It was a drizzly, grey day, and E and I had a quiet New Year's. We stayed in and frittered the day away (or shall I say I did - E ran 8 miles). The one productive thing I did was put together a summary of our 2006 income and expenditures with both dollar amounts and a nice pie chart with percentages. It's a good exercise--is our money really going where we want it to go? What do we need to change to meet our goals?
Tonight we took a nice walk around the Central Park Reservoir after dinner. We used to walk all the time. It was nice--we saw a couple of raccoons swimming and talked about our hopes/goals for the upcoming year.
Working backwards....
We got back from Boston yesterday. We got to meet the latest addition to the Wheatie family. We got to experience our first snow of the season. We saw a bigger and better Jordan's furniture store. We got to look at old Wheaton yearbooks - E had never seen any because I can't find mine even though I know they're SOMEWHERE at my parents'. We saw the new Institute of Contemporary Art - nice building, okay art. We watched The Boondocks (our new favorite funny thing) on E's laptop as we rode on the Chinatown bus.
I was determined to win a duck...and would have if I hadn't dropped one of my balls on the floor!
We spent Christmas Eve with E's fam. The kids are certainly growing up...and becoming those things known as teenagers. I like the traditions of singing Christmas Carols (note to self: find replacements for the falling-apart, free-from-the-bank songbooks from 1950) and reading the Christmas story. Usually E's dad quizzes the kiddos on aspects of the story but we missed that part this year along with the usual group photos.
My sister-in-law and niece:
Christmas Day: E and I slept in, went for a walk at Fort Tryon Park where E shared a Christmas reading by Buechner. We opened presents and tried without success to watch Letters from Iwo Jima (which we did catch the next night). E gave me a really nice tank and cardigan. He has good taste. :) Our strangest Xmas present (from one of his nieces)--a candle that changes color...and it doesn't stop when the wick goes out either.
As always, it was good to be in Cali. I was especially glad to see some friends whom I hadn't gotten to see the last time around. Had some yummy Indian food one night and tea at another, a place where you got to dress up in fancy hats and boas. The wedding was truly a community celebration.
The happy couple:
So great to see my friend who has been in Spain for the past two years as a missionary:
With Mom and Pop:
Good times:
I've been thinking about school a lot even though it's break. The students didn't do very well on the second exam and I'm wondering about how to address it both on their side and my side. I don't want to change things to be popular, but I do want to change them in order to become a better teacher. I thought greater familiarity with how I test and more time to take the test would help, but nope. Now I'm thinking that I need to give more homework that's directly related to the material (versus things like slightly tangential newspaper articles) and perhaps to go through the material more slowly (we did cover a lot in the last unit).
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