An interesting find... While surfing through various blogs, I found one displaying this 1885 8th grade test. I know for certain that most of the eighth graders I taught wouldn't be able to complete most of its tasks. I just thought I'd share it.  ¶ 10:31 AM (0) comments

  movies, movies, movies... I went with a friend to see Saved! yesterday. I thought it was fabulous. There were so many little plotlines running throughout it, and they managed to capture a lot of what it feels like to be in high school in general. It threw me back a little, reminding me of some of the people I went to high school with, especially those who knew I didn't have their same spiritual preference and tried hard to save me.

I also bought Camp and Whale Rider on DVD on sale at the movie store. So I've had a movie-filled weekend so far. These two were definitely among my favorites from the past year, so when I saw them on sale, I had to get them.

Today's Weather: wow! it got cool. it's about 67 out right now.
Song going through my head: "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys. See movie note above.  ¶ 9:32 PM (0) comments

  books... I saw this list on Mitch's blog, so I decided to put it on mine too! The bold titles are ones I have read:

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple - update: finished 8/04
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Hmm. I think that's it. Granted, many of these were read 10+ years ago. Looks like I've got a few ideas to add to my "Books to Read" list.

Today's Weather: hot!
  ¶ 11:50 AM (0) comments

  A worthy cause... Today was the 8th Annual NC Triangle Susan G. Komen Foundation Race for the Cure. I got up bright and early at 6:00 a.m. to pick up a friend and drive to Raleigh for the 8:00 starting gun. I had a minor back injury about a month ago, so I wasn't sure I'd be doing anything but walking this year, but I tried to start training about three weeks ago regardless, just to see what I could do. I finished the 5K (~3.2 mile) race in 32:20, which is a personal best time for me. My eventual goal is under 30 minutes, or an average 10 minute mile.

I can't even begin to express how it feels to go to this event every year. There are so many people there. More than 17,000 people registered for the race this year, and many more were there today to cheer people on and support their families and friends. Most moving, of course, are the survivors of breast cancer. A girl who ran near me, about age 13, had a sign on her back saying that she was racing in memory of her mother. Another survivor crossed the finish line hand in hand with her two adult daughters, both wearing signs honoring their mother. In the co-ed 5K, the first man finished in under 15 minutes, which is absolutely phenomenal. The second woman to finish was a 14-year-old former student of the middle school on whose team I raced. From small children to very old men and women, so many people out to show their support and raise money for research and education about breast cancer. It is truly one of the most moving things I have ever experienced. If you haven't been to one, go. If you can't run it, walk. If you'd rather sleep in, give.

Today's Weather: overcast and cool. great weather for a race!
Song going through my head: The theme music from Baldur's Gate. I've spent way too much time playing mindless computer games today.  ¶ 10:19 PM (0) comments

  Journalistic Objectivity... A friend of mine recently sent me to this article about Venus's transit across the path of the sun, resulting in an eclipse of sorts. The funny thing is the first line. Someone has clearly been burned before, and it shows in the brief introductory statement to the piece. It amused me, and I'm learning about using the BlogThis! button. It seemed like something worthy of blogging.  ¶ 3:09 PM (0) comments

  Sluggish... So I can't think of many things that I like less than a summer cold. I expect colds in the winter, so they don't bug me much. In the summertime, however, they're just plain miserable.

Things on my mind: It's my birthday month. My mother used to start trying to get people to celebrate her birthday for the whole week leading up to it. She would get up in the morning during the week prior to her birthday and announce, "It's my birthday week!" She admits that it was a ploy for attention and presents early. As she got older, the birthday week stretched out. Now April first comes and my mother announces the arrival of her birthday month. Her students even notice, and I think that someone even gave her flowers this year on the first of April. So now, it's June. Which is my birthday month. Flowers, anyone?

Today's Weather: sunny and hot, chance of thunderstorms later.
  ¶ 12:28 PM (0) comments