My good deed for the week.

After work, with kids in tow, I headed over to our church for the Red Cross Blood Mobile to donate blood. I'd been wanting to donate blood for a while, but the last time I did was oh, about 19 years ago (actually it was when I turned 20 - on my birthday!). Last year or so, a friend had told me that he had donated blood and it made me think that it really is an easy thing to do and yet, oh, so important.

We got there around 4:30 and I started with the waiting in line – first reading the information, then waiting to tell someone that I was healthy, then waiting for a bed, then waiting to get stuck, then waiting for the blood to drain. I was finally finished at 6:00 – whew! Carl, one of the men I know from church, said to me that my kids were the best behaved kids he had ever seen. He was really sweet. The kids were really patient. But looking at Sean, I could see that he was really exhausted and by the time we got to the hallway, he brokedown in tears and cried the whole way home. Poor little guy. He did recover, but is still exhausted.

Suna asked how the church meeting went. All was remarkably easy. Our former church's annual meetings would go on and on and on, all about tedious mistakes and typos. Our budgets got passed and the new slate of officers went through. Many people thanked me for taking on the role of VP. I also will be taking over as the 'point-person' for the accessibility stuff. Long time friends will recall that I was very involved in that project for a while - mainly getting a lift/elevator installed in the church. But with 2 (sometimes 3) meetings at the church a week, I was burning out (I was responsible for 3 sub committees along with the over sight committee). Now the current point-person is burned out and needs a break. Honestly, I think this job will take more of my time than the VP thing. I did step down from the other 2 committees that I was on (Communications and Open & Affirming/Reconciling). I will really miss the O&A/R work, but I know I can always show up at their meetings. :)

Another Year Older

Friday was my birthday. I've really never been a big birthday person. Kinda goes along with not being a big gift person, I suppose. It was a fairly relaxed day, which is what I needed after this week. In addition to the regular schedule of teaching 9 classes this week, I also had 10 parent/teacher conferences (each about a half-hour plus prep time). So on Thursday evening Pete asked if I wanted to go out to dinner or a movie or something. I told him the only thing I wanted to do when I get home from work on Friday is to cuddle up on the couch and not move! And that is just what I did! It was nice. Pete even dropped off and picked up Ahren from theater (which I usually do).

Today Ahren and Pete were volunteering at the Soup Kitchen in the afternoon and Sean got invited to the Children's Museum with a friend, so for most of the afternoon I've had the house to myself. I caught up on some knitting (now I'm almost finished with the shrug I've been working on) and watched a little tv. If I had known that Sean was going to be out, I would have gone to the Soup Kitchen too. Years ago, I volunteered at our former church's community dinners (like a soup kitchen) and did that for several years, but I had to stop when I had Ahren and it was difficult leaving her to go there. But now, Ahren and Pete have been going about once a month to help out, which is really nice. Once Sean is a little older we will encourage him to go along, too.

Pete was talking about going out to dinner tonight at the casino, but I'd really rather not, just a nice, easy evening at home sounds best to me. What a home-body I've turned into. Now if he'd suggested I take a trip to the yarn store, I'd be all over it. :)

Tomorrow is our big annual meeting at church, which will be the day that I get 'officially' voted (along with all the other officers) to be the Vice President of the church. It's not that big of a deal, Sean is excited because they will showing Madagascar for the kids to watch during the meeting.

MLK Day

Well, today is a day off for everyone in our house. We are planning to go out to lunch (we rarely eat out as a family) and then hit the Mystic Aquarium (which may be mobbed because of MLK day).

Yesterday, I spent the entire day (at least 5 hours of it) at Artrageous! a fund raiser for the Children's Museum of SE Connecticut. It was held at Sonalysist Studios (which is a movie studio) and Ahren was performing some of the scenes that she did in the play Once on this Island, Jr. last summer. Many of the cast all came to perform the opening and closing scenes (which were dancing and singing numbers). Because Ahren was one of the Storytellers (2 of the 4 were able to attend yesterday), she actually had a lot of lines and spoken parts. They really did a good job and the theater group, The Secryt got some good publicity. The coolest thing of the whole day was seeing these incredible table scapes that were all designed around different children's books - it was amazing! On Saturday they had a fairy tale ball that was a very formal event and very extravagant ($150/plate). The event that we attended was the day after the ball but they kept all the table set up and then added 'booths' around the perimeter, with all sorts of activities for kids - cookie decorating, face painting, painting glass stones, planting marigold seeds, storytelling, etc. Ahren's group did 3 performances throughout the afternoon to entertain the crowds. Considering they hadn't done any of the show since July, it was pretty good.

In other news, I've decided to keep track of the movies that I watch and books that I read for 2007, I'm going to keep the running list on my backup blog, and you can see it here. On WordPress I can make 'pages' not just 'posts', which keeps the content more static, so I'm going to try using that for these tracking sort of pages.

Sam asked if I'm planning to do the worm thing again and I think I will, but I think I will have to wait until the spring because most places won't ship worms during the winter due to the chance of them freezing. (We are still waiting for Sean's ants to be delivered and they were ordered in November!) I'm a little nervous because I don't know why they all died and if was something that I did, but they were thriving for a good long time, so I don't think it was anything that I did.

Freaky update....

I just checked my mail and saw that Pete rented a movie from Redbox a few minutes ago -- he rented "How to Eat Fried Worms" --- he doesn't even know about my worms. That is just too freaky!

Heartbroken :(

Today I made the sad, sad discovery that my red wiggler worms have all died. Rather I think that they may have been murdered. :( First a little history...

I got these worms while attending the La Leche League International Conference in DC (yeah, I know what do worms have to do with breastfeeding??) One of the sessions I went to was for vermicomposting (using worms inside your house to compost) and the woman who did the session said that if anyone wanted to take worms home, they could take some of hers. So me and another guy split the worms (here we were in his hotel room, with a pile of worms separating the dirt from the worms and then dividing them into two piles, while his little 2 year old helped us). So I bring home a baggie of worms and set up my worm bin.

Last year I decided to bring them into my classroom to use with the students talking about the ecology and recycling and life cycles and such. The kids loved them (okay, not all the kids loved them), they would ask, "can we see the worms??" and I would open the bin and they would hold the worms and watch all wiggle around. It was really fun. Towards the end of the year, I had a day when we separated the finished compost from the worms and we were amazed at how many worms we had - it was incredible. It was a great day, for many reasons. :) I offered some worms to any family that wanted to take some home, but only one family decided to try it. Over the summer the worms did really well, considering they were largely neglected although I was still able to toss some scraps into the bin every few weeks.

Fast forward to now: Last week or so, I noticed that there was a lot of liquid in the bottom of the bin (I had two bins nested inside each other with small drain holes in the bottom of the top one), which was odd, but I figured I would dump the excess when I checked on the worms in a day or so. So today, I took the bin outside to air it out (it does get a lot of fruit flies inside the bin) and noticed that there didn't seem to be any worms around the top and there was an apple that was rotting without a worm in site. Huh?? Usually, if there was banana skin or a big chunk of apple, the outside skin would remain for a while and the worms would be swarming inside the fruit (actually it was pretty cool, when you would peel back a banana skin and it was totally packed with worms - like something out of a horror movie - in a good way). Then I dug around in the compost and couldn't find ANY worms - where the hell did they all go??? So I picked up the top bin and checked the liquid in the bottom bin and noticed that there were tons of worms slooshing around in the liquid and they didn't look good. Well, maybe if they got out of the water, they would be okay??? So I dumped them back into the bin, but they were all dead. We are talking hundreds -thousands of worms all dead.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what could have happened to the worms. It seems like it must have been recently because they weren't completely decomposed. These are some possibilities:

• I put something in that had too much pesticide on it? No, because they survived this long and I didn't put anything unusual in it, besides if it were that I think that they would have just died in the main bin and not gone down through the drain holes. (In the past I've found maybe 1-2 worms EVER in the drain bin).
  
• It was too cold in the room over the break? No, because they survived last year when our classroom temp was regularly 55 degrees - this room is warmer than that and we haven't had a terribly cold spell AT ALL anyway.
  
• They didn't have enough food? No, because there was food in there that was decomposing.
  
• One of the kids poured something in the top vent into the bin? No, because I would have noticed it and also the only thing they could have poured would have been juice or water, which wouldn't have really hurt the worms.
  
• Someone added some liquid that was not friendly - cleaner? windex? something toxic to worms.? This is the most possible solution because there was something that made the worms try to get away from their compost-home by going into the drainage bin and there was a lot of extra liquid in the bottom bin. But this also just doesn't make sense because I can't imagine who would have done it? Someone who didn't like worms? Someone who just didn't like me? Of course, that's possible, but a lot of people didn't even really know about the worms.
  

I'm just so baffled and sad. I'll now need to decide if I should try and get some more worms and start over. It won't be the same, these were special worms, I had a special attachment to (I know I sound like a freak - there must be something wrong with me to be this upset over worms).

Today technology is great!

catch me on another day, and I might not thinks so, but after about 45 minutes of tweaking I finally got video up on the class blog. I wanted to run a test video, before I did anything with anyone else, so I put up a little clip of me doing one of the song/poems that we do each day before snack. I completely DREAD being in front of the camera and it will likely be the only time you will see me in a video (I much prefer the behind-the-scenes stuff), so enjoy it while it's there. You can check it out here.

These days I've been starting to think about all the useful things that I can do with the video capabilities in the classroom. I could put together a clip on our coming to school routines (hanging up jacket, signing in with clothespin, washing hands and starting the journaling), so that when we have new students they could watch the videos with their parents to know what to expect.

Speaking of new students, my 3AM class got a new student (first new one all year in that class) and in the interesting thing is that he is from England - that means that in my 3AM class I now have *3* students from England and in my 3PM class I have *3* students who are from India. Weird, huh?

Ah, technology!

So while I was fiddling around with my new camera (which I love!) I found that I can also use it to take video clips. The 1 Gig memory stick can allow upto one hour, but I can't imagine that I would it for anything more than a few minutes at a time. So what to do with digital video capabilities in a preschool classroom??? Well, videoing a few songs sung by the kids would be fun, right? But I figure that before I talk to the parents about this, I'd better see if I can get the technology worked out first. So did a little 10 second test video, rigged it to the computer at school at uploaded it to youtube. It seemed to work, but then when I went back to check it, the school's server blocked me out of the youtube site. ARGH! So I did check it when I got home and it seemed to work well, and the resolution was actually better than I expected. BUT now the challenge will be to figure out how to get the videos uploaded easily. The computer at school is blocking me, and my home computer doesn't have enough upstream capacity to handle uploading files like that. My initial thought is that I might be able to use GoogleVideo as the video server, linked to the class blog. I know that I can use Google search engine, so maybe GoogleVideo would be accessible at school. I will have to check it out tomorrow.

In other news, I wish that it were colder today because we would have had a nice amount of snow, except for the fact that it's tooo damn warm! Instead we just had yucky rain - how boring. Will we get any snow this year, lordie, I hope so!

Okay, so a little the (not so) cold, now a little about the hot: Don't say I didn't warn you, this is one hot video -- the Wicked Game by Chris Isaak. I found it linked from a 43T friends page and my monitor nearly caught on fire.

Oh yeah, and since it seemed that folks liked that picture of me, I thought I would update my profile picture with it. Thanks, Sam and anon ;) ~me

Interesting Sunday

Okay, so now looking back on the past two months (blog-wise, at least), I feel like I'm more interesting when I blog more (November = daily blogging; December = occasional blogging). Now, I realize that really, I'm not any different of a person in either month, but having taken the opportunity and time to write something - anything, seems to give a setting or backdrop for my mind. I'm probably not making much sense but the ending thought is that I'm going to try and blog more regularly. We'll see how it goes. :)

One interesting thing happened today - I had lunch with Barbara, the interim pastor at our church along with Ned, who is the current VP of the church and soon-to-be President of the Prudential Board at church. We discussed the idea of me taking on the VP position at church. This would be essentially a two year commitment (one year as VP and one as P). I've decided that since the timing works out well for me (having just retired from my API position and my LLL administrative role), I'm going to do it.

All of that has made me think about how much I really like my church and why. I think that really the crux of it comes down to the fact that it is a such a warm and welcoming congregation. People need not be perfect to be welcome there. I find that reassuring, especially in taking on a such a highly-visible position, *I* don't have to be perfect. (Some readers here know that I am far, far, far from perfect, despite my goodie-two-shoes impressions.) Many churches only want people who are *good* and don't make mistakes. I like that my church allows for people to be human -- no, not only allows, but accepts that people are human and will make mistakes. There is no need to go confessing to anyone about one's shortcomings - they are just between you and the Powers That Be (whoever that is for you) and that's ok.

Now to try and remove a nasty splinter that Sean has - hopefully a warm soak will make it easier to remove and he won't be screaming bloody murder for the rest of the night.

Wow - it's me!

Okay, so there is rarely a picture of me on any of my cameras, but today, when I mentioned that I had a new camera, the working mom said, 'oh, well, let me take your picture' and then snapped a pic of me and one of my assistants. So here is me and Carolyn - it reality, Carolyn is probably a good 9 inches taller than me - so it's funny to see us looking like the same height.