March & Stuff

Wow, here we are in March.  How have two months of this year already flown by??  I am both thankful and sad about that.  Thankful because 2 of my 4 classes are OVER for the semester (insert a giant sigh of relief)!  But sad because time is just going by too quickly!  The last few weeks have been a blur caused by crazy amounts of school work, parent teacher conferences, little sleep, Matt working crazy hours and a week of on-call, and life.  Again, I'm going to have to leave it to my camera to remind me of what all has happened since we last "spoke".

In the (long) quest to become a better photographer and utilize my fabulous new camera, I took a class (thank you Groupon) from Chimpsy Photography a few weeks ago (oddly, the owner is cousin's with a friend of mine in DC... small world!).  It was a short class, and I definitely learned the "basics", but I have oh so far to go!  I do not want to be an "auto" shooter.  Bring it on "M"!!  :) Here are a few pics from that class that I took:

Valentine's Day: I didn't get home from class that night until 8:30pm, but I walked in to find our house lit with candles and a gorgeous (and delicious) meal waiting for me at the table.  Winning! (sorry, couldn't resist a Charlie Sheen-ism)  I'm lucky to have a husband that not only puts up with my craziness, but does sweet things like that for me!

My cousin Carrie came to CO for a long weekend up in Breck.  She joined us for dinner (and a quick trip to El Diablo of course) and stayed the night before catching a flight back to DC the following day.  It was great to see her and catch up.  A bonus story about this quick visit was that Matt had to work early the morning after dinner, and I had to leave for school around 6:20am.  As I was walking the Stinker after Matt left, I somehow, for the first time in my life, got locked out of the house.  No idea how.  But, my poor cousin and her bf were awakened to the sound of my pounding on almost every door/window in the house to get their attention.  Slightly embarrassing.  Oops.

Here was a fun dinner out at Karma with our friends.  It's delicious there!

These are some of the folks in my "cohort" at UCD.  We generally go through the program together (with the exception of a few classes specialized for our content areas) and have endured quite a crazy semester so far.  Making it through each week was a big accomplishment, so usually on Fridays (after our 2-5pm class go out), we'd head to Larimer Square for a celebratory glass of wine at Euclid Hall. 

BTW - this is the high school that I work at 2 days a week.  I still love it!

Kristyn's bridal shower was a few weekends ago.  It was a great time getting to celebrate her and her upcoming wedding!  She has some wonderful friends, and we're really excited to celebrate in April with everyone.  Matt will actually be playing piano during their ceremony and DJing the reception.  Should be a fabulous time with great friends :)

Since our first two courses of the semester finished on Friday, I had my cohort over for a small party of sorts.  It was fun to see everyone outside of a school setting where we could actually talk about things other than, well, school!  Generally, 90% of my conversations these days revolve around students, social justice, standardized testing, formative assessments, equity issues, hidden curriculum, and the like.  Don't get me wrong, it's all fascinating stuff (well, most of it is), but it gets very draining!  I definitely am glad to have met these folks taking these journey with me.

So, that's about it for now.  I need to get moving on this dreary day.