Hey There!

Pssssht.  Last week was hard.  After a full week off for Thanksgiving, I returned to the harsh reality that, well, work is hard.  And kids are annoying right before Christmas.  And accreditation years at school are their own personal hell.  It was one of those weeks where I had to groan and pout and peel myself out of bed each morning, and where the only thing I wanted to do when I got home was take a coma nap.  So that's what happened.  There were coma naps and that was about it.

But this weekend brought with it returned motivation, a can-do attitude, and enough energy for me to become, (as Cassie always puts it and I always want to steal, but then I don't want to steal because then I'm a big fat stealer) "a whirling dervish of productivity."  And then I was feeling back on top of the world.  While the Christmas tasks aren't even close to being done, the miserable school tasks are well on their way--or at least enough on their way that I don't have to worry about them when I exit my classroom.

I'm so happy right now.  Happy that we have 1 1/2 episodes of Boardwalk Empire to catch up on, that my Christmas cards are ordered (and that I didn't have to pay anything for them because I won a $100 Shutterfly credit earlier this year!), happy that maybe--just maybe!--Newt Gingrich will be the Republican nominee, and happy that there's a big bowl of peppermint marshmallows just waiting for me to go ellipt so that I can eat them up without feeling guilty.  I'm happy that I get to read one of my faves, The Great Gatsby, with my juniors twice every day, and I'm happy that after nine more school days I won't have to see those same juniors for a while.  I'm happy that we're getting our tree this week and that I get to make my house into a really busy, super tacky, a little bit white-trash winter wonderland.  And I'm happy that I get to share this fun Christmas season with the cutest dog ever and the best husband ever and an active little fetus who's been going all Michael Flatley* on my insides today.

Here's what it's been looking like around here.

 Mitch needed to help load the refrigerator with beer.

 And tell Matt a very funny secret.

 This is how far I am with Christmas decorating.

 Cupcakes for a baby shower!  You probably forgot that I'm basically a professional baker.

 Pup was feeling a little down this weekend, which was probably more upsetting to Matt and me than it was to him.

 Talking to Shecky on speakerphone during ellipting.  It's kind of awesome.

 Peppermint creamy goodness.

 Human child has some work to do if he's going to be cuter than his brother.

 This totes could have been our Christmas card photo--you know, if Mitch didn't look like he had rabies and I didn't look like a ghost.  Oh well.

Soul. Mates.  

Happy week to you!  May it be full of marshmallows and Nucky Thompson.  And dogs.  Always dogs.

*His legs flail about as though independent of his body!

Slackass.

Okay, so I've been a real slackass lately with the blog.  And with everything else in my life.

Why?  Am I sick?  Am I depressed?  Are Matt and I on the verge of divorce?  Has our internet been out?  Was I bitten by a brown recluse? No, no, no (but he has made me wake up from naps three times this week which is making me consider it), no, and no*.  

Nope.  Just lazy, and unmotivated to do anything but play Mario 3, watch Mad Men, watch Friday Night Lights, eat Hershey's nuggets (damn you, Publix, and your buy one get one free temptations!) and snuggle with the dog.  Oh, and nap.  I've been very motivated to nap.  Last night I took a 6-hour nap.  Yep, Matt was at work (so he couldn't wake me up.  HA!) and I slept from 6:00 until midnight.  It was. . .amazing.**

Just wanted to check in and say what's up.  We've got a fun and relaxing weekend planned, and maybe--just maybe--I'll be able to muster up the energy and motivation to get some stuff done around this joint and then share it with you.  At minimum, I'll post pictures of me lying on the guest bed, playing Mario 3*** and eating chocolates.  Clearly, thirty has been good to me so far.

What have y'all**** been up to?

P.S.--I actually wrote this during lunch, and in the meantime had a work episode that is making my blood boil.  Can't say anything about it here, but I'm suddenly feeling a surge of energy.  Golly, maybe I need to be angry more often!  I'll be super productive then!

*But I do have a really bad mosquito bite.  Can I blame my vegetable state on this?

**And don't even think about going and getting yourself all hot and bothered thinking that I'm with child.  Because I'm not.  

***Send me all of the secrets you remember or find about Mario 3.  I mean, I'm good and all, but it's been like 20 years (ACK!  I can even pull that "20 years" bull jive out and use it for real!) and I don't remember everything.

****How do you feel about y'all?  Love it or hate it?  I love it because I think the English language needs a word like it.  (Spanish has one, after all.)  I also love split infinitives, though.  And excessive parentheses and exclamation points.  And fragments, apparently.

The Wheels on the Bus. . .

Today I had the rare privilege* of going on a field trip with hundreds of ninth graders.  It was about as fun as you would imagine a field trip with hundreds of ninth graders to be, especially since we were only going across town to the tech school, so there were no fun zoos or museums to speak of.  The only fun part was when, during the presentation on the early childhood development pathway, I tried to convince a couple of my girls that the robot babies were actually dead babies.  They didn't buy it.  They also didn't believe that the mannequin heads in the cosmetology room were severed heads of fugitives.**  Shoot.

One of the best (and by best I mean, of course, worst) parts of this trip was that I got to ride across town in a school bus. 

I hate riding school buses.

Hate hate hate hate hate.

And do you know why?  (I mean, other than the fact that they smell and don't have good climate control and they're uncomfortable and always chock full of screaming children?) 

I super hate school buses because, when I was in the tenth grade I had to ride the school bus to school.  And I hated it.  It took 45 minutes each way, and there were a bunch of trashy kids on my bus, and it was uncomfortable and loud and too bumpy for me to be able to get my homework done.  So I'd just sit there, bored and miserable.  If I was lucky, I might get to talk to some preppy girl about her newest pair of jeans from Abercrombie. 

Before too long, I realized that the only thing that would make the bus ride bearable would be sleep.  So I took to sleeping on the bus.  And then I took to lying on the seat and sleeping on the bus.  And then, on one fateful day, I took to sleeping a little too hard on the bus--so hard, in fact, that I didn't wake up for my stop.  And I didn't wake up for the next stop, or the next stop after that, either.

I didn't wake up until much later, when I popped my head up, only to realize that I was the only kid on the bus and that the bus was now on the highway.

Oops.

Both I and bus driver were pretty freaked out.  Fortunately--in a very embarrassing twist--the bus was headed to my brother's middle school.  I had to go to the office, call my parents, and get permission to, in my sixteenth year of life, ride the middle school bus home with my kid brother.

It was pretty humiliating. 

And that, my friends, is why I hate school buses.  But, really, doesn't everyone hate school buses?


*The universe hates me.

**This, coupled with the fact that they didn't believe that I was Jesus the other day, makes me think that I'm losing my touch when it comes to lying to children. 

This and That

1.  Ladies and gentlemen, it's Snuggie weather time!  The other night I snuggied up on the couch with the dog (who does not, for some reason, own his own Snuggie).  If it gets any colder outside it's going to be lying-on-the-couch-in-a-sleeping-bag weather.  Whoop, whoop!

2.  Informal poll.  Are you tired all the time?  Because I'm tired all the time, and I can't decide if this fatigue is A.) a result of my weird sleep habits and caffeine addiction, B.) just part of being a grown-up, or C.) some kind of health problem.

3.  And, just in case you need to see how tired I look all the time, here's my school picture.  (By the way, I think that one of the very worst parts of my job is the fact that I'm forced to take school pictures that will be featured in a yearbook.)  This is what I look like at 9:45 a.m. with no makeup, and little will to live.  In my defense, I had just spent the last hour of my life corralling primping ninth graders through a stuffy hallway,  trying to get about 25 of them to keep from screaming and touching each other while standing in line.  The only somewhat redeeming thing about this photo is that I had actually brushed my hair that morning.   

And how's this for a before and after?  That's what 12 years, hatred in your heart, and a love for baked goods will do to you.

4.  We've had two fun new meals this week: Quick Dirty Rice from Our Life in the Kitchen, and Cheesy Beefy Potato Soup from My Fiance Likes It So It Must Be Good.  Both were very, very tasty.  Both will be made again.

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5. My eleventh graders have figured out that if they want to get me off-topic, all they need to do is bring up Amber from Teen Mom.  Is that bitch in jail yet?  Or at least sterilized?

6. Bought the first two book of The Hunger Games series for Chloe [but really for Matt who wanted an excuse to read them].  I kind of want to read them, but I'm afraid that they'll give me bad dreams. 

7.  The election was a bit of a suckfest--an expected suckfest, but a suckfest nonetheless.  At least most of the craziest of the crazies lost, right?  Hey, but did you hear that Sean from the Boston season of The Real World is now a Representative from Wisconsin? You know, the lumberjack guy who married the crazy girl who made out with Puck on the San Francisco season of The Real World.  If I remember right, I liked him (Sean, not Puck).  Did you watch the Boston season?  It was the one with Elka and Genesis and Montana (Basically during MTV's phase of selecting only cast members who had silly names.  Now they just try to find the person who's most likely to do steroids and botox and take 50 shots in a hour's time.).

8. I seriously have the best mother-in-law.  The other night I was talking to her about how I can't seem to find any good baking chocolate in Savannah, and today I got this in the mail.  I love her.

9. Tomorrow Matty and I will be attending a showing of The River Why at the Savannah Film Festival.  We're excited because we got free tickets (old roommate Cris is a baller who scores free stuff for us), but mostly because it stars Zach Gilford (a.k.a. MATT SARACEN!).  It basically looks like a modern-day A River Runs Through It, which is awesome because I LOVE A River Runs Through It. 

10.  Just spent a good chunk of my night making candied pecans and caramel.  Get ready for something tasty!

Oh, Friday, where have you been all my life--or, for the last six days?

Moment of Realization

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So, at around 9:00 tonight I was walking into my local Target, because that's what I do and because I needed some boring household items and the new David Sedaris book.  On this particular Saturday night, Target was hoppin' moreso than usual.  There were about 10-15 people waiting outside the store, talking and socializing, and the parking lot was about half full.

Walking toward the store, I encountered a guy, about 55-60 years old.  He didn't look crazy or homeless or like a serial killer--or what I think a serial killer should look like (damn you, Trinity, for f'ing with my notions about what serial killers look like).  Our exchange went something like this:

Guy [confused]: What's going on?
Me: What do you mean what's going on?
Guy: It's nine o' clock, right?
Me: Oh, you mean because it's so busy?  Eh, that's just 'cause it's Saturday.
Guy [pointing at sky]: It's. . .dark outside.
Me: Yeah.  It's nine o' clock.
[guy pauses for a few seconds and then his eyes widen]
Guy: Oh no!  Don't tell me it's nine o' clock AT NIGHT!
Me: Yeah, it's nine o' clock at night.
Guy: Oh dear.  I just slept fourteen hours without realizing it.

Poor guy was all out of sorts.  That must've been one hell of a coma nap.

Cream Cheese Poundcake

Here's why life's been awesome lately:

1. I had the smoothest, most lovely first week of school yet.  It was so good, in fact, that I'm left with that "waiting for the other shoe to drop" feeling.  Hopefully that other shoe stays waaaaay up in the air.  And hopefully my little baby ninth graders stay as sweet as they were this week (there is a zero percent chance of that happening) and hopefully my eleventh graders don't knock me off of the pro-baby wagon. 
2. Speaking of the pro-baby wagon, Matt and I have been ridin' it for 28 days now.  Like being possessed by the devil, I tell you.  I'd also be a damned liar if I didn't admit to having fantasized about: decorating a nursery, naming a little girl an old lady name, watching Matt be an awesome dad, and teaching a little human how to be completely awesome.  I'm less excited about: being pregnant, spending all of our extra money on that little person with the old person name, not being able to pay as much attention to Mitch, getting even more fat than I already am, and not being able to take naps whenever I want.
3. Speaking of naps, I took a 5-hour one on Thursday night.  That's right, lest we forget, Mandy is the world champion of nap-taking.  What was even more impressive was that, upon waking from that 5-hour nap, I took a shower (which I hardly ever do) and graded a big stack of papers.  My productivity the night before made for an easy day at school on Friday.
4. Speaking of school on Friday, it was the best ever--not because I got to read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" with my juniors (because I hate the Puritans more than I hate Ashlee Simpson), but because we got FREE CHICK-FIL-A!  I don't know why we got free sandwiches, but there's nothing like some free chicken sandwiches to make an already good day even better.
5. And speaking of delicious food, when I got home on Friday, I made a cream cheese poundcake. I didn't even know that was a thing until one of the women at work requested that I make one. So I set out for a recipe, and went to town. (Well, I didn't really go to town so much as I went to Publix, and then went back to my glorious happy kitchen to do some baking.) Check it out.

(Notice the gorgeous Amish Butterprint bowls.  They're not only beautiful, but better because of the little spout things.  Made for a better baking experience.)

(From what I understood, I needed to fill the pan to be very full because there were no leavening agents in the batter.  I may have gone a little wild with this instruction.)

(See?  And it gets worse.)

(Oh well.  More crispy pieces for me to eat.)

(What I really want to do is to pan-fry this piece of cake in some butter and then eat it with Thomas Jefferson's Vanilla Ice Cream.  I also want my jeans to continue to fit, so I guess I'll pass on that idea.)
Cream Cheese Poundcake (adapted from this recipe)

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups butter
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
2 cups white sugar
2 tablespoons vanilla extract (I used vanilla bean paste)
6 eggs
3 cups cake flour

Directions
1.Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Grease one 10 inch tube pan.
2.Cream together the butter, cream cheese, and sugar until light. Stir in the vanilla extract. Add the flour and the eggs alternately, beginning and ending with the flour. Pour batter into the prepared pan.
3.Bake at 325 degrees F (165 degrees C) for 1 hour and 15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Enjoy the rest of this long weekend!

Love and Same-side Booth Sitting

After a looooong day at work yesterday, I was thrilled to come home, and even more excited to see that my new Real Simple had arrived. I love me some Real Simple--love the recipes, love the road tests, love the tips and the articles. I even love the "Thoughts" feature, the feel-good quote and picture that start off each issue.

When Matt, Mitch, and I settled in for our Friday family snuggle nap (you can puke now if you'd like, because we really do call it that. In fact, we usually scream it in a high-pitched voice--"FAMILY SNUGGLE NAP!"--and then retreat to the bed, our favorite place.) I took my new, crisp magazine. I read this month's quote, and it made me smile, so I then read it to Matt:

"Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking

outward together in the same direction"

~ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY, WIND, SAND AND STARS

And while I was picturing something sweet like this. . .

. . .Matt responded: I think that Real Simple is advocating same-side booth sitting.

(You know, the couples who go out to eat by themselves but insist on sitting on the same side of the booth. Often they start making out in the middle of the restaurant. We are anti same-side booth sitters.)

It was like the time I said I would want to name a boy child George, and he asked me if I really wanted to name my kid after George Bush. My solution: George Clinton. Or maybe George Barack.

Sometimes I think I might hate Matt, but then he calls on a Friday afternoon and suggests a family snuggle nap, and I fall in love all over again.

We need a nap.

We're not sad, just tired.

We have had a long week, and the self-improvement plan permits naps on Fridays and Saturdays.

See you in about three hours.

XOXO

Mandy and Mitch (a.k.a. E.T. and Elliot)

Productive Like Monica

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Day three of the self-improvement plan, and I'm a regular Monica Geller. Man, do I ever feel improved! I was so busy improving and organizing and being productive yesterday that I didn't even have time to blog! Since Sunday I have:

• not taken a single nap (this is a much bigger accomplishment than it may seem!)
• gone to bed much earlier (between 11:30 and 12:30--not early per se, but way better than my previous 2:00 bedtime)
• ellipted every day (so that I can eat the entire bowl of Halloween candy and sleep like a champion)
• turned in my first quarter grades two days early (and was crazy productive all around at school)
• grocery shopped for the next 2 1/2 weeks (meal planning extraordinaire!)
• forced myself to get up 10 minutes earlier than my usual wake-up time (this is the biggest achievement of them all--next thing you know I'll be showering daily!)
• packed my lunch for school (to prevent ravenous inhalations of food upon returning home)
• still found time to snuggle with a dog (my life's purpose)

I don't have to go to school tomorrow (horray for furloughs?), so I'm really looking forward to sleeping in, enjoying the crisp air and the quiet no-screaming-teenagers Wednesday, and, of course, being even more productive.

Shalom Y'all

One reason that I was excited to marry Matt was because I would get to change my name to a name that sounded Jewish. I had this fantasy that I would pretend to be Jewish, and then take off work on all of the Jewish holidays (which is really just a reincarnation of a Saved by the Bell plot, I believe).

To celebrate my fake Jewish heritage, then, I began to embrace all things Jewish.

To nobody's surprise, I began with food. My former roommate Cris and I became big fans of Savannah's Jewish Food Festival, appropriately titled the Shalom Y'all festival. I'm not joking. That's really the name. They sell tshirts, even.


The festival was this weekend, so I joined Cris and friends to enjoy a beautiful afternoon in Forsyth Park, and to feast on Jewish delicacies. Adventurous eater that I am, I inhaled a footlong hot dog. It was. . .amazing.

And I picked up some kosher dog treats for the pup.

A few years ago, when Cris and I attended the festival, I picked up this literary masterpiece. Noshy Boy. It's Jewish didactic children's literature at its finest. I'm obsessed with this book, and if more people knew about Noshy Boy, I'd be him for Halloween.

Nosh: (verb) to snack

Noshy Boy has a very similar plot to one of my other favorites, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Noshy Boy loves to snack, and he snacks himself fat. He learns, through the course of the work, to enjoy healthier foods and snacks only in moderation. It's a coming of age piece, really. A real bildungsroman.

I think I had this happen to me once. . .

Well, today I picked up another in the series, Shluffy Girl.

Shluffy (adjective) sleepy, tired

Shluffy Girl has her own vice: sleeping too much. "Nap time is Shluffy Girl's favorite time of the day. But for Shluffy Girl, nap time is almost all the time." Shluffy Girl sleeps all the time, and it begins to cause problems. . .

She falls asleep on the bus and misses her stop.

[Hot damn, if this didn't happen to me when I was in the tenth grade! I fell asleep lying down in the seat, missed my stop, and woke up going down the highway. It was a debacle, a horribly embarrassing experience. As we learned a few weeks ago on 60 Minutes, this also happened to Andy Rooney. You know something's seriously wrong with you when you start having stuff in common with Andy Rooney.]

Eventually, Shluffy Girl learns to find a balance between life and her true love, sleep.

I feel like I've met her somewhere.

Oh dammit.