Timing

There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under heaven.

He has made everything beautiful in its time.

I know that everything God does will endure forever;

nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.


Ecclesiates 3

Merry Christmas!

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.

So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."

Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests."

Luke 2: 1-14

I pray that your Christmas will be filled with peace, love, joy, and hope.

A huge thanks to Rhonda for taking this picture and creating our Christmas card. After Christmas is over, I plan on posting more of the pictures from this photo shoot.

Merry Christmas!

Have I told you lately...

...that I love my job?


Sure, there are frustrations.
There are problem students.
There are discipline issues and kids who won't turn in homework.
There are many wasted minutes trying to get them to shut up.



But, there are also students who listen intently as I lecture, quietly taking pages of notes, because they find the subject interesting.
There are students who steal my coffee cup and encase it in jello, knowing I'll find it hilarious.


There are drama students who gave each other such convincing "black eyes" that we had numerous people fooled.
There are students who make me laugh so hard I end up crying.
There are students who spend all day Saturday working on a paper that's not due until Thursday, because they know they will be having a busy week.
There are students who work hard in everything they do, even if it seems like an inconsequential task.
There are also students who turn in papers, on time, well written, correctly formatted.....


attached to chocolate.

Have I told you lately I love my job?

So how many have you read?

If you have a facebook, you've probably seen this floating around already. Apparently the BBC believes that out of their list of 100 books, most people will only have read 6. I'm proud to say that I've read many more than that, but I still have a long way to go!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen – love it and teach it!
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – read all three
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte – love it, and teach it!
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – love it!
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee – love it, and teach it!
6 The Bible – of course!
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte – started, but never finished
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell – read it in high school
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens – used to teach it, not my favorite

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – not all of them, but quite a few!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – read it
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger – read it in high school
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger – want to read it
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – taught it last year
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams – own it, but never read it
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky – only book I’ve ever hated
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck – should have read it in high school
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol – great story
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy – own it, but never read it
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis – read them as a child, re read some as an adult
34 Emma-Jane Austen – not yet, but I want to!
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen – not yet, but I want to!
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis – great book
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - :)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell – not my favorite
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery – read as a child
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding – graded lots of papers on this, but never read it
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen – started, but not finished
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens – own it, but never read it
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – own it, but never read it

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – taught it a couple years ago
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas – want to read it
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett – one of my favorites when I was little
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante – read parts of it
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens – read it
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White – loved it as a kid
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom – read it
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad – teach it
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas – want to read it
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – teach it
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl – loved it as a kid
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So I've read 26 of them, and I teach/have taught 8 of them. There are a bunch more I'd like to read, but also quite a few I know I will never get around to. Moby Dick? No thank you.War and Peace? I don't think so. I don't blame you if you don't want to repost, but I would love to know what you've read, and what books you love (even if they aren't on the list). I'm always looking for news things to read.

Friends

This summer I got to shoot pictures for two awesome young ladies.

J is a former student of mine, who is just starting her first year of college, and M is a current student of mine in her senior year of high school. These girls have been 'besties' their whole lives, so before J left I was able to get some pictures for the two of them. It was a fun morning, plus, it gave me more experience, so we all win!

While I so often hate the Central Valley, it does have its own, special (hot) beauty, so we capitalized on that while we could. When all fields were green and the hay was golden, we drove through the country looking for places to stop.

A few more of my favorite pictures from the day...

Since we last 'spoke'

I have....

* re-read all of my favorite trashy young adult novels
* gone to San Diego with the Reynolds side of the family
* fully intended to write a post with pictures from the San Diego trip
* gone camping in Laguna Seca with the Reynolds clan
* watched some awesome practice/qualifying races at Laguna Seca
* fully intended to write a post with pictures from the camping trip
* Started school again
* been completely exhausted (it wasn't this tiring last year!)
* felt so old because I am ten years older than my freshmen
* come up with a new budget and a new chore system... much to the chagrin of my husband
* discovered tonsillitis is no fun
* reached the two year anniversary of when we started trying to get pregnant
* counted 22 pregnant friends (that's a lot!)
* including one of my students... who would have been a sophomore :(
* doubted our plan to stop trying
* and been reassured that this really is the best thing for us
* and then I've doubted it again (and the cycle keeps repeating)
* increased my brain capacity by playing sudoku all the time ;)
* decided to not buy anything I can live without during the month of September
* gotten a referral to a dermatologist to see if I can once and for all get rid of my skin problems
* shot some pictures for some awesome girls
* fully intended to write a post with pictures from our shoot
* generally enjoyed life
* and missed you all



Perhaps I'll get another post up soon with some pictures. I really did get some great ones of my adorable, wonderful nieces while in SD and while camping, and I would love to show my little girls off!

First Lines

Most of you know I teach English. I am passionate about literature, but I don't think I've ever shared any of my love for words with you. Reading is one of my favorite things to do, and the first line of a novel is very important to me. So, I wanted to share some of my all-time favorite first lines from books I love.

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, 'and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'" (From Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll)

"It was a bight cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." (From 1984 by George Orwell)

"The thousand injuries of Fortunado I had borne as best I could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge." (From "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe)

"It was a pleasure to burn." (From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury)

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." (From The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis - the whole introductory passage from this book is amazing)

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth." (From The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger)

"It was almost December, and Jonas was beginning to be frightened." (From The Giver by Lois Lowry)

And probably my two favorite ever, from two of my favorite novels ever:

"When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." (From To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." (From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen)

And finally, though it's not a first line, here's one of my favorite passages from the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte:

"No sight so sad as that of a naughty girl," he began, "especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?"
"They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer.
"And what is hell? Can you tell me that?"
"A pit full of fire."
"And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there forever?"
"No, sir."
"What must you do to avoid it?"
I deliberated a moment: my answer when it did come was objectionable. "I must keep in good health, and not die."

And if you haven't read Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, or To Kill a Mockingbird, you really should. They're all incredible.