Fall Break

One of the perks of teaching is that I get a week off in fall. It's nice but also very necessary. Last year I went with a few friends to Hawaii. I didn't take off to some exotic getaway this year, but I relaxed, got some stuff done, and stayed away from my classroom even though I was tempted to go in and get some work done. So here's what I did:

Lakeside, AZ - As soon as the busses left, I packed up my classroom and headed out as fast as I could! A few of us took off that weekend to Suzanne's family's cabin up in Lakeside. I wasn't quite prepared for how freezing cold it would be and had packed a bunch of shorts. So I only had one pair of sweatpants, which I wore for the majority of the time. It rained and hailed on us Saturday, so we sat out on the porch for the majority of the time enjoying the weather. Unfortunately, Suzanne had stomach issues for most of the weekend and so I spent a lot of the time walking around by myself talking to Sara on the phone. Finally, on Tuesday she felt better. We hiked Mt. Baldy a bit and enjoyed the picturesque views and changing fall leaves. That was definitely a highlight of my trip and I would love to go back and hike it all the way to the end. Too bad we didn't have enough time.

Fall Cleaning - Okay, so I didn't quite get around to spring cleaning this year, but thank goodness I have a week off in the fall to make up for it. So I decided to clean up my files and bills. Apparently I found out it has been several years since I've cleaned it up. Oops! After a couple of days of serious shredding and reorganizing, I think I finally have some order to the mess. I never seem to know what to keep and what to shred. Heaven forbid something should ever happen to me and someone should have to go through my stuff and figure out my mess. Once I had all that completed, my next task was to clean my room. It's been a while since I've done some serious deep cleaning in it so that took some time too. I just wish I could keep it clean! ;)

As You Wish - My friend, Suzanne, and I took some time to paint some pottery. As You Wish is a fun little place where you pick out from a variety of unfinished pottery and custom paint it yourself. You pay a sitting fee where you have access to all their paints and supplies. The cost of the pottery depends on what you get. Suzanne and I painted several tiles, which are one of the cheapest items. The trick with painting pottery is that it's tough to tell how it's going to turn out. The color of the paint is very light but it changes when they fire it and the more coats you give it the more distinguish the color will be. It kind reminds me of taking pictures on an SLR manual camera using old school film. You don't really know how well you did until you develop it. But it's still tons of fun to do and totally worth it.