Back to School

Tomorrow I go back to school. My student teaching begins with several inservice days. I'm not exactly sure what to expect, as my cooperating teacher just learned within the last week that I would be in his classroom in September, instead of November.

For the last few weeks of summer I've been trying to relax and enjoy myself! Michael's mom threw a weekend of showers two weekends ago - a baby shower for Michael's step sister, Liz, on Saturday, and a wedding shower for us on Sunday. We played fun games at the baby shower, and fortunatley, no games at the wedding shower. It was a great weekend, with nice weather, and I think everyone had a good time. Thanks Carol!



I've been baking a lot lately. Especially since I borrowed my parents' bread maker on Friday afternoon.


Friday night I made a loaf of whole wheat bread. Saturday morning I made a loaf of pumpernickel; today I'm making a loaf of white bread, mostly because I ran out of whole wheat flour (I used some to make blueberry-zucchini muffins this afternoon) and hopefully I'll have enough bread to live off of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the first few days of school, until I figure out where the refrigerator and microwave are . . .



The muffins are good, by the way. I found the recipe at Cooks.com, and was able to find both zucchini and blueberries at a little farm stand on my way to register for classes today. I didn't have enough flax seed meal to substitute it for the oil, but I did substitute fresh blueberries for the frozen ones called for in the recipe.


I also picked up an Amish-grown yellow watermelon. It's delicious.


Other than baking and making too many recipes with tomatoes in them (okay, really only two - tomato pie and tomato salad - Michael opted for Jimmy John's the other night instead of eating any more tomatoes) I've been spending the last few days of summer doing wedding things (writing thank-yous for shower gifts - although Michael did most of the work on those, organizing decorations, and meeting with the hotel to go over our plans for the reception, and to taste entree options), cleaning (I still haven't gotten to my desk, but I did take about 8 sweaters to Goodwill, along with several pairs of shoes!), and reading. I spent all day on Sunday reading Breaking Dawn. Some people I know really loved the Twilight series. Okay, so a lot of those people were students who I observed last semester during a teaching clinical. But still. These guys were really into the books. Personally, while I can see how appealing the would have been 15 years ago, I just didn't get the whole series. I think Stephenie Meyer is a good writer (and I'm not just saying that because I live next door to the parents of her publisher) but for the first three books, I really couldn't get my head around the relationship between Bella and Edward. I don't want to give up too much for those of you who haven't read it, but I was definitely on Team Jacob, not Team Edward. One of Michael's students said he wouldn't like the ending . . . Michael still has a couple hundred pages to go, so I'll have to wait a little longer to get his reaction. Personally, I didn't mind the ending, but it seemed to me like the series went from being "out there" to being "really out there and very hard to believe." But the ending could have been a lot worse.

I also just read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I wonder if I would have noticed all of the discussion of seeds and agriculture if I had read that novel before I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

And speaking of locavorism - the cover story of the most recent Time Magazine is about eating local foods and moving away from the Big Business of farming!

Time to do dishes . . .