My Summer Vacation
Now that I'm on vacation, I've been keeping busy with three things:

1. Running
I've been going crazy with my running. I love it! It feels like cross country all over again. I run around one of the lakes near my house...it's about a 4-5 mile run and I have a route that doesn't stay on the lake running path very much. Since I have a short attention span and I am so goal-oriented, I need hills so I have something to push myself to complete. I just started late June and already I've lost weight and my legs feel like springs. I just need to cool it a bit; this morning, I had to walk almost all the way because of shin splints. A 70+ man shuffled past me and then two elderly women skated by on rollerblades, just to embarrass me more. So my plan is to ice and heat, whatever, and take advil before I run. I need my endorphins:) Here's my sprinting hills mix (cheesy, but it works):
Fell in Love with a Girl- The White Stripes
Lose My Breath- Destiny's Child
Ride- The Vines
I Will Follow-U2
C'mon C'mon- The Von Bondies
Knock on Wood- Amy Stewart
Run Away- The Real McCoy;)

2. My Final Project for Graduate School
Grr! I need to finish this! It's an incredibly detailed mini-unit, based on content-embedded language instruction. To give you an idea of how structured the assignment is, there are 19 grading points on the rubric. So there are 19 facets of instruction that I need to consider and find research to support in my planning. Grr. I mean, I think that I should have plans this thoughtful for all the teaching that I do. But when you're dealing with 8-year-olds, instruction has to be fluid, spontaneous, and essentially dictated by behavior. If I have one cah-razy student in a class, even if a 30-minute lesson is highly structured to meet all National Standards for No Child Left Behind, no learning is going to happen unless I can find a way to entice that student. 10 pages of justification for 2 1/2 hours of instruction are not going to make a difference in that case. And I hate hate hate APA citation style. Why don't they teach that in high school? I swear, I learned one way all my life, and then it's like, oops! it's so juvenile, figure out the APA style on your own, usually by pouring over an internet site or devouring an instruction manual. I still hate it. I'm definitely going to whip out everything today, though. I don't want to worry at the last minute about this, my last school project, probably ever.

3. Eating Differently
When I started my hell week of classes in June, I suddenly realized that the reasons that I usually use for eating the food that I did are so misguided. I used to eat a ton of reduced-fat pringles as a reward for hardwork, as a way to unwind, but it's really like 30 grams of fat. And when I had a bad day, I would eat comfort food to make myself feel better. So I was relying on food to manipulate my emotions, which obviously isn't the purpose of food. When I started thinking about food as nurishment for my body and as a means of my goal to become more healthy, it completely changed what I ate on a daily basis. Now, I only keep food in my house that's healthy, so if I'm really hungry, I can always eat a lot without feeling guilty. Because I hate the post-eating emotions, too. My new favorite foods are watermelon, roast chicken breast with Franks hot sauce, cottage cheese with melba toast, Spinach salad with cottage cheese, a little cheddar, and a few croutons, and fat-free cool whip for dessert. I also only eat substantive carbs for breakfast. It makes me feel so much more in control of being healthy. The running and changing menu made me realize that gimmic diets and programs are so unstable...it really has to be a change that you create on your own, work at, and eventually develop as habit, hopefully. Let's see if it lasts with all the beer and chips that my grandma will lay out everywhere on our family vacation...it will be like booby traps everywhere.

3 1/2. ooops. Another thing I'm doing is going on a lot of dates. It's like Next (on MTV), but the guys are actually smarter, less cheesy, and I get to "next!" Eventually, I want to narrow it down, but it's fun for now.