Day 7 - In Arizona with the Prices

Even in extreme heat, we drove to the Cardinal's Stadium (Chris' favorite team), visited the disorientating Botanical Gardens (do not do that in summer - everything is closed inside, like the butterfly exibit and cafes), and then played games with the Price cousins!

Road Trip Day 6 - Grand Canyon Hike and Meteor Crater

-The trail down!

-Strata changes on the way down into the canyon.




-Barringer Meteor Crater, Arizona. A very big hole made to look small by following our Grand Canyon visit.

Road Trip Day 5 - Las Vegas to Grand Canyon

Thunderstorms in the Grand Canyon.

We entered into Arizona, crossed the Hoover Dam (which, I believe was in Transformers 1, right?). We were lucky to be followed by the desert thunderstorms, which cooled things off and provided some shade on our drive. Arriving to the Grand Canyon, is truely breathtaking. I think we would like to return there to hike down to the bottom for a few days. Chris will hopefully post pictures from his hike a few miles into the Canyon. It was on a trail shared by the guided mule rides.

Road Trip Day 4 - Las Vegas

Chris at CircusCircus, a conflict in values, pirate ships, and one lioness at MGM.

Las Vegas was a lot bigger than we were expecting. Finally pulling into MGM Grands' parking structure was like going to the airport. No bell hops or getting registered first before parking - we felt sort of like cattle, cash cows more like. So for the first couple of hours we were not impressed, even though our hotel room was very nice at the MGM.

So we decided to play the slots, the penny slots that is! We figured out that you are offered complimentary drinks whilst playing. With a $1 tip and $1 on the slots, that's a $2 drink - pretty nice! I (Christy) personally liked the pool area, which I didn't get to until around 4pm on Thursday because we walked the Strip for about 3 or 4 hours. This place definitely is a party all the time with tons of people, music playing at all hours. If you want peace and quiet you have to go to your room. Even on my lounge poolside, there was DJ music and I didn't get much reading done. Oh well!

Our favorite slot game was Village People Party! Probably super annoying to the neighboring players, but it you got "Village," "People," "Party" to line up then you got to play another game for bonus points, with little dancing Macho Men!

MGM Grand is huge! All the Casinos were like small cities in the Strip.

The Venetian and Paris looked super cool. I also liked the look of New York, New York with, I think was, the Brooklyn Bridge replica.

Road Trip Day 3 - Death Valley to Las Vegas

This is all I can do right now because we have to hit the road! 1. Chris in Golden Canyon, Death Valley, 2. Badwater walkway, 3. Scenic lookout with a bench that looks like barely anyone has sit in it.

Day Two - Yosemite to Death Valley

So I tried to upload these in cronological order. We left Yosemite and took Tioga Pass, shistine! Ni-nite time! These pictyres are: 1. rock 2. mono lake 3. hot 4. more hot 5. coyote puply 6. sand dunes in def valley.

Road Trip Day 1 - Yosemite

Hello All, We (Chris and I) started on our 5th anniversary adventure May 29th from San Mateo, where we went straight to the Yosemite Rose. A picture of that wonderful B&B will be posted on the next post. We finally have Internet because we paid for it in Las Vegas (where it is actually day 4 on the trip, but OH WELL). Whilst in Yosemite we had points of interest, compared with our original honeymoon. This trip we went to see Bridalveil Falls, containing a short walk someone in their later stages of life could attempt, and so, Chris thought it would be good for me. It was delightful - not the misty walk it sometimes is called, but nice and with a wonderful brook to dip your swollen, pink feet in. Hearkening back to the Yosemite Rose, where we were treated like a King and Queen compared to other accommodations we have visited afterwards, we stayed in our original room from our honeymoon (awwwwww....). When we got there, Katherine the lady who runs the beautiful home with her husband, told us a tale; Since we stayed there, a gentleman who was morbidly obese stayed in the room and could not fit in the shower stall. Hence they expanded the bathroom to include a full-size shower and Jacuzzi tub - to use a Las Vegas term: Jackpot! What a lovely surprise and treat! I know what I will ask for for Christmas - a bath with jets!

Going back to Yosemite - it was immense and gorgeous. They were doing controlled burns, but we got to see a bear! Whoo hoo! We saw the little red-furred guy when we visited Glacier Point.

Over prepare then go with the flow...

Written By Regina Brett, 90 years old, of The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio
"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I've ever written."

My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:
1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.
8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.
12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.
13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.
16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else. 20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important sex organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words 'In five years, will this matter?'
27. Always choose life.
28. Forgive everyone everything.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business.
30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.
31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
33. Believe in miracles.
34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.
35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
36. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.
37. Your children get only one childhood.
38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's,we'd grab ours back.
41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
42. The best is yet to come.
43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
44. Yield.
45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift."

Say YES to NO by Dr. Greg Cootsona

But I know him as Uncle Egg. Or the uncle who played with me the most as a child. Well, Uncle Greg and Aunt Lo (Laura) both were dynamic playmates. All children love it when adults play with them. They even wanted to have Mike and I over for sleepovers a few times and planned Easter egg scavenger hunts. Mike was better at those things, but nevertheless, it was cool and unforgettable. Uncle Greg was the uncle who taught me how to tie my shoes and married me to my husband of almost 5 years! So, now as I plug his book - of course I'm advertising his book - I am genuinely excited for him. Check it out, Say YES to NO!

I am borrowing a copy of the book from Mike, but the release date is tomorrow and so far it's a great read! Here is the Reverend Cootsona officiating our wedding in San Juan Capistrano.

The drop date is March 3rd! Check out Say Yes to No!

The Moon and Venus - 27th Feb

It's not funny...

Hello Aunt Louise,

How are you doing? I'm stressed out with school and work. I've entered into a whole new level of credentialing where I'm working fulltime as a new educator and then have to take grad classes and I'm also going through BTSA (where you meet and are observed by a mentor regularly who also encourages you to do extra things). Yesterday I saw my mentor and after the observation we had our meeting during my lunch. When she said, "So, what should our next steps be?" I wanted to say, Nothing, I'm just trying not to fall apart. It has been hellish and it has been effecting my sleep (you know it's bad when a Rice can't sleep!) which in turn just compounds my stress level. So, yesterday I was so frazzled all day and came home and was rotten. I just wanted to eat, and sleep - I needed a break. But it's hard because I'm behind on my homework and feel like I should be at least reading. Today I got to school just to burst into tears at my desk just as I was supposed to see my first student. When I got to that class and discovered that the target student was absent, the teacher looked at my face and asked how I was doing. I was thinking about lying and saying I had allergies, but, since I'm a teacher, I have a hard time with deception. I told her I was having a hard morning and, of course, my bottom lip started to shake, my face grew hot and I started to cry. I don't like to cry, especially in front of children. I told her I has stressed out and she asked if I had been exercising, which I said I was. She offered to take a walk with me during her lunch, and I said that sounded good, but I was just trying to quickly get back to Room 4, my office. I was trying to cover the lower half of my face to shield any unsuspecting passerby's from my obvious distress. At that moment one of my para educators was on his way to his class and asked if I was okay. I nodded and quickened my step.
Even looking back on this morning and yesterday - it's not funny to me. I don't mind being stressed, but now I cannot separate it from my work. And I need to be on the ball, calm and collected at work. Not a mess. So, in short, you can pray for me. I need it because this is just the beginning.

What I Have Had Time to Write About

Christine B. Malone
2/10/09
SPED 824 – Post
Article Critique #1
Horner, R., Sugai, G., Lewis-Palmer, T., & Todd, A. (2001). Teaching School-Wide Behavioral Expectations. Emotional & Behavioral Disorders in Youth. Fall, 77-79, 93-97.

Horner, et al, presented a very straight-forward and almost refreshingly obvious argument about, not only setting up behavioral norms in schools, but explicitly teaching those expectations to all students. Some of their data, especially the “Tertiary Intervention” graph (pp. 78), resonated with my own experience as a teacher and what I have witnessed in the front office of my school site. Simply making clear who needs the most behavioral resources, helps a school know where to start intervention. Most importantly, all children need to be taught, along with phonics, algebra and topic sentences, the school's expectations of them in their everyday school lives. As educators we can only complain for so long about how our students are not parented correctly or how they are a product of their environments (pp. 78). We have to take action and be proactive about teaching them what it is to be a caring individual and citizen in our global society.
Considering we have the attention of our student body for at least 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, we should be able to teach them how to behave as a part of a well-rounded education. As I read this article I continually thought about my current school site, which contains an elementary and junior high. Our principals are fantastic about, first, creating open relationships with all students. They do not just sit in their office, but are visible and available to teachers and students. At the beginning of the year they encouraged that all teachers repeated activities like lining up or transitions until students learned to do it respectively and quietly. This also included a lot of students being given referrals in the first month. As a result, our student body is pretty much “under control,” but I think the students still need understand exactly why they need to behave.
Soul Cafe was a regular assembly provided by a contracted company for the San Bruno School District and I attended a few while I was a student teacher. When I talked to my Mentor Teacher about the reasoning behind the intervention, she said that for a lot of San Bruno's children, there seemed to be a lot of violence and adverse behavior. Soul Cafe clearly outlined certain positive attributes and through role-play and skits students were given the language to describe their feelings, good and bad. They provided “I Messages” cards that all students used to resolve their own problems with each other and teachers even used the lexicon when talking about their own feelings to reinforce the program around school. I could see how giving the students the chance to learn about what is expected behaviorally and the words to help them to resolve issues, was key to a more respectful student body.
At my current situation, I believe the students know what is expected of them because the staff all seems to be on the same page, but they do not understand the reasoning. On the other hand, all the students with IEPs are completely integrated into the general education classrooms. With that, they are treated like all the other students and, for the most part, are expected to behave the same as the other students. In this scenario, as compared to my experience in a Special Day Class, there is less behavior from these target students. In fact, most of the students that frequent the principals' office are mostly students without special needs (even though we know every student has their own “special” needs).
All the same, the whole student body needs direct instruction on exactly how they need to act, in all areas on the school (IE: the playground, cafeteria, and hallways. pp.77). Since we have older students, they could even be involved in an Expectation Campaign and make posters for all the different areas of school. At the moment, especially since my school is a charter that prides itself on it's test scores, most of the day is spent on reading, writing, and mathematics. This takes well-behaved classrooms to achieve high levels of instruction. In all of this “rigor” I sincerely believe we are loosing site of our responsibility to teach children to be a whole person, including how to be a caring, respectable, and sincere human being (not to mention the lack of instruction in the arts). If the teachers are not teaching the core curriculum, they are planning with their team about what they are teaching next, or comparing data from regular rounds of assessments. The staff meetings are mostly about talking about data and professional development days have never been about what we, as a school, want to teach our student about positive attributes. Our school motto is “Everyone goes to College,” but a whole lot of people who attend college still do not embody the people skills to be a balanced individual, that cares not only out themselves, but others. This article provides sound and simplistic reasoning why we need to take the lesson time to help our students learn to be well-behaved on a school-wide level.

Random Pictures

Christy got very excited about our new bed set.

View of the river Cam, from Chris' punting expedition in Cambridge.

Content Smally in Tahoe.

Saturday - Sweet and Salty

First I wanted to make pancakes, but then I remembered the sliced sourdough sitting on the kitchen counter. Perfect for French - freggin - toast! That got me out of bed before 9am, but before I did that I offered to talk on the phone with my mom-in-law and put on a pot of coffee. You won't see any pictures on this post because the frawnch toast was eaten lightning-fast. Off the skillet into our tummies. Chris was even trying to be "good," whatever the hell that means, and succumbed to the power of my new and improved Eggy Toast (as they say in the UK).

French Toast (in memory of Grandma Boots)

Ingredients:

A loaf of sliced sourdough - a day or two old
1 egg & 1 egg white - beaten
A dash of nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup milk
Butter for greasing the pan/skillet
SNOW - Grandma Rice's code-word for powdered sugar served on the side in a crystal or glass bowl.
Maple Syrup

On the stove, heat the greased skillet at medium-high while you whisk/mix the eggs, nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla extract, and milk. Now bathe one of those bread slices in the sultry batter until it is saturated. Throw it on that skillet. Cook until cooked - I don't know, until it looks tasty.

You know, you could put the oven on low and cook all the slices you want, putting them into the oven to stay yummy warm. When they are done, serve with a sprinkle of powdered sugar AND syrup. Let me know how it goes, Folks!

While I was stuffing sweet morsels of french toast into my gob, Chris said aloud that he wished to go to the beach. I seconded that motion and, after we did the dishes (what good little wives we are!) and showered, we hopped in our Corolla and took of, eh. To Half Moon Bay or more precisely, Montara State Beach. I imagined a windy, relaxing walk from one end to the other. Our fellow beach-lovers were out, sunbathing, skin-surfing, regular-surfing, boogie boarding, dog wrangling and the like. For November it was in the high 70's and I felt that the sun was not only warming my pink skin, but burning it. It felt nice. Chris noticed that the surf was coming in a lot farther than usual as we meandered along.

Since I am a California native and took a college-level course on OCEANS, I feel the need to help Chris understand the ins and outs of the beach's flora and fauna. I crouched down to prod some poor dead jelly fish, it was the size of a dollar coin, but rounder. I turned it over with a little bit of washed up wood. "Do you see that?" I said to Chris,"See the opening?" There was a wiggly little pink line that was around the opening on the creature's sack-like, opaque body. Suddenly Chris yelled,"Watch out!"Luckily, I am as spry as a monkey because I hoped up and ran the opposite way of an incoming wave. I am continually amazed by human instinct. Feeling so stupidly surprised, I giggled as I escaped a salt-water soaking.

A few hundred yards further on we noticed the waves would wash clear up to the cliffs. A few times we had to make a run for it, so as not to get a salt-water bath. Near the end of the walk, we both just stood, reflecting on the greatness and beauty of the California coast. By then we had compromised with the high-tide and rolled up our pants, and removed our shoes. There was a small grouping of seal heads poking out of the water, swaying out beyond the large waves and I pined for binoculars, but reflected that junk sometimes gets in the way of enjoying life. Then we were both woken up as water washed up to our knees. That was when Chris decided it was a good time to walk back to the car.

At one section there was not very much dry land, and we were already jogging along trying to escape the shoreline. Poor planning led to a wave totally enveloping us up to our chests. Chris and I both either yelped or squealed. When the water was at it's highest, breaking off the cliff's wall washing back onto us, he held on to me for stability and for moment I thought we were totally going to fall into the water. We didn't, but we were just as wet. Chris in rolled up jeans and a white t-shirt and me in draw-string pants and a stripped shirt, we were both drenched, but kept running now not to repeat what just happened. We reached a break in the waves where the bluffs were not connected, providing a dry section. There stood a family of adults, dressed in their J.Crew best for a day at the beach. Sensing we looked ridiculously unprepared for our wet encounter I announced that the waves were high and I recommending running. So we all ran and ran until we reached a wider portion of land. Their father-figure didn't run fast enough and got it up to his thighs.

We had a funny, pant-less ride home. And we did not go out for lunch in Half Moon Bay's downtown for obvious slightly under-dressed reasons. But it was a good silly adventure for two over-worked people.