Am I mean?

Fun interaction from class...

The situation: High school freshman Biology class. I have a good rapport with this student and the class as a whole. When the student and their friends first entered the room they were discussing grammatical errors in a note from the student's significant other. During the lesson the following conversation occurred...

student: Where do they come up with these words?
me: It's Latin.
student: Why is it all in Latin?
me: At one time, anyone who was well-educated in Europe or the U.S. learned Latin so that there was a common language for communication.
student: Why don't we learn Latin no more?
me: Apparently we don't even learn English.

Too harsh? :) We all had a good laugh.

Haven't been on here in a while...

Track started a couple weeks ago and we have our first meet on Saturday. It is a relay meet and is intended to be a fun way to start off the season. I'm having trouble deciding who's doing what because of sickness/out of town/soccer games.

Sensei Heeg is recovering from the surgery on his foot, so I'm starting up my lessons with him again on Friday. So far pregnant TKD hasn't been too bad. I tried going to a sparing class during sparing week, which is kind of boring when you can't spar. So now I'm only doing black belt classes during sparing weeks. Tonight, for example we just did boxing drills...only one drill involved kicks and I just went no contact.

We have a new computer. In honour of its arrival, I started to clean and organize the computer room. I got a about half way and now I just have organized piles spread out on the floor. I should probably take care of that this weekend.

Update?

Not an actual full update, just the kind of update where I quickly throw some things up here to acknowledge that I haven't updated for a while. We had a snow day today, with chances of more coming overnight. Woohoo! Rowlf is worn out from his morning of playing in the snow. We had conferences tonight. A conference day is like working two days in one, so getting it off is like getting two days off for the price of one. Good deal.

I have more things to update on, but I'm not going to bother right now. :)

Kitchen

We painted the kitchen this weekend. We tore down the trim (which was just Styrofoam), and haven't gotten new stuff yet, so it still looks a little off. Steve's black belt test is this Saturday, but the weekend after that we'll get the rest of the kitchen finished off...except for the electric work and getting a new microwave to go over the stove.

Steve has to travel this week, so he won't be making it to class, but I think he's ready for the test. His parents are coming down to see it. It will be the first time they've seen him doing tkd, so that should be fun.

Conferences are tomorrow. I have all slots except two filled, so it'll be a long night. Since Steve is out of town, I have to drive home and let the dog out before I go back. Long, long day...

The tournament in Dayton last Saturday went well. It was the best run tkd tournament outside of our school I've ever been to. We were done by 4:30. I won forms after tying for first with My Tien. We had to do our forms again at the same time and I ended up winning. Good that CTC people went 1 and 2. Sparing for most people didn't go that well. I didn't spar, but I was coaching. Most of us that went either didn't have much experience or hadn't been doing any serious sparing training recently. No one got hurt, and no one embarrassed themselves, though. Simply ran into some good competitors who were obviously training and going to lots of tournaments. I think it was kind of hard for a couple of the kids who hadn't been to a tournament before, but it was a good experience for them. All together it was a pretty good day.

Steve had his fast and meditation this week. He started the fast Wed. morning and meditated for two hours this morning. I know he's glad to have that over with. He did a good job (no cheating).

Only a few weeks until his test.

I'm going to a tournament next Saturday in Dayton. Just doing forms...I don't train enough to spar right now. Steve has his second pretest for his black belt test tonight. The focus is on sparing and breaking. I don't know if I'll be judging or not.

Last night I had my first class as the official Wednesday night teacher. I made it relatively hard since people show up to Wed nights to get a good workout. Everyone was sweating, so I guess I accomplished the goal.

Hopefully Max and I will get a chance to run through our two person staff form. We are going to try to get it on video so the next time we forget a piece we have something to look at. At one point this summer we forgot part, and since we've changed it from the original, no one else could help us out so we just had to keep doing it until one of us remembered.

Power outages

Today is my second day off school as a result of the power outages. On Sunday we had a huge wind storm. No rain, just wind...it was weird. Sustained winds of 40mph with gusts up to 76 mph. We were lucky and didn't have any significant damage. Some branches down in the yard, stuff on the deck was blown all over, but everything is back in order now. The power went out sometime on Sunday (I was at my parent's watching football). It came back on about 2:30 yesterday. My parent's power came back on at 4:30 this morning. Apparently 90% of the city lost electricity. Duke energy had sent some crew down to Huston to help out with things there, so they started out a bit shorthanded. They recalled some of those crews and brought in help from South Carolina. Almost all the schools in the area have been closed yesterday and today because they don't have power, or the power outage affected the food supply or the bus fuel.