Wednesday, August 13, 2008

back to school

so yesterday was my last day working at UT. it all went very quickly, but i got a call from a RR principal that was looking for a teacher/coach as he'd had someone back out on him at the last minute. we chatted on the phone for a bit and he invited me in the next day for the interview. i was impressed during the interview and the coaching opportunity had me quite interested. i assured them i had NO experience coaching volleyball as they were looking for someone to coach both volleyball and basketball. they assured me that i would be fine and they would let me know the following week. well, 2hrs later they called to offer me the job and i accepted it the next morning. i then walked in and resigned from my job and gave a 1wk notice.

and so here we are. this is a much bigger school district with lots of resources available and a new principal with a lot of enthusiasm and good ideas. not to mention its less than 15min away from my house. so i'm ready to give this another shot. i'll be coaching volleyball and basketball for 8th graders and then teaching 6th grade math, which is nice because thats what i taught last year. i only have 4 sections of math instead of 6 like last year and my classes will be small (approx 20) because of a strong emphasis being placed this year on improving 6th grade math.

so i have a few days off as i'm waiting to officially be hired with all the paperwork and everything, and i'm studying up on volleyball and jfer is coming to stay with us for a few days as well. so here we go again! here's hoping for one awesome school year. be sure to check out the madteacherdiary blog to keep up on all the school stories.

Saturday, August 09, 2008

a fun weekend and a surprise!

UPDATED! added some pics from the camera to go w/ the cell phone pics.

this has been a crazy month. aside from everything (it feels like) being broken or messed up and needing our money to fix it, ross and i have been busy! i mean, it takes a lot of time to pay your money to a bunch of people. but we have also been finishing up our tennis league that wraps up this week. we've had a good time playing and its motivated us to get out to the courts more.

also, my mom and 3 of my siblings came to visit us last weekend. friday afternoon my mom and the girls went on a mega shopping spree at kohls. jared stayed home and played ps3 and hung out with peyton and.....our new puppy! we adopted brady from our shelter 2 wks ago today...i have not blogged about it because i was wanting to surprise my siblings, and were they surprised! brady totally stole the show (thats his name...i'll give you a minute to pick up on the football reference ). he is currently 9wks old and we are working on housetraining him and in one more week he will be old enough to learn commands/tricks so that will be cool. we have already taught him to sleep in a crate at nite. this only took 3 nites supposing he doesn't have any relapses. peyton is behaving wonderfully in attempts to either show off or garner more affection, i can't tell. but just in the past 2 days i have caught the dogs starting to play with each other (though its a little hard right now b/c peyton is 10x as big as brady...literally!) which is the motivation behind getting another dog. they follow us around everywhere and i refer to them affectionately as my posse.

ok. so back to jared. he played with the dogs while we shopped. then ross came home from work and grilled salmon on the grill and we also had chicken and some other goodies. then we played rockband into the wee hours of the morning.

saturday my mom left to c.s. to help my dad with jennifer's house, so ross and i endeavored to entertain these three teenagers (almost). ross and jared drove out to check on the boat repairs while rachel and i played tennis and bekah cuddled with brady. then we played more rockband (how could you go wrong with that?) before taking naps and then swimming at the marina. this is slightly more fun when the boat is there to chill on, but we still had an amazingly fun time. we rushed home and got ready for church, dinner at huts with B&BH, then we planned to see the bats fly out from congress bridge, but as we drove up everyone was leaving....missed it by that much! so we walked around whole foods for a bit then headed home.

sunday morning we dragged everyone out of bed to go kayaking on town lake. i had taken jared & rachel to do this last summer and it was a hit. its so much fun to see all the turtles and ducks and we even saw a snake...eww! we made it all the way down to red bud island (the dogpark we take peyton to sometimes) before it was time to head home and then head over to college station to meet up with my parents.