Bad Day x2

I thought I was having a bad day. Got a bad review from my university supervisor and felt like crap because I agreed with him. I was an ineffective teacher today. But no matter how crappy my days are, I realized how bad Amanda's days can be. Mine are nothing in comparison.

On a daily basis, she is dealing with keeping new borns alive. But there are occasionally those that will not make it. She has to deal with death. It forces her to grieve but also help families grieve. Then when it's all done with, she has the duty of wrapping up the body in plastic and uncerimoniously carrying the child down to the morgue, leaving something she spent time caring for and nurturing lying on a hard, cold table.

Makes me feel bad thinking about that, but puts things into perspective how my bad days aren't so bad.

Bicycle Ingenuity

Long story, short... working on linear magnetically induced electrical circuit for powering whatever by attaching magnets to bike wheels. Sqeaky and I had some creative ideas and are working on the calculations. I need to test the lifting capacity of a variety of magnets at 2mm.

Has this been created before? Probably. Might we improve upon another patent? Possibly. Even if it is a catastrophic failure, due to complete miscalculations, flaws in design, or excessive cost, the project sounds fun.

So, I'm awfully tired today... all day.

Made the effort to get my fingerprints done to submit with the state teaching certification. It was really simple and clean to boot! Fingerprinting is typically all digital now (except at campus security).

Confidence continues to climb in the classroom. I'm beginning to take the initiative to get things done for students and learning how to do it. I'm ready to teach. It'll take a while to be great, but I'm ready to continue that process.

New Traditions

Getting ready for baby is a wonderful nerve-inducing time of thinking of new traditions. I was flipping through a book of ideas for families and got really warm hearted about the ideas we could do:

• photo with "family" tree at important times
• picking the wall for a growth chart
• picking books for nightly story time

Yeah, I'm getting a little excited.

The baby room is mostly empty, as the photo shows, and the only things that will go into the room will be for the little one. We will likely get the crib from family in the next month (yay, hand-me-downs) but we are still on the look-out for a changing table and I have a feeling that our tax rebate will be used to buy a glider. The rocking chair in the picture is being saved for Stephanie.

So Much For Spring

After the wonderful weather yesterday, the windy-snowy-rain rolled in today. This dreary weather afforded me the opportunity to do rainy day stuff. While watching 3+ movies (The Break-Up; Firehouse Dog; and Harry Potter and the blah somthing), I took some time today to visit forgotten websites, update bookmarks, and seek out new things to read online. I expanded my Twitter account to include more of my favorite internet personalities, partly due to none of my friends having accounts.
I hit up Nick's Flickr account to see what he's been up to. I really should start an account there and drop him some comments. I value his friendship eventhough I see him maybe once monthly. The additional contact would really help. It's free, might as well.
As far as teaching goes: I have found that I have trouble thinking up lesson or discussion topic ideas on the fly but creating lists really helped. By doing the same thing with blog post ideas, it should help me be more consistent in writing entries (perhaps I can even pre-write some).

You can see in the picture (taken 1 day after the previous picture was taken) how much the snow melted yesterday. Here it comes again!

Spring Springing

I have started my Spring cleaning! Last night we cleaned the house thouroughly (in a few rooms) and it feels so much better. I'm cleaning those hard-to-reach areas, scrubbing the often-missed spots, and organizing the misplaced stuff. Why? Well, it really needs to be done, first and foremost. The secondary reason the arriving baby. I guess nesting isn't just a mother-to-be routine. Tertiary reason: grandparents potentionally coming to town next weekend. The last reason is what's pushing me to get it all done sooner than later, but it isn't what motivated me to start... and I'm okay with that.
The rest of today will keep me busy. Two of my gaming friends are moving out of their respective apartments and moving in together. They, and other people will likely be here in the next 30min to an hour, so I need to start getting dressed. So glad today's weather is going to be so nice. 9:40AM in Nebraska on the first of March and it's already 39°F. The high is 59°. Woo! Spring is around the corner.

Twitter

Life grinds on, student teaching continues (in my second semester), money gets tight, I seek cheap ways to entertain myself. Hence: Twitter. The new widget attached to the blog will update a few times a day "ideally". Realizing I wanted to blog daily, Twitter-ing 3-4 times daily seems unrealistic. However, if I convince myself to do even more, maybe a 1x daily update will become possible.