 5 days from when he broke it (lost his balance & fell) to when we saw the doctor, another 8 days before he saw the orthopedic doctor (on the 2nd day of school), and surgery was scheduled the next day. He's already missed 3 days of school; next appointment is Thursday this week. Nearest doctor is a 50 mile round trip; the surgery was further away -- just over 200 miles round trip. My husband has been good to take him to all these appointments, so I wouldn't need to get a substitute on my 2nd (or 3rd, or 8th, or 12th) day of school.

Who are you?

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Honourable Lady Julie the Sanguine of Divine Intervention Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

I dunno -- it seems to fit. Well, kids, I'm about to be a teacher. We had new teacher orientation on Friday, and today & tomorrow are "Professional Development Days" for teachers & staff. The kids will come to school on Wednesday. People keep asking me if I'm ready. Do I look ready? Oh, I mean "Don't I look ready?" Whatever. Wednesday is a half day. Oh, and I'm a sophomore class sponsor. One of four, actually, but 2 are gym teachers/coaches, and claim they will not be available most of the time, and the other is a special ed teacher whom I haven't met. Good times. There's a sophomore class meeting on Wednesday morning. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do. I could ask my son, the sophomore. Or his sister, who, as I recall, was quite frustrated with her class sponsors as a sophomore. She's now a sophomore/junior in college.

In case anyone was concerned, I did get an A in Geometry. And I did do a little yarn shopping as a reward. We went to St. Louis for the Stitch N Pitch game last Monday (Cards won!), and I managed to talk my husband into a yarn store stop on Tuesday before we headed home. At Knitorious, I got 2 hanks of Twilight (blue) Alpaca with a Twist Fino, and some plum-colored Trekking XXL, which will make a pair of socks to match an outfit my mother wears quite a bit. I was looking for a shawl pattern I'd seen in an ad in the recent issue of Vogue Knitting. It's the Flight of the Honeybees shawl by Alpaca with a Twist. I had to email the store the next day and have them put aside a 3rd hank for me. They've also ordered the pattern -- I guess it's so new that they didn't have it.

In other knitting, I have finished a pair of Big Black Socks for SocksForSoldiers, and I've also finished the 1st of the Inside Out socks in STR Monsoon (sock club kit from February). It feels like time to work on finishing things and get down to having just one or two projects going at a time, instead of too many to count.

In the photo above, it's right side out (as knitted), and below it's, well, inside out. I love the stripes (no pooling!).

Done, done, done!

All done with my Geometry course! The final exam has been completed and posted. I'm so relieved, I considered a little yarn-shopping reward. Then I realized we usually reward academic performance, not just survival. I have an A in the course so far, but that's without 2 of the 4 tests graded, the big software project, the paper we wrote over a month ago, and a dozen or so homework assignments. Wonder when the course grades are supposed to be posted.

I have enrolled in a Fall semester course -- one of those I need for Alternative Certification. It's called Teaching Reading in Secondary School. I will be teaching math, but it looks like everyone has to take this.

I went by the school to pick up the teacher's editions of the textbooks I'll be using -- 4 big heavy books. And yes, I will be teaching Geometry, but I expect there's a world of difference between high school geometry and the brain wrenching course I just finished. I just don't remember yelling at my geometry homework in high school (of course, that was in 9th grade, which was ... um, 30 years ago, and memories can fade).

So, my poor little Inside Out sock got frogged back to before the heel. I originally took out 8 rows, then decided to err on the side of caution and reknitted 3 rows before re-doing the heel and the 25 rows of the leg I'd already done. It's better, maybe still a little loose, but that gives it a little room in case it shrinks in the wash, right?

The new clue is out for MS3. If I'd had time to work on it this past week, I would have stopped at row 286 instead of doing 287, inserting a lifeline, and completing the clue, which ends at row 335. But I'm still on row 230. The 5th clue takes us off in a bit of a new direction, which has nonplussed and disconcerted a number of people. I think some people expressed disappointment with the "wing" before they had any idea what it was going to look like. It's not really anything weird, just a diagonally knitted triangle attached to the end with short rows. The stole will not be symmetrical, but it won't look kooky either.

We have acquired a Wii -- our college daughter bought it today, her last day of work. She's headed back to school next Friday & wanted something to play with, I guess. I think she's justifying it as a birthday present for her dad (whose b'day is over 2 weeks away), but they've got it set up and they're playing with it now.

Looking forward to a relaxing, no geometry weekend!