Yay!

This might seem like an insignificant milestone, but if you look at the counters at the top of the blog you'll notice that now the "Time Left" counter is now LESS THAN the "Time in Sandbox" counter --- we have passed the halfway marker and I couldn't be happier!

We had a staff/planning day today to get ready for our respective intersession courses and our coming semester. My team-teacher/friend Amy and I are holding "High Tech High Iron Chef" as our intersession course. I went over to her house in Coronado last night and her husband taught us both knife skills...and we made homemade pasta and wonderful salads. I learned to brunoise, chiffanode, julienne, chop, mince and dice and I didn't cut myself once! I must say, learning to cook and cooking excellent, beautiful dishes is fantastic fun. I can't wait until Mike comes home and we can cook together!! This week our students will be making sushi (california rolls and such), risotto and homemade breakfast dishes (pancakes from scratch, etc.). Next week they'll be decorating cakes, working on their own knife skills with salads, making homemade ravioli and sauces and having an Iron Chef competition. The downside to this is that we have 40 kids, all day long, with no breaks and no prep periods...so it's going to be a crazy 8 days!!

Our first project of the coming semester is a HTH CSI project where our students will be acting as crime scene investigators, studying fingerprinting, DNA analysis, blood spatter patterns, paint and fiber analysis and criminal psychology. In my class they'll be studying major court cases in the U.S. and the history of detective fiction. We'll be reading several Poe short stories, some Stevenson, Dickens and some current works of mystery and detective fiction. They'll also be writing their own short stories and submitting them to a few writing magazines/journals. This is only and 8 week project and we'll end before spring break, so that'll make it a bit more manageable than our entire semester-long project from the Fall - ugh! Anyway, I'm sure I'll post more on both these things as they proceed.

I've heard from Mike in emails lately and he is doing just great, but still really looking forward to being home. I don't have a whole lot to share about what he's doing...other than the fact that he's had to give up his truck and is now on-foot for the remainder of his time there. I guess they needed it for training of some sort...or someone else needed it whose truck was used for the training, I'm not sure. Anyway, it's about a 1/2 hour walk to and from work every morning...and about a 15 minute walk to where he eats lunch...so he figures he's got a lot of walking ahead of him! He was talking about wanting to work out more while he was there - I guess he got his wish! :) He certainly doesn't need to lose any weight and he looks great, but I think the "fresh air" might be good...maybe? I am sure he'll be wishing for the truck back soon enough!

Well, I hope this post finds everyone doing well.

I love you Mike!