Opening Day

I pulled out all my red or red and white knitting for today, opening day of baseball season, and finally settled on red and white socks (Regia Nation Color). I've downloaded and printed the schedule, noted the televised games on my calendar, and programmed the AM station into my new car stereo. I'm good to go.




I'm working on a project for an upcoming swap, but I don't know if she reads my blog, so all swap posting will have to wait. Let's just say it's a Hello Kitty swap and I'm super excited.

The service learning project went really well. My cell phone rang off the hook for almost two hours, but pretty much everyone made it downtown just fine. My two sections worked really well together.

The highlights or lowlights, depending on how I look at things--

• I learned that a national park ranger trumps a city cop. I was able to get all my kids in past the barricades and watched an aggressive, wirey cop back down from a pudgy, grey-haired ranger.


• I learned all the names that students have for one another. In spite of a bonding activity on the first day of class designed to make them learn one another's names, they apparently rely on Hoodie Girl (the girl who wears the same red hoodie every day); Juno (the pregnant girl); Cowboy (the guy with the giant confederate belt buckle); Skater Guy (apparently skinny jeans and some kind of special sneaker mark him as such); Purple-Hair Girl and Little Miss Short Shorts (pretty self-explanatory, those two).


• I have students from a lot of different ethnic backgrounds, but I have exactly one black guy in each class. They don't even look alike, although their names sound similar. All morning I kept getting their names mixed up and felt like a complete idiot. Ironically, the students I always have trouble keeping straight are the white boys with their matching haircuts, ball caps, and generic faces.


• I got attacked by a Canada goose, cursed at it like a stevedore, flailed at it with a student's purse I was carrying, successfully fended it off, then turned around to find a clump of tree-planting students staring at me. They swore they were out of earshot.


• I am apparently so desenstized to students that when one popped up out of a wheel barrow, where she'd been hiding underneath of load of sticks, I didn't even react.

Cooking: Barry Goldwater's chili recipe from Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker and Corn Muffins from Tricia Foley's Having Tea. I've been having a terrible time finding a cornbread recipe on which LB and I can agree. People have definite tastes in corn bread, and it's not entirely rational: degrees of sweetness, ratio of corn meal to flour, white or yellow corn meal, shape, texture, etc. This recipe was sweeted with maple syrup (Fair Shares), got a dash of cayenne, and had a 1/4 cup of rolled oats in it for a great chew. LB approved for once.