What a week!!! Hurricane Ike really did a number here.

This is the first time I’ve been able to get online in nearly a week.

As I’m sure you all know, Hurricane Ike came rolling (or rampaging) into Texas last Saturday.  Work was cancelled last Friday to prepare for the storm.

Guess what.

Work was cancelled ALL THIS WEEK as well.

So here’s basically what I’ve been doing for the past week:

Saturday: Wake up in middle of night, power goes out around 2 a.m., watch trees whipping violently back and forth behind the fence, praying they don’t crash into the house (they didn’t–no damage to our property thankfully).

Sunday: Still no power!  I mean, no power ANYWHERE in the area.  Husband and I traveled nearly 2 hours to College Station to buy a generator (husband works from home, so power is pretty important).  Stop at every gas station, auto parts store, Walmart, etc, looking for gas cans.  Finally find some at a Home Depot.  Then stop at every gas station looking for gas.  Don’t get gas until after 8 p.m.  Husband gets generator running near 9 p.m.  YAY!  We now have a tv to watch and cool fridges.  Still no cable, hence, no internet.

Monday, Tuesday: None of the schools in my district have power.  School is cancelled the rest of the week.  I eat, sleep, read…put down my summer decorations, put out my fall decorations.  Rake the yard.  Husband tries to clean out the pool.  He literally brings the rake into the pool to rake out pine branches.  My throat starts to feel funny–kind of thick, but not hurting.  My parents stop by, our realtor stops by, neighbors come by…we’re very popular today.

Wednesday: Ok, now my throat hurts.  It feels very swollen.  And have I mentioned yet on here that I’m also pregnant and in my first trimester so, of course, nauseous all the time?  Almost done with first trimester though.  Start coughing up green stuff.  Call the OBGYN.  OBGYN calls me in azithromycin.  Now I have the task of finding an open pharmacy somewhere in the area!  Find one about 30 minutes away.  Phew.  Go home (still no power), take the first dose, take some mucinex, sleep, eat, sleep, eat, cough, cough, throw up, sleep, eat, cough, cough, cough…can’t sleep…

Thursday: Cough, throw up, cough, eat, sleep, take next dose of antibiotics, take mucinex, cough, cough, eat, sleep, sleep…hey, still no power.  But at least husband can get online for work because he bought one of the devices from Verizon that you plug into your laptop to give you connectivity…which is how I’m online right now.  School is planning on opening on Monday, but only if they get power restored tomorrow.  We’ll see.

Well, that’s about all for now.  It’s been pretty boring here, and it sucks being sick, but overall we were very blessed.  We had no damage to our home; a few trees that we planted in the yard are probably destroyed.  Some of our neighbors weren’t so lucky.  My family in the area was pretty lucky, too, except for one of my sisters who received a little roof damage which led to a leak, but it’s patched up already.

I hope everyone else that was in the path of Ike has fared as well as we have!

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No work today! And some gasoline drama…

The gulf coast/east Texas regions are preparing for Hurricane Ike–thus, no school today!  A little break is always nice, of course, but let’s pray everyone stays safe this weekend.

Yesterday after work I needed to stop to get gas.  Of course, everyone else in the area needed gas, too.  This sort of crisis can really bring out the worst in people, unfortunately.  Naturally, I had to wait in line to get gas at the gas station, as several of their pumps were shut down (I’m assuming they ran out of gas).  Many people in front of me in line were angry as they got nearer and discovered the station only had regular unleaded gas (fortunately, that’s what I use anyway). 

A few drivers made the mistake of coming down the road the opposite way, trying to “cut” in front of several cars.  That’s when people get vicious.  I’m sure you can imagine the honks, the hand gestures, the yells, etc.

While I certainly didn’t want to have to wait for one MORE car in front of me, I have to admit mostly I found it humorous.  The lady in front of me was making a total fool of herself with the obscene things she was shouting and gesturing. 

At one point, a white van full of Hispanic workers crossed the street from a business across the street into the gas station’s parking lot–they just appeared to “gun it” across the road.  Oh, it was ON, then.  “Get at the end of the line, or I’ll kick your ass!” Yes, that is an actual quote from the lady waiting in front of me.  If she had waited two seconds, she would have seen that the van didn’t NEED gas.  They simply were going into the store.

Oh well.  I guess tensions are running high and these sorts of things are to be expected. 

In any case, be safe, coastal residents!

Very interesting blog stat…

I visited WordPress today for the first time in many days.  With the school year starting soon, I’ve been extremely busy. 

Since I haven’t posted anything regularly in a while, naturally I didn’t expect to have many visitors to the blog.  Indeed, for the past several days the average has been pretty low, well under 100 per day. 

To my surprise, however, I noticed that today I have had 415 visitors so far!  This piqued my interest, of course.  Why, I wondered, are there so many hits today?  What are people so interested in?

Looking at my dashboard blog stats in WordPress reveals that there have been MANY search engine searches involving the following:

ten questions to ask your biology teacher
10 questions to ask your biology teacher
10 questions to ask your teacher about evolution
ten questions to ask biologists
10 questions biology teacher

And so on.  Through these searches people are visiting the following post of mine, Response to “10 Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher”.

My guess is that with the school year starting, a lot of nervous religious (primarily Christian) parents are preparing for their children to take biology.  Perhaps some of the searches are even being done by the children themselves. 

Has anyone else with blogs similar to mine experienced such tremendous growth on related issues recently?

And just in the time it took me to type this, the visits have gone up to 439!  Interesting.

Good luck!

Just wanted to wish all the fellow teachers out there good luck starting the school year.  Most of the school districts in my area, including the one I work for, start tomorrow.

And good luck to the students as well!

Teacher fonts

For those of you who like to re-type old worksheets, labs, etc, so they don’t look like they came from the 80’s or from a typewriter (even if they did), there are two cute school-ish looking fonts at BV Fonts that you can download for free.

One is a cursive font called Learning Curve (see a preview here). 

The other is a print font called Print Clearly (see a preview here).

Call me crazy, but I’m one of those teachers that hates anything I hand out to the students to be typed in Arial, Times New Roman, or some copy of an awful ditto sheet from ages past.

Teacher humor: Kids Are Quick

Kids Are Quick

TEACHER:   Maria, go to the map and find North America .
MARIA:     Here it is.
TEACHER:  Correct. Now class, who discovered America ?
CLASS:        Maria.
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TEACHER: John, why are you doing your math multiplication on the floor?
JOHN:         You told me to do it without using tables.
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TEACHER: Glenn, how do you spell ‘crocodile?’
GLENN:       K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L’ .
TEACHER:  No, that’s wrong.
GLENN:       Maybe it is wrong, but you asked me how I spell it.
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TEACHER: Donald, what is the chemical formula for water?
DONALD:     H I J K L M N O.
TEACHER:  What are you talking about?
DONALD:     Yesterday you said it’s H to O.
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TEACHER:  Winnie, name one important thing we have today that we didn’t have ten years ago.
WINNIE:     Me!
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TEACHER:  Glen, why do you always get so dirty?
GLEN: Well, I’m a lot closer to the ground than you are.
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TEACHER:    Millie, give me a sentence starting with ‘ I. ‘
MILLIE:         I is…
TEACHER:    No, Millie…Always say, ‘I am.’
MILLIE:         All right…’I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.’     

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TEACHER:   George Washington not only chopped down his father’s cherry tree, but also admitted it.  Now, Louie, do you know why his father didn’t punish him?
LOUIS:     Because George still had the axe in his hand.   
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TEACHER: Now, Simon, tell me frankly, do you say prayers before eating?
SIMON:     No sir, I don’t have to, my Mom is a good cook.
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TEACHER:    Clyde , your composition on ‘My Dog’ is exactly the same as your brother’s. Did you copy his?
CLYDE :       No, sir. It’s the same dog.
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TEACHER:     Harold, what do you call a person who keeps on talking when people are no longer interested?
HAROLD:   A teacher.