October | 2010 | Just Casting On

the path david walks to work

I couldn’t help, but include a picture of the leaves around here. Anytime I start to feel overwhelmed or frustrated, looking outside the windows at the beautiful leaves changing from green to yellow to orange to red (I guess also to brown) makes me smile.

On to the actual purpose of this post, today was an exciting afternoon. My soccer practice was canceled because of rain and people feeling sick. So I came home from class and planned tomorrow’s class. It took like half an hour. Why, you may ask? You are worrying that all my complaining about time is really just empty chatter. No, during my internship last spring I taught a course on Judaism, Christinaity and Islam. One of my lessons was on the flood story and how it teaches us about the nature of the Jewish (and Christian) scriptures. Thank goodness for my crazy, over achiever notes. I reread the passage, skimmed over the notes, and I was set. Sadly, this won’t work for every lesson because I didn’t teach everyday last semester AND I’m using a different primary text, but it does give me hope that in the near future, maybe even next semester, I will finally be able to move beyond organizing the material to finding better and more creative ways to teach it. Perhaps I could even spend time reading up on parts of the religions I don’t know as much about.

I also excited because I thought it would be fun to review the major player and vocab of Judaism using a word search. They’ll be given clues and to answer and then the answers are in the word search. It’s pretty hard…see how you can do below:Here are the words: Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, Solomon, Assyria, Babylon, Eschatology, Torah, Anthropocentric, Diaspora, Theodicy, Neviim, Kethuviim, Ark of the Covenant (w/o spaces), Pentateuch, Prophet

Word search courtesy of me and the Discovery education website. Just a hint words can be backward (even on the diagonal).

i felt a little like this sheep before the long weekend

A couple weeks ago during my most recent New Faculty Orientation meeting, my boss said that October is like unloading (or loading – I can’t remember) a moving train. The analogy is definitely accurate. Amidst the regular craziness of class, dorm duty, and sports, October adds in midterm grades (with progress reports) and parent/family conferences. I tell you all this as a way to explain my extended absence. Thankfully, this craziness concluded with a “Long Weekend,” which is pretty much just an actual weekend – only it happens Sunday-Tuesday. Since the job normally includes no weekend (games on Saturday, duty on Sunday), these three days were a breath of fresh air. Here are the highlights from my first real weekend off in eight weeks.

waiting sheep

Our weekend began our second annual trip to Rhinebeck’s Sheep and Wool Festival: It was a lot of wooly fun full of leap’n llamas, pumpkin chunking, apple crisps, and of course yarn.

David had to work Monday and Tuesday, so I was here. Both mornings were spent doing boring things like grading and planning my Judaism unit, but the afternoons were pretty great. Monday I got a lot of things done I had wanted to do for a while…oil change, pant alterations, make dinner for David and I, call a good friend from college (that one had been in the works since July!). Today’s afternoon was even better (seriously). It was the logical conclusion to the sheep and wool festival, knitting.

what a beautiful model

I completed a new hat for David while watching Avatar, which I had yet to see. While the hat was great, the movie was just okay. Great effects, but I wanted more from the plot. I espeically wanted James Cameron to stop explaining to me what he wanted me to get from the plot. But, let’s return our focus to the better part of the afternoon, knitting with Calvin in my lap. With that said, I’m going to go start on a second hat. Hopefully you will hear more from me soon.