A visual description of our lives

3 times a week Jimmy is an assistant coach of the W &L wrestling team. This past Saturday they had a decathlon. One of the events was a tire push. look at how strong Jimmy is....

Then Sunday we celebrated Amber's birthday. Doesn't Amber have the best birthday blowing-out-candles look?

Here is the cake up close. It was a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. I added some white chocolate pieces, and some raspberries (which were not in season, by the way...)

And yesterday Jimmy and I carved a pumpkin. Does he look like anyone you know?

Oh, I am so glad it is the autumn season!

Ramble, ramble, ramble

I feel like these days I do more rambling than updating. I mean, did you really need to know about my cucumber sandwich? At that moment I thought so.

Today is Tuesday. I seem to use Tuesday as my venting day. Hopefully I don't come across as angry or bitter. Most of the time I think I am pretty happy, but long days at work seem to bring out the frustration in me.

So here goes. This is the last week that students can retake the first two exams. And by the way, they are taking for the first time, their third. It is almost humorous to see students come in at the last minute and say, "whoops, I probably should have retaken chapter 1 months ago, and whoops, I still need to retake chapter 2. Do you have time for me this week?" I am not a confrontational person so I shake my head in dismay and say "come during my office hours, and we will see what we can do..." Do you think I should be more harsh? Should I holler and yell, and tell them how irresponsible it is of them to wait until the very last minute? I just don't know what would be more effective. I am not a very big person, 5 feet 3 inches, and I probably look like I am 18 years old. Do you think they would believe me? Anyways...I am not really angry about the whole situation, just puzzled at how I should handle it.

My second ramble goes out to insurance companies, and this is more of an angry ramble. Jimmy and I signed up for health insurance in August. We paid a handsome fee, although i am not an expert on good or bad prices when it come to health insurance. And we have been calling them for the last month,( yes, 1-2 months after I saw the money taken out of our account), about getting some sort of confirmation, a policy number, documentation, etc... It has been pretty frustrating. Needless to say, I am not super impressed. Supposedly our cards went out last week. I will check the mail when I get home...I hope it is there. Don't you think once they took our money that they would be forced to give us some sort of confirmation, even through the phone? You would think....thankfully day by day Jimmy is becoming more and more knowledgeable about the law and how we can make sure that we are not being scammed.

As I become more and more familiar with so-called "real-life" I become more and more confused. But thankfully, and this will be my last ramble, I have a husband, who is seemingly good at calming me down after I have exploded about another stressful thing in life. I used to get kind of annoyed when he would say "it will all work out." In fact, because I am so easily stressed, I would think to myself "how can he say that it will work out, when he has no clue about the future?" Little did I know that stepping back, breathing deeply, and letting myself realize that life will work out really does help in the process of, well, life working out. Stress does not usually help things work out. In my case it never does, because I become so emotionally absorbed in the problem that I can't see the solution.

Ramble, ramble, ramble.....

Cucumber and swiss sandwich

Did you know that if you take 2 slices of bread, put a little butter on one side, cut up some cucumber slices and Swiss cheese that it makes a delightful sandwich?

Well, if you don't know that, maybe you should try it. My mom seemed to have invented it, although maybe it was something that all Haehnels ate. I just know that today I was craving a swiss, cucumber sandwich and when I ate it, it was still delicious, just like I remembered from my childhood.

It might be an acquired taste.

Hibachi and fall weather

We had the opportunity to use a wedding gift, our Hibachi. It was a nice fall day, and we wanted to enjoy it. I even got to put my feet in the nearby river. Oh, the joys of nature. Yes, we have matching ponchos....

A teacher's frustration

I am imagine that all teachers have a day like this. I wake up and check my campus e-mail. I am flooded with my research students' next assignment. A research plan. I begin going through them, and none of them, I mean none of them, are complete. The students aren't following the instructions I gave them, they just seemed to turn something in so that they would get credit. So I start thinking "it must have been my explanation...maybe I didn't describe the process well enough." So I go through the day wondering how I could have improved. It is in my self-pitying moments that I open one last student's e-mail and see that that one student has followed the directions correctly. It is a well prepared assignment completely and wholely written. Maybe that one student was listening, or actually took time to read the instructions on the paper I gave all the students. Maybe I are not a failure after all. Ahh...the joys and frustrations of teaching.

But I am not done. I teach a developmental class where everyone has to get a 75% on all the tests. If they don't pass a test, they can retake it until they pass. My mon/wed/fri class has enough flexibility that I can include a few re-take days into my schedule, meaning I can take a class period and make it into a retake test day. Doing this on the first test was close to disatrous. Out of the 10 people who had to re-take the test, maybe 2 passed. None of them had studied before the retake. Seriously people, if you didn't pass it the first time, why don't you study to pass it the second time around? I don't get it. Why do people think that information will magically appear in their brains?

I thought maybe if I instill this principle into their brains, maybe some of them will be prepared by the time I give them the retake for the second test. And some of them did...some tried really hard to be ready. I can tell when they are studying. And even though they didn't necessarily pass even on the second time, at least they were improving and making a valid effort. However some of the other people just didn't even work at it, and those people really drive me nuts. They came into the test, sat down, realized that the information still wasn't there, and turned in almost blank tests.

Maybe it is because I was the kind of person who was not woefully smart. I had to study several hours, and do lots of problems just to do decently on a test. That had to be one of the funniest differences between Jimmy and I. When he told me that he studied the night before he took an exam, I thought "seriously, you haven't been studying for it all week?" He is good at taking tests, and he I am pretty sure he retains things after one run through. I however, required lots of scrap paper, and probably hundreds of problems before I really felt confident about material. That was how my undergraduate career went. I spent most of my college life studying. I admit now, that I may have been a excessive studier. But I won't take back the fact that it did almost always ensure good grades. I say almost because some of my physics tests would have been hard even with the solution set right in front of me. Although it may have cost me a significant social life, I went to a school were drinking was THE activity, and I wasn't interested in that.

Maybe people just don't know how to study. Maybe I am being too critical. Okay, I feel a little bit less angry and little more sympathetic for these people. I guess I just needed to write it down.

Note: I realize for all you exceptional writers out there, that my writing method may be sloppy and not entirely grammatically correct. I try to read through all my posts, but I am not characterized as a good writer. I even go back and read my posts and think "why--this girl can't put together a single correct sentence!" I will try my best to accomodate to your talents.