Back to Normalcy

Brewster Bunch by ~SyntheticPlatypus on deviantART

A wedding picture for my friend at work. Her and her newly blended family! This looks amazing printed and framed and she loved it!

Lots of moving around and drama at work. I'm not going to complain, so all I will say is that I get to continue teaching art to children full time, which is what truly matters. It's still my dream job. I love teaching kids how to draw, it's official.

So with rumblings of the job I've had to start really thinking about how to file things for next year, how I'm going to deal with the influx of projects, making actual units for students and having the folders of the units as portfolios. It's massive amounts of craziness.

I've been nicking away little by little with the comic, once summer hits I'll throw myself into it, especially since I won't have the sub day to work on things during class :D

People should head to down town Chandler soon too. There has been a public art initiative and there are five local artists that have made ceramic tiles and decorated bus benches all over on Arizona Ave. They are really neat and you should check it out!

Tarot

So a few weeks ago I went to a White Elephant party with my Geek Girls. Near the end of the night my friend Shauna got her tarot cards out and was giving little readings. We were to think of a question, shuffle the cards, then cut the cards into three piles, the past, present, and future.

My question was about my job. Major budget cuts to the education system are happening and I don't think I have ever really been so unsure of my employment for the next year.

Ah, the life of an art teacher.

Anyway as I was shuffling a card popped out, as I was about to put it back in Shauna grabbed it and told me, "It wants to be seen."

I continued to shuffle and cut the cards into the piles.

The first card (past) was the Two of Pentacles. The card for change. It makes sense, moving across the country, starting my career, meeting Evan, marriage, a house. My recent past has been all about change.

The second card is my present and it was the Ten of Wands, Oppression. Which with my job, this makes sense. I'm unsure of my employment so I don't want to get too attached, I am subbing a day a week which disrupts my life and teaching, but I do it for the love of the rest of my job. I am tired but I know I need to still work hard.

The third card is my future. While the card did not give me a definitive answer about my employment it did tell me that I would be okay. The card was the Six of Wands. Victory.

The fourth card, the card that popped out when I was shuffling, was the Three of Pentacles, titled "Works." The card featured an artist. :D

So, as long as I work hard and keep doing what I'm doing, I think I am going to be okay.

The Art is Coming.

It is.

I promise it is.

I stretched myself a bit thin for awhile and it left me with no time for personal endeavors such as art. The only thing I could really get in was a bit of reading which I do in bed before I am actually going to bed.

So wth that being said I have my fall break coming up next weekend. Now I have a big giant personal thing to take care of from Thursday evening to Sunday evening, but after that I have an entirely delicious week to do stuff.

So what exactly am I going to do?

Well here is a list of goals art and otherwise:
1. Run every other day and do my EA workouts for the rest.
2. Get FOUR Creative Grab bag projects FINISHED. I have the plans ready for one, so that shouldn't be terrible to do.
3. Finish Miss Kabukikatze's Prize Picture for dA. I started it...I'm not sure if I love it though. I may redraw it and color it differently. But the plan is there.
4. Character designs for a webcomic I am working on with one of my Geek Girl friends. She is going to be on a flight to India for 14 hours and will be e-mailing me massive amounts of stuff.
5. Get at least 4 pages (if she sends me that) drawn and finished for said comic.
6. Work on the Character Portraits for Evan's Game. He's making a video game. We have an idea so I'm gonna help with a portion of that.
7. SLEEP
8. Finish my library books. I'm in the middle of two of them now and am going to spend another day reading a different one.
9. Go to work on one day and get everything prepped for the week we get back. This will probably be done later on in the week.
10. Enjoy my house, husband, and puppy...cause I've been missing out since going back to work.

So ten goals. One Week. Will I do it, ladies and gentlemen? Or will I fail epically. You will find out with me!

Also: Last practice for cheer today...for this season. I'm still on the fence about doing it again but if it's just Mondays and Tuesdays then I probably will. The amount of money for this work is stupid. :D

This is a Test

This is only a test...

I'm alive, I promise. Everything kind of just hit at once and I've been slowly swimming my way back to shore.

Everything is great and awesome though. Some quick highlights.

My job has started back up again. It's going great. The only thing about this is that I'm spending tons of time on new power points and project examples since I'm starting at the beginning with the little ones and have nothing.

I'm also becoming a middle school cheerleading coach. *shrugs* I have no idea, don't ask.

The house is being cleaned out. Like a major overhaul. I feel like I'm drowning in stuff and that Evan and I are falling into that owning a house trap of filling it up. Just in the living room we are down a bookshelf and entry way table. Just started going through clothes last night again. I'm so sick of stuff.

Clothes are easy to go through right now. I'm back on the horse of losing weight. I have 20 more days of my restrictive diet plan and then can slowly add back some normal things. But I'm feeling so healthy and great some things may be having a permanent grave for me. I will also tell you about the horror show that happened to me because of that on another day.

Also had to clean out the fridge because apparently "natural flavors" n thing sis code for milk and soy. Which my husband is allergic to. He kept getting ill and we had to figure it out. I gave half my fridge away. That sucked.

The art portion of my life besides making examples for school has been nill. Monday I have a Geek Girl Goal Setting meeting and it's the perfect time to restart my goal of an artwork a month. The first being a prize for a dear friend who got my 1,000th page view on the deviantart site. Then I'll be back to my creative grab bagging.

Umm Some drama with mine and Evan's wedding rings too. We are both getting new ones, which is depressing but better than having to deal with the drama of them both. He's allergic to his and mine just keeps breaking. The jewelery place is working with us though. Which is nice.

I will be blogging more and more, I promise! It's part of the goals!

The School Updatage

Alright, I am back from my honey moon, have a new layout, and ready to blog!

Today I would like to talk about my job as an elementary art teacher.

I finished all the grading and cleaning out of my classroom with plenty of time to spare. I worked on everything on and off all the last week of school and by Friday (the day after the kid's last day) I was able to come in the morning and completely check out for the school year. I had a meeting at 9 am with my arts boss and the rest of the arts peoples so after I was done at school I hopped off to my meeting.

Not a good meeting.

I'll spare you the details but essentially here is what is happening to me next year, because they screwed up. (I'm being nice when I say it that way, btw.) I will be working four days a week teaching elementary art for 50 minute class periods (oy, kindergarten...I'm still trying to figure that one out) and then on the fifth day I will be subbing.

SUBSTITUTE TEACHING.

I think I'll let everyone draw their own conclusions on how I feel about this, because I do like my job and would like to keep teaching.

I dragged most of my own belongings out of the classroom and brought them home so I could sort and organize throughout the summer. It's a bunch of stuff and I really just threw it in boxes, I need to go through it more. I did try to sort as I packed but by the end I was just throwing things into boxes.

I will say on the bright side I do get to stay at the school I've been at, so yay for that. My principal is still my principal and my good friend Amanda is still there as well. (she teaches choir, goooo arts!)

So the only things left is too sort some stuff, call about adding the hubby to my insurance to see how much that costs (he is currently freelancing, employed freelancing tho...it's not code for unemployed), and then change my name over once I put all the official paperwork in.

So hooray for a new post, yes?

Variety

Well I have several things to blog about so I thought I would just hit them all at once.

Went outside today to the backyard and went to check on my plants. My peppers are doing awesome, I have about 4 growing and on of them turned red! My tomato plant is iffy. Some of its leaves were crisp (I watered it) but there was a good size tomato (still green) growing. We'll see. The lemon tree is good. I believe the little nubbins I am seeing are actually tiny itty bitty lemons. Yay! The kumquat tree is all green with nothing else but it seems okay. The orange tree...WAS doing good. My dearest puppy Gala thought that the lower four branches were apparently a SNACK. Hopefully it will recover.

Speaking of the pup, she has had some MAJOR shedding issues. So the brushing and the washing have not been working. She isn't allowed on the couch anymore it's so bad. So, I've been keeping an eye on Girlpirate's LiveJournal because her kitty has had some bad shedding too. People suggested to her the FURminator and she went and used it and posted pics of the outcome. That was good enough for me. I went out and bought one and gave her a bath and began brushing her. 0_o I had enough extra fur for a whole other Gala. I've been brushing her off and on throughout the evening as well and got another baseball sized tuft off her. This thing is my new best friend.

So, I ended up canceling all of my plans today. I woke up with a massive headache and sneezing fits so I wanted to relax today.

Yeah right.

So Evan said that this would probably be the last halfway decent weekend to do anything in our attic for the insulation. Let me tell you all, we got SCREWED on the inspection of our home. 100% so if any of you are buying a home get a friend who knows what they are doing for another inspection. The guy said we had 8 inches of insulation in our attic and we had about 3 inches in some places and none in others. Oy. So we went to Home Depot and got 20 bags of insulation (recycled! it's actually awesome) and rented the blower machine. Once we figured out how to work the damn thing we went through the bags quite quickly and Evan was up in the attic and put it all over the place. We are going to get about 17 more bags tomorrow morning and finish up before 1:30 to return the machine. We figure we'll do this once a year until we gt the recommended R-60 with all of this we are probably going to be at about R-19. Which is way better than the NOTHING we had.

All this week as preparation for our talent show at school. Last week we had the auditions and then this past Thursday was the dress rehearsal and Friday was the show. We were running around all ragged trying to get everything done last minute (next time, 2 weeks in between tryouts and show!) The show went great. We had one kid choke on his song (but we had sheet music so he had words to look at, at least!) and all the kids showed up. At the end of the show a parent came up to me and said that this was the most talented show she had seen and the most organized. I laughed when she said that and replied "I'm glad it SEEMED organized." Because wowza, we were literally getting stuff ready at the last minute. It went great though and I'm proud of the kids.

Started the picture for my next Creative Grab Bag project, it's almost done with the drawing bit, but then I'm going to ink it. I showed it to Evan and he said I should paint it to color it in. Uuuugh. I hate to admit it, but a water color wash would look fantastic. I'll probably finish all the drawing bits tomorrow. I need to check out to make sure I have water proof pens, I may need to hit the store.

I think this is it for tonight. Just lots of little things today!

I aen't ded

I'm not I swear.

My job has had MASSIVE amounts of drama. I for one do not like the drama and like to keep drama away from my life, so it is upsetting to me that my life at my job has become somewhat drama-filled.

So anyhoo lots of other things have been going on as well. Evan got rid of our beloved fish tank (after several years of fish, he was just sick of taking care of them) We sold half the fish to this one crazy couple and then this sweet guy came and bought our tank and the rest of our fish, including my beloved Krab. This guy was so sweet about everything and he even gave us his number and if we are ever in his neighborhood we can come and see the fishies. So, that is cool.

So after getting rid of the tank we redid the layout of the living room it is sooo much more spacious and relaxing to be in. There is even a spot for Gala's stuff without it seeming crowded. I really like it in here now. Evan and I didn't realize how squished in it was. The only thing we are missing are side tables for the couch and my parents are bringing us two that they refurbished (they painted them red!) which will soo go with the living room. So exciting stuff. Since the living room is so nice and sparse though it has started a getting rd of stuff movement in me. We've been letting stuff pile up for awhile so we took a bunch of stuff to goodwill and I have some things leftover from the Bookman's run that need to go to the library. I also have this giant book shelf thing in the office that has just become a depositary for everything so I am packing some stuff away, binning other things, and pitching the rest. Then off to Craigslist the shelf goes. Parts of the apartment just have gotten too cluttery.

Other news is that we are looking for a house, we actually looked at several in Tempe and they were all holes. Expensive holes. So, we opted to look in Mesa and dear god....I am in love with about a billion of these houses. Evan and I went through the same list on different computers and then we put our lists into a program that sorted everything and we got rid of anything that did not repeat. So I had selected about 50 houses and Evan had selected about 40 and we ended up with 27 houses that we agreed to look at. Some of those will probably be out of the market and we'll be left with even less. It will be interesting.

I am growing up in so many ways and I think I may actually may be getting happy. Once the drama is done and the paperwork is faxed in.

Curriculum Night

I have two curriculum nights this week. One at each of the schools I teach at. So I get to hang out untl about 7 pm both nights at school. Wonderful fun.

I also stupidly scheduled my first observation with Tara for TOMORROW. I kind of know what I am doing but still am unsure. I kind of switched things around...but I think I will still do the notes for optical illusions and try and color theory/ optical illusion mini group quiz. Ill review with them how to do it today after the notes. Then If there is time after that quiz thing, I'll demo how to do the optical illusion project then let them start. I think this will work!

I took another step toward adulthood this past Saturday. Evan and I opened a joint checking account. Now we are in a committed relationship! We had been talking about how to split the bills and groceries and it just hasn't seemed like it had been working well so we came to the conclusion of doing this. We are in this for the long haul and it just seemed like a logical progression anyways. He is switching all of his bank stuff to mine. I am happy about that because if I had to switch it would be a major pain. All he has to do is go tell someone at work. I would have to drive to the district office, wait for the right person to come out and see me, fill out the paperwork, have the paperwork approved, and then I would be okay.

Ya, I don't really think so.

So, Evan and I also made ice cream yesterday..and by ice cream I mean a milkless and soyless cream-like dessert. We bought an Ice cream maker and substituted a lot of ingredients. It made a ton so it will last us awhile. It's not half bad but it is sooo not ice cream.

Well, busy days ahead. I hope this week goes uber fast. I have next Monday off...yay veterans!