School Randomness

I've had a few fun things at school lately that I thought deserved a post.

The other day, toward the end of the day, I got a call from the front office saying my appointment was there. I didn't have an appointment, so I asked who it was and she said "Mr. Buttars." I told her to send him right back. Nate had taken the day off for Jr.'s birthday and they stopped by to say hello on their way to Old MacDonald's Farm. It was fun to have them there for a little bit.

Last weekend, Janelle hosted the second annual "Witches of Pine Forest" party at her house. It was tons of fun. She went all out this year and even had a pinata! Luckily we didn't have any "America's Funniest" moments.

The dynamic is definately different at an adult party with a pinata. No one was running for the candy, but these ladies were all picking through it saying, "My kids like . . . " or "My husband will eat . . . " I thought it was funny.

Just this last Friday, we had a "Pay to Play dress up day" where the kids could pay $2 to dress up like a storybook character. They had some cute costumes. Even Tricia dressed up. Our counselor was Cruela Devil (sp?) and lots of the special ed team dressed up like the dalmations. It was really cute. You can tell that my class has a lot of Star Wars fans. Oh, by the way, this is not my whole class - these are just the ones that dressed up.

Lastly for this post, on Friday, my friend Amanda came in as a vendor for her "Mandy's Wall Candy" business. She brought her little 6 month old named Bentley. He was so cute! You should check out her stuff HERE!

Super Saturday

I'm one of the counselors in our Relief Society Presidency - the counselor in charge of additional RS meetings.

We had a big one on October 23rd - SUPER SATURDAY - a.k.a. craft day. It was a lot of fun and we had a good turn out. Here's a picture from when we were setting up.

I signed up to make a bunch of stuff. I just snapped a few pictures with my phone to show what I made. I painted the crows and the candy corn. They're currently up in my house and will stay there until Thanksgiving! :)

I painted this Jingle wood craft and attached paper to 3 of the letters. I still need to finish the J. I'm looking for some cute paper to do that one. I think I'll attach some buttons to the l as well. I saw that on an example and thought it looked really cute.

I like this one as well. I actually made this one the Friday night before at Carrie's house. She was teaching it and didn't have an example yet so it worked out for both of us.

Last, sorry this isn't a better picture, but we learned how to make these really cute flowers out of fabric and put them on headbands. I need to practice some more with those! My first Super Saturday was a lot of fun and a big success!

Week of Workshops

This last week I was gone from Sunday evening all the way until Saturday afternoon at two different workshops.

Sunday evening I drove to Round Top, TX to the Round Top Retreat for a "Capturing Kids Hearts" workshop. The retreat was amazing. The main house had 3 stories. The first two both had these huge wrap around porches with tons of rocking chairs.

This is a front view of the big house.

The grounds were huge and so beautiful. There were at least 4 other houses on the property too, that they would use for bigger groups than ours turned out to be.

I loved this covered arch walking into the grounds from the parking area.

This is a side view of the big house from the parking area. When I drove up in the dark, I thought it was a huge barn.

There were walking trails all around the grounds that we put to good use!

There was a little pond just off to the side that had awesome color! It reminded me of the lakes I saw in Canada this last summer. Becky and I posed in front of it! :)

Here are Dunia, Becky, and Lori.

This is inside the big house in the meeting room we had our trainings in each day. It was pretty cold in there so we had to bundle up!

Lori and I were just across from them that first day.

This is the side of the bedroom I stayed in. I loved the old antique style of everything there.

Here's our whole group just before we finished up on the last day. I feel like I got to know most of them pretty well. It was a fantastic training! I highly recommend it.

We had to rig up something fancy to get our cameras set for the timers. I love this shot!

I drove straight from Round Top Wednesday afternoon to Corpus Christi for my next workshop. After I checked in at the workshop, my first item of business was to get to the hotel. I ended up on the 17th floor and it had quite a view. The ocean was just to the right.

Here's the morning version of that same view.

I took this from the front of our hotel. It looked just as beautiful all three mornings I was there. The timing was perfect to see the sunrise.

As you might expect, I took a few!

This and the next one are both from the bus that took us from our hotel to the place where our conference was.

Love it!

This view is right outside of the America Bank Center where the Autism Conference was held. This is the USS Lexington.

Here's a zoomed in picture of a couple of the planes on it.

If I wasn't in a big hurry, I enjoyed walking to and from the conference back to the hotel. This courthouse was on the way and was so pretty.

Thursday night I met up with my principal and old principal for dinner at Joe's Crab Shack. They had some fun dancing while waiting for our food to arrive.

Here's the whole group of us. Jen came down for this conference too. It was really good to have her there.

This is a view of that big convention center as I was walking to it one morning.

The palm trees that lined the walk were date trees, I believe. This is the only one I saw that was growing fruit.

Jen was a presenter on Saturday. She actually did it twice. I attended her second one.

She was in this huge room and did a really nice job!

Here she is just prior to presenting her second class. I left right after it was over. I was anxious to get home after being gone so long!

Volleyball fiasco

I have a little group who gets together to play volleyball on Tuesday nights.

It's been going on for a couple of years now, and I've meant to take some pictures, but have never really done it. Last Tuesday Dreana brought her camera to get some of us early birds.

Dreana jumped in for this one. She brought me that gum, which is delicious.

Close-up! And a lovely face from Nate.

A few hours later, Dreana dislocated her ankle when she blocked a hit of mine and came down on my foot. It was really bad. We thought it was broken, but it was just dislocated.

Here's the group of us at the hospital as they were about to release her. She was much happier when she found out it wasn't broken! I never want to see a dislocated ankle again!!!!!!!!!!!!

Moving and More

There's a bathroom decorating competition going on at our school. They're supposed to be done to a children's book theme.

Our team decided to do a "Wild About Books" theme so a couple of my teammates got started on the bathroom this last week! Who knew Jeanne was a zebra stripe master. It looks great!.

This post is mostly about moving since now Nate is moving to UT in January. The lease on his apartment was up at the end of September, so he moved in with his sister and had to get rid of a bunch of his stuff. He gave me his table. I got this shot last weekend so I could have my old table in my memory. It is now at goodwill or a new home.

Nate also gave me his brown leather couch which I haven't got a picture of yet. He delivered them last Saturday with his kids. They took some time for a little wrestling fun. It was a great time.

Last Thursday I helped Nate move the rest of his stuff from his apartment and clean it out. Once we got everything done, I wanted to get a picture of him in front of his empty apartment. He had to do his tough guy face.

I asked him to do a normal face, but he wouldn't so I snapped this one real quick when he was in a facial transition.

I am an electrician!

We had quite the smoke detector ordeal last weekend! My roommate called to say that two of our smoke detectors were beeping - just once every 30 seconds. These are the talking kind so we knew they weren't sensing any smoke or carbon monoxide. After talking to too many people and reading up on the website, I figured out that there was a mechanical malfunction (since we'd already changed the batteries). They were old enough that they needed to be replaced.

I went to Lowe's to pick up two new ones. They were having a special to get $21 off if I got 3. I wasn't going to at first, but really felt like I should. I got them and came home and started unpacking them only to discover that you have to wire them and the directions said to get a qualified electrician, but with a little help from my Dad, I was able to wire them and get them all set.

Here's me just after finishing. I've got my needle nose plyers and my phone, which were my tools for this whole ordeal. Incidentally, on Sunday, a third detector went out and I had the other one to replace it with. It was a smoke detector miracle!