Excerpts from student letters

I haven't mentioned my new job here, but since September I have been working as an Americorps member going into to schools and into the community to present anti-violence programs. I mostly go to elementary schools to talk to the kids about bullying, gossiping and rumors, conflict resolution, anger management, etc. It's been a really great experience. The kids in one third grade class wrote me letters this week because it was my last time going to the class and I thought I would share some of what the kids wrote:

"Thank you for helping us with bullying, gossiping and my feelings. My favorite was gossiping because there was a lot of it at the time."
"You are a good person. Like when you play bingo with us instead of screaming you told us to sit down."
"I like your clothes, shoes and hair"
"You treat us very nicely. I will miss you when it's over. I wish you could come seven more times."
"Thank you for so being so nice. I like you hair and clothes. You are the best best best teacher. I wish you would always come."
"I like the game telephone. We always messed up but I sill like it"
"You are very pretty and talented"
"You treat us like we are your children"
"I love your hair and the games you play with us. You are kind and respect us."

And this is the best one:
"Thank you for helping us not bullying. I enjoy playing the bingo game. You have beautiful eyes. Your voice is very lovely. I like when you are talking."
My first love letter!

Sanwich of the week 8.27.09

Today for lunch I made a delicious egg salad sandwich. I put some paprika, dill, salt, pepper and tomatoes and onions.

I'm trying to be more conscious of what I eat. If I didn't think about I would eat cheese fries every single day. But I'm trying to be better and one of the things I'm really trying to be aware of is the fact that I don't eat a lot of meat. I'm not a vegetarian, I just don't like the taste of most meats and I also really hate cooking meat. I get really freaked out by having raw meat around and I'm paranoid about salmonella so I end up over cooking things. So because of this I'm trying to get my protein elsewhere which has lead to me eating more eggs and beans.

Lace and plaid

I came home from work the other night and went outside to take some pictures. They came out weird and sort of creepy because the lens got fogged up due to the humidity. Oh, Florida!

I also wanted to take a picture of my outfit from that night. I really liked it and was happy because they were all pieces that I've had forever but I really like the combination of it all.


So much lace! I love this skirt, I got it at a thrift store years ago and I feel that if I ever had a psychotic break I would wear this skirt every day.




This is another outfit from this week. I once bought a shirt pattern and the girl on the cover had a brooch pinned at the collar of the shirt and I really loved it and wanted to try it. It's kind of ridiculous but I think I love it!


Which by the way is sort of how I feel about taking pictures of my outfits everyday. It's kind of ridiculous but fun and it helps me remember the outfits that I like. So many times I stand in front of my closet hating everything I own, so it's nice to be able to look back and be like "oh yeah I do have things I like!" Also it makes me feel like Cher from Clueless, which certainly adds to the ridiculousness of it all.

I've been listening to this band The Low Anthem at work a lot and I really like them.
I don't know how to embed a video but here is the link for one of their songs.
click me

July 4th weekend

My sister came down for a visit this weekend with her two dogs. Her and my mom bought them hamburger toys so they could enjoy the 4th weekend also!



My sister also got me a belated birthday gift, a whirley-pop pop corn maker! I have wanted one for so long, I made some pop corn right away.


On the night of July 4th my sister and I practiced taking sparkler pictures. We tried to make letters, she was more successful with an "A" but "K" was hard to make plus I was making backwards! Oh well, it still looks neat.


Here are some other shots:


My sister's face in this one really cracks me up.




It was fun taking firework pictures, I want to do it again so I think I am going to look for after fourth of July sales and pick up some cheap fireworks.

Books and magazines

Barnes and Noble had a bunch of books and gift items on 50% off! So I got some new books, I didn't realize it until I got home but all of the books I bought are from Dover publishing. I love Dover books. They always have really interesting titles that aren't too expensive and they have great cover designs. Also the books themselves are made of quality paper and are made to last. I got a book about screen printing that I am really excited about. A couple of years ago my sister got me a screen printing kit that I have yet to use. Such a shame! I did screen printing in high school but wasn't sure how to go about without all the equipment that I had access to in school so hopefully this book will help me. From the little bit that I looked at it seems like a really great book. I will definitely post any experiments that I conduct. I also got a book about Norse gods and heroes, an arithmetic refresher and a book of Indian designs. I'm hoping to use some of these designs in my screen printing.
Oh I also got the newest edition of Lapham's Quarterly journal for Natan. This edition is about travel. If you've never looked through Lapham's you should! Each issue has a one topic and they collect different writings and pictures about the topic from various authors from all different time periods. I haven't spent too much time on the website but here it is if you're interested.

Saturday

Wow, I realized I could make collages on picasa! This is going to be so much fun and really make blogging easier and more interesting. I hated Just having a row of pictures. Well these were taken last Saturday somewhere around Fort Lauderdale airport while Laura and I waited for her dad. Those are my new yellow loafers that I found at a thrift store last week and I really love them, they are so comfortable and I really love shoes that are interesting colors. I look forward to making more exciting collages in the future!

Free Paint!

Neat. Glidden is giving away a free quart of paint. All you have to do is go to their website and pick your color and they will ship it to your home.
Free paint!

Washington D.C. final days (Saturday and Sunday)

Saturday I went to the National Postal Museum by myself. It was really neat and probably the nerdyist museum I have been to. They had an exhibit about stamps, about V-mail during WWII and then another exhibit about depression era stuff that wasn't open yet.





After I hoped on the subway and went back to the National Building Museum. I wanted to go back to the gift shop because I was so overwhelmed the day before and I couldn't decide what to buy. I also checked out the Norwegian rest stops exhibit again. Then I walked back to the hotel which was about 23 blocks away. It was a nice walk though. I went into an H&M store for the first time. I had previously bought their clothes at thrift stores and always really liked them. The store was packed and it was set up in a similar way to Forever 21 where they have things organized by color or theme instead of by type of garment. For some reason this really bothers me. What always ends up happening is that I see something I really like but it's out of place and it's not the right size and I have no idea where to look for the other sizes. I just want to go to a store and see all the pants together and shirts together. I guess I am clothes separatist, I'm anti clothes integration.

I also walked down the mall a little bit and walked by the White House, which was much closer to our hotel and it was also ridiculously crowed there. I didn't stay long because I was uncomfortable being packed in with so many tourists.

When I got back to the hotel I just relaxed for awhile because that night we went to the opera and I wanted to rest. We had thought that the Kennedy Center was in one direction from our hotel and we walked to this building that turned out to be the State Department building and most certainly not the Kennedy Center. Then we were majorly confused asked this man walking around and he turned out to be an opera fan and especially Wagner so he Natan started talking while he walked us to the Kennedy Center. It was super friendly of him and we got there just in time. The opera we saw was Siegfried, which is part of Wagner's ring cycle. I really enjoyed the show, the production was American themed so it was interesting. For example, the first scene takes place in the woods were it is secluded from other people and Siegfried lives there with Mime. In this production that put the scene in a trailer park, it worked really well. The other scenes were less successful but not bad.
Natan asked some random woman to take a picture of us and she like scoffed and rolled her eyes! She could have just said no. So he asked someone else who gladly took the picture for us.

The lightening makes Natan's jacket look really red, which is was not and it makes him look like a game show host.

Here you can see the weird statue of Kennedy that makes him look like a burn victim.


Before the show we went to this really delicious restaurant for dinner and afterward we went back there for dessert which was equally delicious. I had a vertical banana split.



Sine we were staying by George Washington University there were statues of him everywhere.


Waiting for the bus, which turned out to be unnessacary

Washington day two (Friday)

Friday Natan and I took the subway back to where we were on Thursday, by the capitol and went to the Florida House. The Florida House serves as an embassy for Florida citizens visiting in Washington D.C.



The door of the Florida House


Then we went to the Folger Shakespeare Library. They had an exhibit about sleeping and dreaming in Elizabethan times. This is the drinking fountain there.


Then we walked to the National Building Museum, which was just wonderful. We saw exhibits about the planing of D.C., one that showed various items from the collection at the museum, one about rest stops in Norway and one about planing green cities. That one was my least favorite and the rest stops of Norway was my favorite. But even better was the gift shop. It was awesome. It was more like a small store with lots of books and design items than just selling items from the museum. I got a crank flashlight shaped like a black cat, the eyes are the lights, I got this wall vase for my mom, a pacman oven mitt for my sister and a porcelain key necklace for myself.
The National Building Museum, it is housed in the pension building from the Civil War.

A statue outside the museum.


The Museum has the largest Corinthian columns in the world!



I had to sneak this picture that was in the exhibit about planing D.C. because pictures are not allowed there, unfortunately.

Washington D.C. day one (Thursday)

This is our hotel is D.C. It was called the Allen Lee. I thought it was a hostel because I found it on a hostel website and they have rooms with shared bathrooms like most hostels. But it was a regular hotel and even though I had reserved a room with a shared bathroom, when we got there they gave us a larger room with a private bathroom and TWO double beds for the same price as the other room. They said if someone reserved the room we would have to move but no one did and we stayed there the whole time. Natan even tried to pay the difference in price just to guarantee that we would keep the room but they told us not to worry.



It was in a really great location. We were right across from George Washington University, about seven blocks from the White House, a couple of blocks from the Kennedy Center (that's where we saw the opera on Saturday so that was nice) and in walking distance of Georgetown (we walked there for dinner our first night)

So Thursday was our first full day in Washington and first we went to the Holocaust Museum. The museum is free but you need to get tickets that they give out in the morning. The museum was good, but the security guards were pretty jerky. The cafe was good too. I had a bagel and matzah ball soup! They had a temporary exhibit on propaganda and that was really great. After spending more hours than we had planned in the Holocaust Museum we wandered around looking for something to eat but there are surprisingly few restaurants around the Mall so we went to the Smithsonian castle and had chili cheese dogs!


Then we walked to Capitol Hill and as we were getting closer we heard steel drum music. We saw that there were people on the lawn of the capitol and they had a small stage set up and we saw people rehearsing something. We stayed and watched for awhile because it was so ridiculous and after ward we found out that it was the National Day of Prayer. It had very low attendance, apparently during Bush's presidency it had become a large event that held events in the White House. Obama though has distanced himself from the day because of ties between church and state and the constitutional division of them.


We headed to the Library of Congress next. I was really looking forward to going there because I am a big fan of the LOC and their website. We saw two of their exhibits, one was about early America and it featured the Waldseemmuller 1507 world map, which is the first to show America named America. The other exhibit was about Lincoln because it's the bicentennial of his birthday. I could have stayed much longer there but they were closing.

Chesapeake Bay

Our first day in Washington we decided to travel out of the city while we still had the car. So we drove to Virginia and went to Mason Neck State Park which is on the Chesapeake Bay. It was beautiful and it was nice to be outside with fresh air and in the sun.


This is the Beaver swamp but we did not see any beavers.







Afterward we went to Manassas, which was were the first battle of the Civil War took place.



This is a statue of good ole Stonewall Jackson. Manassas is where he got his nickname.


This memorial was put up after the battle by veterans.

Philadelphia

We got to Philadelphia on Sunday night. We stayed in a hostel with four beds and we were told that if another couple came they would put them with us, but we ended up having the room to ourselves both days.
We had a shared bathroom, and the other guests were mostly this group of middle school students on a field trip. The hostel was this great old mansion in the middle of Fairway Park.


We had planned to go to the art museum on Monday but we forgot that most museums are closed Mondays. Then we were going to go to Gettysburg but their was 100% chance of rain and it had rained for a couple days before that and there were flood warnings so we didn't go at all. So Monday we ended up going to the Mutter Museum, which "was founded to educate future doctors about anatomy and human medical anomalies"! And there were a hell of a lot of anomalies! When I saw the Bodies exhibit a couple of years ago it was really impressive but somehow those bodies seemed like fun and playful and the poses were like playing sports or something, but these bodies were more scientific. There were fetus' in jars and all these weird things and medical instruments lying about. They also had a lot of stuff about conjoined twins and they had the growth that was removed from Grover Cleavland's jaw and a piece of John Wilkes Booth! It was really impressive and crazy. You should check out the virtual tour: http://www.collphyphil.org/virt_tour/museum_5.htm
You weren't allowed to take pictures in there but the virtual tour is pretty good.
After that we just drove around because it was raining. We went to some thrift stores and then we met up with one of Natan's friends at the bar he works at which was a really great place called Johnny Brendas. It's a stupid name but the food was good and they had only local beers and good songs on the jukebox.

So these are pictures of a restaurant that we ate in called The Spaghetti Warehouse in Philadelphia. They had a trolley car inside! And an old timey phone transfer system. It was cool, I've never seen one up close and all the cords still worked and you could plug them in and they still had the labels for the different lines.



Tuesday we went to the Philadelphia art museum.

Natan really wanted to see the Marcel Duchamp stuff they had, which is basically all of his work. It was awesome! Two of his largest most impressive works are the large glass, which actually broke while in transport while Duchamp was still alive and the Museum was of course freaking out but he thought it was great and pieced all the glass back together.

and one called Given 1. The Waterfall 2. Illuminating Gas, which is a door that you walk up to a door

and look through two peep holes and see a woman lying in a field by a stream.

It was so fantastic, when it was first exhibited you people didn't know what it was and there was a foot pedal that you stepped on and a light came on behind the door and illuminated the scene. Now they keep it always lit up and the foot pedal is gone, but I like to think of people might accidentally step on the pedal.
These pictures are all from the Philadelphia Museum website.
Here is a statue of George Washington outside the Museum.

Philadelphia was pretty good, it was raining pretty much the whole time we were there and we didn't go see any of the historical American sites so I would definitely go back there. Also we also only went to one gallery on one floor of the art Museum and that was amazing so I would want to go back.