Sunday Salon: October 30, 2011

Family and Life:

Last night my daughter and I went down to Los Angeles and saw the So You Think You Can Dance Tour at the Nokia Theater. It was so much fun! The dancing was entertaining (much better in real life than on the TV screen), the music was good, and my daughter was in heaven.

One of the fun things was that we were instructed to text the word "dance" to a certain number and to include our names. What did we get back? Check it out, it's personalized, how cool is that?!

One of the best parts? We spent the night in LA (at the Hilton across the street from Universal Studios) so that I wouldn't have to drive home tired. As we checked in they said we'd been chosen as the Guests of the Day! We were upgraded to a suite (HUGE living room, bedroom, multi-room bathroom, walk-in closets and an awesome view), and parking and internet was free. That was pretty fun.

The view of Universal Studios from our room (the shadow is our hotel)

This is just the living room

I am so embarrassed to admit this next thing and here's why: (1) my parents are from the UK where (almost) everyone uses garden clothes drying racks and (2) I live in southern California where it's sunny most of the year. However, we have always used an electric clothes dryer and have talked forever about getting a clothesline for the garden. FINALLY we did it! I dried my first loads of laundry in the sun yesterday and I am so happy about it! Even the heavy duvet covers dried in about an hour and that's in October sunshine! And, it all smells so fresh

Work:

I've been teaching Google Docs this past week and so far it's going well! We've also gotten in a lot of new books that the students seem excited about so that feels good. Tomorrow is a whole district in-service about the Common Core Standards (new standardized tests that begin in 2013 or 2014).

I am on call for jury duty this coming week so I feel like I haven't been able to make any work plans such as teaching in case I am not there. Odd feeling. Also, there are a lot of heavy-duty cases coming up in our town....

Books and Reading:

Super slow reading week! I have been working on this one book all week and I am only have way through so I got two quick YA reads from my school library hoping to zip through one of them this weekend.