Friday, October 12, 2007

Younger Brother and Orange Pants



My brother, Jim, got into town yesterday and typical of most air-travellers today, he has a story to tell of his trip here. It is truly amazing that the airline industry continues to survive. Any other business that works (or doesn't work) the way the airlines do would have gone belly up a long time ago. But, Jim got here and that's what counts. This afternoon I met him at Arcadia where we watched the first half of the Arcadia/Jefferson soccer game. When we left at half time, Arcadia was winning 1-0. Jim and I walked around the athletic fields at Arcadia, which have been enlarged to accommodate all the sports teams that were added when a middle school was added to the campus. The above photo was taken at dinner tonight. Gram made a leg of lamb, roasted red potatoes, green beans and a green salad. She served a wonderful Apple Pie for dessert. It was all great!
Corey sent this photo of him wearing the orange pants. He wore them on Monday night when he went to the Bob Dylan concert in Syracuse. Lookin' good, Corey!

Jim is packing up for his trip to Jenny Lake/Saratoga. He leaves at 6 AM and I'm hoping he leaves quietly so I can sleep in! 

Tomorrow I will be winding the yak yarn into skeins and trying to get the smell out of it. Joanie has given me another suggestion for how to get the smell out of the yarn, but I may not share it, unless we are forced to try it! 

Hope all is well.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Field Trip


Today was field trip day at school. All the second graders were going to the Public Market this morning and since they were supposed to be in PE, my schedule opened up so I was available to go along as a chaperone. The top photo is of the "fish guy" at the market-a real favorite with the kids. The second photo shows me with my 3 charges. I cannot remember the last time I rode on a school bus, and God bless school bus drivers! The kids were just barely under control on the way to the Market but were pretty tired on the way home so the bus was a bit more settled. I've been going to the Market for years and today I learned some interesting things about the place. It is the second oldest public market in the country and 10,000 people will visit the market on a typical, summer Saturday. The second graders were making Stone Soup when they returned to school, so after our tour we needed to walk around in our small groups and buy something to put into the soup. My girls chose to buy green beans and a couple of ears of corn. Don't know what Stone Soup is?? Check out the children's book by the same name at your local library.

I'll finish this post when I come back from Open House at my school. 

Why is Open House so exhausting? Is it all the smiling? Or maybe it's trying to remember all 400 kids' names. Or standing in one place for an hour and a half, even though Open House is only scheduled to be an hour. Or because it is at the end of a day of teaching. Or because at the end of a day of teaching I have to find something nice to say about each kid that comes in. Anyway, I am a very popular person at Open House and that is nice. 

Tomorrow my brother, Jim, comes in to town for his class reunion weekend. It's his 30th reunion-wow-he must be getting old. I don't need any comments that he is my younger brother!! 

Time to knit and drink some water, and rest up so I can go to bed.

Hope all is well.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Photo Re-try


I have heard from several loyal readers that 2 of the photos from the last post were not loading into the blog so I will try them here again. 

The first photo is from our rainy hike along the Green Trail River Walk along the Genesee River. The second photo was taken at Cipriani's restaurant with Bob and Sally.
If you can't see the photos this time, oh well. 

Tomorrow at school the second graders are going on a field trip to the Public Market. My student teacher and I are going on the trip too since the second graders will be missing their PE time. I love the public market and it should be a fun trip. 

Jim got an overhaul today-he just walked in and I noticed he got his haircut (he is racing this weekend, so he now has his "fast" haircut!). He tells me that he also got a flu shot today and went to the dentist! That's a full day-I wonder if he went to work!

Scrambled eggs for dinner tonight with free eggs from Wegmans along with some yummy bacon from Oscars!

Jeanne had a comment on the last blog entry with a recipe for a solution to try to get the odor out of the yak yarn. Thanks! Any other ideas out there? Leave me a comment.
Hope all is well.



Monday, October 8, 2007

Yippee for Christopher Columbus

It is Columbus Day and I had the day off from school! It was a beautiful day here until about 5:15 PM, but more about that later. 

After  a good work out at the gym, I did some shopping, including a stop at the new Eastern Mountain Sports store in Pittsford Plaza. The one in Marketplace Mall closed. The new store seemed bigger but they seemed to carry about the  same stuff. My only complaint was that the store was too dark! There were spotlights pointing down to some of the merchandise, but overall, it seemed like I was in a cave, not that there is anything wrong with being in a cave. I just prefer more light when I am shopping. 

Upon my return home, I baked up a grape pie from all the grapes that we squeezed yesterday. Grandma wasn't feeling well yesterday so did not come over to help make the pie fillings, but Sally had been planning to stop by to get a tutorial in grape pie making so I recruited her for a while. We ended up making 16 bags of grape pie filling. Today I baked one up to make sure that this year's crop of grapes was up to the standard and to share with Grandma (that will make her feel better). The pie is great! 

The voting for seeing Corey in his orange pants is closed and it was a unanimous decision to "bring on those pants!". Jeannie, thanks for the comment-I could see Michal wearing those orange pants. Corey and I have spoken about a photo, and he is thinking of doing a short video of him wearing those pants at a variety of locations around campus. So, Corey get busy on that video! Your public has spoken! Thanks to everyone who voted.

Jim and I were scheduled to go out to dinner with Bob and Sally tonight at a restaurant on
 the other side of the O'Rourke bridge (the bridge formally known as Stutson Street). When Jim got home a bit earlier than usual, I suggested that we go for a walk on the River Walk, along the Genesee River before going to the restaurant. The walk starts just south of the Charlotte Beach area, goes under the O'Rourke bridge and continues south for a mile or so. The neat part of this walk is a long, curving boardwalk along a swampy edge of the river. As we started walking, we heard some distant thunder and before too long we were walking in the rain (5:15 PM). We went prepared with our umbrellas, so we didn't get completely
 soaked. The thunderstorm moved through and it had stopped raining by the time we got back to the car. It was a good walk and we really worked up an appetite for dinner.

The restaurant was called Cipriani's Italian Seafood House and we all had a nice meal.
 We enjoyed hearing about Bob's trip to Tibet and to the Mount Everest base camp. What an experience! We shared a few laughs and had a leisurely dinner as a couple more thunder storms blew through. Bob brought some yak yarn home from Tibet for Sally and me and we may try to wind it into skeins this weekend so we can wash it and get the yak smell out of it! I wonder if tomato juice would work to get the odor out! Latex gloves may be in order while working with that yarn. 

Back to school tomorrow and I have rowing at night. Only the rowers going to Boston in a couple of weeks will be at practice, so we should be able to get on the water a little earlier than usual. Getting on the water as early as possible gets more critical as the days get shorter. It is scary rowing in the dark!

When I talked to Tucker on Saturday night, he told me that he had met up with some folks that had been on our river trip this summer. While on the river, they told Tucker that they were planning on coming to southeastern Utah this fall and would look him up. Well, they did and he was able to recommend some hikes for them to do and I believe he actually went  hiking with them one day. They also took him out to dinner twice!

Jim took a couple of photos from his NYC trip for the Corporate Challenge race and I will include one or two of those in a future post.

Hope all is well.