Summer finances.

I feel that summer is expensive no matter if I stay home or travel lots.

Traveling is inherently costly: airfare, train fare, hotels, meals, attractions, and of course a little bit (or a lot) of shopping.

However, I question if I spend just as much when I stick around town.  Movies, coffees, concerts, lunches, drinks, and shopping all adds up.  I have to fill my time!

Becca T has been visiting, and today we met up w my friend Flora and did some shopping.  I told Becca to not let me buy anything, but she failed and I ended up with a new skirt and top from Anthropologie, a new tote, and new PJs.

Yesterday, I needed to go to Ikea, so I got a Zipcar for the trip and dropped money on a much-needed duvet cover (my old one ripped and could have quite possibly strangle me in my sleep), new pillows, a new mirror, and other assorted items.

On Sunday, I spent almost as much on a hot dog at the Jays' game, dinner at Marché, and then the spectacle that was the Nelly/TLC/NKOTB concert.

The point of this is maybe it would cost as much to summer abroad!

Best.

I have lots to blog about but I'm sleepy from a fun weekend.

The best part is that I do not have work tomorrow.

More later.

Hey look up!

I've decided my summer song is "Third Eye" by Florence + The Machine.  I can't find a decent version of it to link to, but, really just get her new album. It's great.

Weekends without the dagger of schoolwork to do dangling over my head are amazing.  Seriously, after ten months of never really feeling like I can relax, I can, and it's amazing.  I finished off OITNB season 3, chaperoned prom, watched lots of baseball, went to the movies to see Mad Max: Fury Road, and built a Mini Cooper out of Lego (because, I rock adulthood).

I super enjoyed Mad Max which is surprising because I don't typically like exciting movies.  It is all it's cracked up to be and I wish Imperator Furiosa was my spirit animal.

I've started to listen to my fave Mariah Carey songs in preparation for Las Vegas.  It's dangerous becuase, well, romanticism and all that.  I do better listening to stuff about misery like Los Campesinos!

Confession: I like Drake.  They played so much Drake at prom.

I find it hilarious that I'm 35 and go to prom and use it to update my playlists.

Did you know that Judy Blume wrote a new adult novel?  It was $15 at Indigo so I bought it and I'm going to read that.  I haven't finished a book in a long time.

Summer of Self Care

Well, I've made it through the tough slog that is the end of the school year.  Writing exams, photocopying the exams and assembling them into packages; getting through the last quizzes, tests, labs and projects; marking these last items and those other things that I've been avoiding for awhile; and wrapping up extracurricular activities.

Now all exams have been written by students, marked by me, marks have been entered and report cards are done.  I'm sitting in a hallway by the window doing my last official duty of the school year: monitoring the third floor during exams (so far so good).

Next week will be a flurry of cleaning up, meetings, parties, etc.  I'll be able to sleep in some days and the pace will not be hectic.

Before I know it, it'll be two months of freedom.  And I know what I need to do with it: take care of myself.

This year I let my worst habits get ahold of me.  I let work take over, and I let my exercise habits and food habits slide.  I ate junk food, drank too much to unwind, and stopped bringing my gym stuff to school, promising myself that I'd go home, and then go to the gym.  That would never happen because I would stay at work too late and then use that as an excuse.

I know that during the summer I need to make myself a schedule.  I want to wake up early, and get a good workout done in the morning.  I would like to give myself one household chore to each day (declutter a box, clean out a shelf, etc.), and then after that read, watch Netflix, be crafty, go to a different neighbourhood etc, cook something healthy, whatever.

I have a couple of small trips planned and I think that's all I want.  After years of big summer trips every year, I just want to chill.  I have a baseball road trip to Detroit, five days in Vegas and that's it. I want to take a couple of small road trips to visit friends and family but I want to be a homebody for two months.

I want to get back to running.

I want to eat lots of fruits and veggies, but also try a milkshake at this burger place that my friend's been raving about.

I want to go out less.  Is that crazy?

I want to do away with things that aren't working for me.

I just want to take better care of myself.

Winding Down

Right now I have absolutely nothing to mark.  It's a small preview of summer vacation for me before the official end of the school year.  My lovely period 1 class is writing their exam, and I have nothing really to do that wouldn't require me to leave the room or to make a lot of noise.  (Although I am feeling bad right now that I have a creaky chair and a couple of kids have creaky stools... I hate noise when I'm trying to think.  Sign of old age, perhaps?)

I got the rest of the term marking done over the weekend/this morning and I have all of my marks inputted plus report card comments in.  I am feeling, dare I say it, on top of things which felt like an impossibility a few weeks ago.  It goes to show you that the motto that Becca T and I coined back in our university days still rings true - "somehow it will all get done; it always does."

But these guys will get done in an hour, but I'll probably just mark their exams tomorrow while my period 2 class is writing their exam.

(I'm lucky.  I can arrange my room where kids are really far away from each other so cheating is impossible unless they have super duper vision.  Hence I can do stuff while they write.)

In other news, I'm super happy with baseball these days.  This 11-game win streak for the Jays is amazing.  Now, I am well aware they will eventually lose at some point; but I'm hoping they can get one more win in tonight to surpass the franchise record for a win streak.  I might even forgo my weekly hate-watching of The Bachelorette to watch the game tonight. (I can stream the crappy show online tomorrow, right?) Oh, and my pal Mathew and I have splurged on 100-level seats for Wednesday's game.  Last year, when the Jays were streaking, we vowed to splurge on good seats for a game, but then they started sucking so we didn't.  We've learned that you must take advantage of the moment before it's gone!  (But let's hope this level of baseball continues for the rest of the season, and dare I say it, into the playoffs.)

I've also been watching season 3 of Orange is The New Black.  I don't think this season will have the epic force of season 2, since the main villain got smooshed, but it's still very enjoyable.  I think my favourite part of the show is the backstories of all of the characteristics.  I just finished the episode that tells the story of Chang, the strange elderly Chinese woman that runs the commissary, and it was rather interesting.

And I'll be able to start reading again soon!  I can't remember the last book I finished; it must have been a month ago.

I love when the breakneck pace of the school year finally winds down.

Almost there.

I was going to write a post about an actual topic.  It's the twentieth anniversary of Alanis Morrissette's  Jagged Little Pill album and I can't believe I'm that old.  That album was important to me.

However, Netflix just released season 3 of Orange Is The New Black so I'm going to watch that.  Post will have to wait.

Tomorrow is my last day of teaching for the school year.  Next week is exams.

I have four sets of marking to do over the weekend.  That's manageable!  And no prep!  The stress levels are finally decreasing!

Likes and dislikes.

Likes:

1) Exciting baseball games like today's.

2) Sunshine and cool temperatures.

3) Naps.

4) These paleo brownie bites that I made.

5) Bobbleheads.  I lined up early to add Marcus Stroman to my collection.

6) My sports boyfriend Russell Martin.

7) Baseball hats.

8) The new Hawksley Workman album.

Dislikes:

1) End of year marking

Hives

Yesterday morning I woke up with hives all over my face.  It was awful.  I have no idea what caused it.  I have never had this happen to me before.  I haven't been using any new products or anything.

I had mussels for dinner on Saturday.  What if I'm developing a shellfish allergy?

They've gone down quite a bit, but my face is still blotchy, and my skin feels abnormally dry.  I hope it never happens again.  I didn't even want to leave my house.

***

On Friday night I completed my set of series 2 Simpsons Lego minifigures.

I am rocking adulthood.

Sitcom

Over the years it's become more and more evident to me that I work in really what is a sitcom.  It's the high school version of The Office, but no one interviews me.  (How I wish someone would!!) Often I look around for the cameras that might be filming me so I can make a face a la Jim or Pam.

On today's episode my class was happily at work doing a lab on lenses, when one of the secretaries came over the PA and said "would whoever removed the Scantron machine from the staff room please return it?"

I started laughing out loud.  "Oh no!  That's the worst news ever!  How am I supposed to mark multiple choice? By hand?  Oh man, guys, the teachers are all going to be panicking!"

But seriously, the big mystery to me is who in their right might moved the Scantron machine.  It's big, heavy and bulky.  Who the heck has that much Scantronning to do??  If you have a test, it takes maybe two minutes to zip thirty cards through...  The only big Scantronning job that I know of are student council elections, but it's me who uses it to count the ballots. And I don't take the bloody machine with me!  And that's not even til next week!

The sad part about being a character on a sitcom is that you don't get to see what's happening outside your own scenes.  I'm sure the whole Scantron machine moving incident and its return (it was back by the end of the day) was hilarious, but I didn't get to see it.  But my people are looking into getting the whole story.

Oh young lions.

Just got back from an amazing Constantines show at Massey Hall.  It was probably the loudest rock show I'd been to in quite some time.

I got into the Cons back in my early twenties because they were often playing shows with my beloved Weakerthans.  I slowly warmed up to them, and I was a superfan by the time their last album came out in maybe around 2008.

They took a hiatus after that, but much to my happiness, they have started playing live shows again.  This was my first time seeing them in the past year.

There is something very special about seeing bands play songs you love that remind you of happy times.  That was what tonight was for me.

Confession

I skipped going to the Jays' game today to catch up on marking but I read a novel instead.

Long Weekend

Its the Monday morning of a long weekend, and I'm not sure where the weekend, or the week that preceded it, went.

The highlight of my past week was a field trip to the Ontario Science Centre with my grade 12 biology class.  I took them there to do a pretty intense 6-hour DNA fingerprinting lab.  It was a great experience because they got to do some protocol that's beyond the scope of a high school lab (PCR, gel electrophoresis) and they learned a lot.  And, they each got to see their genotype at a random locus on chromosome 1. It was a nice day.

And a great bonus was that since they are mature grade 12s, I could simply dismiss them from the OSC, and take a 20-min bus ride home as opposed to having to go back to school then home.

I spend the weekend with my parents watching crappy baseball games and relaxing.

It's crazy to think that in a month from now, exams will almost be over and it'll be almost summer.

Don't be crushed.

It was a busy weekend.

On Friday, I left school a little bit early thanks to a good friend who recognized my exhaustion and offered to supervise my regular Friday extracurricular activity.  It was much appreciated as I left the hot, sweaty, gross school building and went home to finish writing a reference letter and take a nap.

My good friend Vern (from high school days, Go9) has moved to Toronto so we had our first hang out now that she's got an apartment of her own and not living on my futon.  We braved the insanity of High Park to see the lovely cherry blossoms (although I saw lots in Vancouver in March, ha!).  Then I brought her to a cute little backyard patio for dinner and drinks.  It was a nice evening.

I could have been productive on Saturday, but instead of doing much, I sat on the couch and watched the baseball game. I didn't even mark while I watched. I struggle with these moments of complete unproductivity.  I am feeling stressed these days because I have a lot of marking, prep work, housework, errands, etc. piling up and then when I have a good chunk of time to work on them, I procrastinate and do nothing.  URGH.  I am my own worst enemy too often.

On Saturday evening, I took my friend Mathew as my +1 to the CBC for a neat little TV studio concert.  Hawksley Workman was previewing his upcoming album, Old Cheetah, on CBC's First Play Live.  I saw an invite to this on Twitter and replied on Tuesday and made it on the guest list.  The audience surrounded the band in a circle, and it was really intimate and wonderful.  He played some old stuff (even opened with Don't Be Crushed) and the new songs were wonderful.  I've been listening to Hawksley's music for fifteen years and so much of it brings me to instant nostalgia (incidentally the name of his new song).  It was wonderful.

Today was super busy too.  Way back in January when I was making resolutions that I've broken, I signed up for the Sporting Life 10K to motivate myself to get back into running.  Well, it didn't work.  However, I decided that since plenty of people walk it, I might as well too, and that's what I did. Today was a hot and humid day that felt more like June, so even though I just walked, it was sweaty and tiring.  However, I felt better that I didn't give up, and even though I have blisters on the bottom of my feet, it was fun.  I went to the Jays game right after the walk in my close, and I hope I wasn't too smelly... The game kind of sucked because they lost again, argh, and I didn't even get to see my boyfriend Russell Martin play since Dickey was pitching so Thole was catching.

After the game I came home and had a nap, and then did some more reference letter writing and lesson planning.  I didn't even touch the marking pile.  Oh well.  There's always next week, right?

April is over...

... thank goodness  It was a demanding month, and I'm still struggling to keep my head above water.

Politics are bringing my morale down.  It sucks.

I find solace in watching baseball games on TV and drinking beer.  Man, I gotta cut back on beer.

Lots of fun stuff coming up in May though.  A musical, a couple of concerts, and a couple of live ball games will help.

And sleep and self care.  That will help too.

So I think it's time for us to have a toast.

It was an okay weekend.  I socialized a bit, binged on Kimmy Schmidt a bit, and did some work.

I have one more big deadline on April 30th, and then my month of craziness of work will end, and I really want to take May easy and spend some time on self-care: spa appointments, getting myself reacquainted with the gym, eating healthy, etc.

I've been thinking a lot about the summer and my summer goals.  Usually I travel a lot in the summer.  Heck, I've had summers where I spend more days away than here.

This summer I have couple of small trips planned: a baseball road trip to Detroit to see the Jays vs. Tigers with my baseball buddies, and Las Vegas to meet up with my friends Claire and Mariah Carey.

However, I'm thinking I'm not going to do much other than that.  There is some labour unrest for Ontario teachers these days; my union is actually in strike position.  It would be prudent to be careful with my cash these days.  More importantly, I want some time to work on the following during the summer:

• get my bike fixed so I can ride it to the gym;
• spend my mornings in the gym getting back to strength-training, running, and yoga;
• drink lots of coffee;
• eat healthy and cook for myself;
• read lots of books;
• do some nerdy cross-stitch;
• write letters and postcards to friends afar;
• watch baseball;
• declutter my home and deal with the clothing situation

Of course, there's always the possibility that I'll pack my bags and go to somewhere random.  However, I feel the summer of 2015 might just be where I press a giant reset button on life and work on me.

Avalanche.

The gods of iTunes shuffle have put the Matt Good song Avalanche on and I forgot how much I love it.  I might just have to put it on repeat as I write.

Anyway, it's been a busy few days.  I think I've finally recovered from the at-school sleepover.  It was worth it though, as the kids had a great time.  Today one of the grade nines came up to me and told me how much fun she had and how she was going to do it again.  It was all worth it.

On Tuesday I took the Eco Club to the Science Centre for our annual trip. It was great and a nice break from being at school.

Every year at this time I get invited to an event that our school participates in.  Students get mentored in guitar by local police officers, and then one kid per school is chosen to play in a big showcase at a concert venue (one I go to for real shows!).  Anyway, it always seems to be a kid who knows me well enough to ask me to come watch and I do.  It's actually pretty fun, although this year I went by myself since my regular teacher pal who goes with me is on a leave.  Heck, anything that gets me out on a school night is a good time.  My student is a great guitar player too!

Other than the constant avalanche of work these days (I'm having a marking/planning weekend), stuff is good.  It's baseball season, and I finally got to meet up with my blog pal Aaron of The Void this Sunday at the game!

And that's the end of my update.

Taking a moment.

Right now the fasting-for-charity teenagers are happily sewing sock monkeys and drinking juice. Some colleagues of mine were kind enough to stop by and help out, so instead of making a monkey for the fifth time, I've come outside to enjoy sunshine, fresh air, and solitude.

I'm sitting in the city park across the street from my school. I can see my classroom window, and think fondly about how the room is quiet for the weekend, but it'll be back to normal by Monday. 

I've given ten working years to this place, and even though some days it frustrates the hell out of me, I'm glad that I've come to think of this quirky little building as my home.

Overload

As far as weekends go, this one was quiet.  There was some drinks, some brunch, and a few errands, and happily I did not open my backpack to do any marking.

Now it's on to a super busy week.  Report cards are due on Thuraday and I'm frantically trying to get a few more sets of assignments marked in time.  Tonight I got a major set of lab reports marked while watching the baseball game, so that feels like an accomplishment.

Last night I went to the Jays' home opener.  No marking got done.  They lost.

Oh and I have a houseguest.  My pal Vern got a job in the city and needed a place to stay this week.

And Friday is a big student council event where kids fast for charity and sleep overnight at school. I sleep there too.

Is it summer yet?

Baseball

Thank goodness the season started.  I'm going to make a bold statement here.  I like watching baseball more than I like watching Netflix.

Home opener is on Monday.  I'll be there.  Next Sunday is Jose Bautista bobblehead day.  I'll be there.

The Jays took 2/3 of their first series at Yankee Stadium which is significant, since Yankee Stadium is their Achilles heel.  Last year they broke a something like 19 game losing streak there.  Damned Yankees.

I like how this season is starting.  2 HRs so far for my man EE.

Also myself from two years ago is in shock how die hard into baseball my current self is.

Long Weekend

I had a rather chill long weekend.  The pile of marking I lugged home from school, and then all the way to Stratford and back, has barely a dent in it.  Oh well.

Things I did, in point form:

• Started watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix, which is hilarious and amazing.
• Did a little bit of shopping in Stratford where I splurged on a new Jays' hat.
• Watched four movies with my parents (Gone Girl, St. Vincent, The Theory of Everything, Maleficent).  I crafted a cute little cross-stitch fox as I watched.  I want to craft more while I watch things.
• Got a little bit of exercise in. 
• Caught up on sleep.
• Watched the Jays' exhibition games in Montreal.
• Watched Jays vs NYY opening day game which was amazing.  We won 6-1.  Please be representative of the season.

And that was my chill long weekend.