Hello from Hawaii!!

Hi all -

We're here safe in Hawaii. I'm emailing from the hotel computer lounge. We made it fine with a few little hitches.

We lost Gene in O'Hare because he went to the bathroom and accidentally left the secure zone. He didn't have his boarding pass so they had to reissue him a new one. No cost - but a highly stressful 30 minutes since no one know where he was. Then on the plane ride from LA to Honolulu we went through some pretty bad turbulence - I felt ill.

Then, when we got to the hotel only half of the rooms had electricity! Gene and my room did, but no one else's room had electricity. That also meant that the elevators didn't work. They finally got power back up and our bags to us around 11 p.m. Hawaii time - which is 3 a.m. our time!

Otherwise everything is going well. We visited the USS Arizona Memorial and the USS Missouri today - very long but fun and fulfilling day.

We then walked down to Waikiki Beach and waded up to our knees in the surf - bought some presents :)

I'll be able to check my email on the ship in a couple of days. We board the ship tomorrow afternoon at 1:00 p.m. Love you all!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!

Love - Wendy and Gene

Okay...hydrotherapy is gooooood

Okay.
I'm better.
Hot shower.
Neck rub.
Lotion rub.
Face mask.
Foot rub.
Icy Hot.

So I don't hate my life as much as I thought :) .

GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!

Holy Christ, get me the Hell out of Northern fucking Iowa. I hate the weather, I hate the mess that is my house, I hate the work I have backed up, I hate my job... I just want out. I don't want to deal with anything for a while. Nothing I do seems to help anyone or anything. I try to please people - they walk away. I try to help - no one listens, no one cares. Work piles up, nothing gets better. I want out. I don't give a damn anymore.

So in a small pow-wow on Friday night, the seniors decided to do a play called The Memory of Water. If you have a really good memory (somewhat of a pun somewhat intended), you'll remember that it is one of the shows I acted in at Drake. I played Vi, spoke in a British accent, and wore a dress that made me look like a green bell pepper. It has four good female roles and two males roles - which works out since we have mainly females and two senior guys.

Since I am locked in the theatrical wasteland that is Northern Iowa, I'll tell all of you my theatrical ideas and insights. So, just nodd your heads and agree with the crazy director-lady.

Set

• Interior bedroom set - needs bed, openable widows, armoir or closet, vanity table & aditional seating
• I want the set to be either shade of blue and white to reflect the "water" of the title or shades of lavender accented with violet to reflect the mother's name - Vi (Violet)
• If we do the blue, I'm thinking of using blue and white toile (the French or faux-French printed fabric with scenes of shepards or courtly lords and ladies), frilly lamps, and heavy white curtains. Like this...
  


• If we do the lavender, I'm not quite sure what we'd do. Any ideas?

Costumes

• I'm going to set it in prsent day - so everyone will just be in normal clothes.
• Vi will be in either a pouffy 60s cocktail dress or one of those 60s cocktail dresses that was short and tight, but then had a big back train - like it couldn't make up its mind as to whether it was a formal gown or a cocktail dress. Like this...
  
• The catch is that all the girls are going to have some form of green on them at all times - it's the unconcious tie to their mother.
• Any ideas for making Catherine outrageous?

What's new in Northern Iowa

Okay getting a little carried away with the blog thing, but oh well. :) So here's an update on what has been happening in the last year or so.

Gene and I are still living in Mason City, Iowa - known only as the birthplace of Meredith Wilson who write the musical The Music Man (which they milk for more than it's worth). I'm teaching HS English and directing the fall and spring plays. Next semester I get three sections 10th grade Language Arts - oh joy. Gene just (okay a month ago) a new job as a CAD drafter for a company that build horse trailers. Its an hour away, but at least it is somewhat in his degree field. We are both looking at jobs in Chicago and Minneapolis because there is simply nothing to keep us here - no decent jobs, no friends, nothing.

Two weeks ago Gene was on his way to work in icy conditions so he was driving my Alero. Remember the Alero? Greg even made a jingle for it. Well, a woman pulled out in front of him illegally causing Gene to swerve to avoid hitting her. He hit a patch of ice and spun out of control and hit a light pole. He was unharmed (Thank God!), the car was not. There was a huge dent in the driver's side door right where the driver's side view mirror used to be and the windshield was cracked. We waited on the insurance - and they finally got back to us - they decided to total the Alero :( It was $200 over the amount they'd pay to fix. So I went to Des Moines last weekend and looked at newish used cars after pricing and doing research on the Internet. We ended up getting a cherry red, 2004 Alero like the one we lost. The new car has 35,000 miles, but it also has new brakes and rides very well. The funniest part was that we got it at the Betts Cadillac dealer! When mom, Bob, and I walked in the first thing a salesman said to us was, "What can I get you to drink? We have 6 kinds of coffee, 2 kinds of hot tea, 2 kinds of Hot Cocoa, and a full line of Coke products." Imagine our surprise - and this was in the used car building - not the main Caddy building. When he brought out the cups he served us in real china - not Styrofoam or Dixie cups. I mean this was cup and saucer, thin rimmed, real china! They must have really needed the business! So we bought a service loaner car - which means only the dealership owned it and loaned it out to customers who had vehicles in for service. It was $10,600 - which is only $2000 more than the pay-off on our old Alero and it's 3 years newer. We get to go pick it up this Saturday morning.

For Christmas my entire family is going to Hawaii for a 7-day cruise! This Christmas Eve is my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary and my mom's 1st wedding anniversary with her new husband Bob. Grandma always wanted to go to Hawaii, but Grandpa was always too cheap to take her. So, we decided to all go and celebrate with them. We fly out next Friday, the 23rd, and stay two nights in Honolulu before boarding the ship. The cruise leaves Christmas Day and comes back January 1st. We visit four of the Hawaiian islands. I'll post pictures to make you all jealous when we get back.

Okay I think that constitutes everything major that has happened recently here in Northern Iowa. Love you all, talk to you later!

Ahh the joy of grading AP vocab tests...or Really funny stuff smart kids say

Okay here's a list of my favorite responses to the last vocabulary quiz my AP students. They were to use the following words correctly in a sentence showing that they knew both the deffinition and correct part of speech. Here we go!

• Furtive
• Compel
• Gallant
• Apathetic
• Platonic
• Verbiage
• Ennui
• Opulent

1. "Planning a career in education or education and theatre, my life will not be one of opulence." *sniff sniff sniff*
2. "The blatant lack of grammatical knowledge in high school seniors compelled the teacher to take action or suffer an compound aneurism."
3. "My excessively long sentences constitue verbiage of the most obvious nature."
4. "Rachel knew that her friendships were due to her opulence, but as long as she had friends - and a bright red BMW - she didn't care."
5. "My wretched mother compelled me to kill my hampster, Ralph."
6. "Oh the word ennui, if I only knew what it meant, it kinda sounds liek annoy - but it's not."
7. "As the Borg's in the movie Star Trek said, 'Opulence is futile,' Just kidding, but the meaning still holds true."
8. "The verbiage the President used in his speech confused me, for I did not know what the words meant. Since I did not know what the words meant, I became very apathetic. Finally, out of complete ennui, I turned off the TV."

Mid-Winter Laziness?

Okay. Here's my first real blog - ever. Monumental moment? I think not. Anyhoo, I'm blogging now to avoid doing actual work. Primarily to avoid grading AP papers. (Okay, yes, that last sentence was technically a sentence fragment and as a HS English teacher I should know better - but...it's a...stylistic thing...yah, that's it...a stylistic thing.) Okay tangent over. So I find no motivation whatsoever for grading old AP papers. I really don't care what most of my HS kids think about Macbeth - because honestly there are probably a half a dozen who will actually write something new and/or interesting. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but history has not been very propitious. *Sigh* However the longer I put it off, the longer it will take.

Why the hell should I have to spend all my evenings grading papers? Do other professionals spend all their evenings doing office work? I think not. How many doctors do you see giving check-ups on the golf course? Lawyers get paid for every hour they work - where's my overtime for all the after and before school meetings? All the weekends spent in grading and checking-up on students? Ha.

Okay this blog turned into a rant fast. Damn...that felt good though :) Ah blog therapy. Okay time to do some actual work. Or...write another blog catching people up on what has been going on in my life. :)