Ants in My Pants

I have returned, fresh-faced, from "vacation" to Phoenix.

First of all, how sad that my big traveling of the summer was to Phoenix.  Yuck, what a heinous city.  The drivers are mean and inconsiderate (but at least they know how to go over 25 mph).  The weather was insufferable -- either scaldingly hot and dry or five degrees cooler and disgustingly humid.  And everything is so far away.  The closest coffee shop in walking distance was shudder Starbucks.  But, we're still getting on our feet as a tiny family.  So, we were buying camping equipment instead of going somewhere exotic, but at least we got out of town for a bit.

One niceish thing about this vacation was that I kind of went back to work.  I've mentioned before on this blog, but I'm the kind of person who really likes to keep busy.  If I'm not running around like a chicken without a head, I'm not really happy.  In Phoenix, I had a four-day training session for the section of Advanced Placement United States' history I'm going to be teaching this next year.  While most of the training was comprised of our teacher making us pretend to be the students and doing worksheets and mini-courtrooms and stuff (hello, isn't that why I went to high school? And college?), it gave me a realistic idea of how much work this class is going to be and how much planning I need to be doing in the two and half weeks before school starts.

I'll use one of my favorite phrases to describe: a butt ton.

So now I have ants in my pants.  I'm itching to get started.  Problem though: still haven't chosen my last book.  Suggestions?  Right now I'm trying to decide if Beowulf is really a good idea or not.

Fortunately, I have three new textbooks I can use as reference, I'm hopefully going to start a website, and my school is open for teachers who want to come in and work quietly.  What I need now is to purchase myself some new posters and start putting my classroom together.  Rawr.

The other nice thing about going to Phoenix was getting to spend time with family and friends.  Because we were there for something like a week, I got to spend a day helping my mom clean out my old room a bit.  That was eye-opening.  You inherently understand that when you start putting two lives together you realize just how much (or how little) crap you have.  Well, I left behind a bunch of my crap and had effectively blocked it from my mind.  Returning home and rounding up at least a third of what was hanging behind was a bit mind-bogling.  I mean, it was a third of what was there.  And it was a terrifically large amount of just. . .stuff.  Now, granted, a significant portion of that was for my classroom (Jane Austen figurine, anyone?) and will be out of my house soon, but golly gee if I don't go on a cleaning spree pretty soon here I'm going to feel a bit like I'm drowning in stuff.

However, I'm blogging right now because I'm putting off further cleaning.  Hmmm.

My watermelon plants survived.  Hooray!

I accidentally left the freezer cracked while we were gone so now our freezer looks like the ice man's lair (read: full of bizarrely-shaped icicles, because that's obviously what an ice man's lair looks like).

I still have way too many books but can't seem to shake a bunch of them.

Okay, this song's over, I have to man up and go clean.  Wish me luck.