Breaking News

I have just moved Thanksgiving up one place, surpassing Halloween as my new favorite holiday.

"BOSTON -- Tom Brady says he's doing well in his recovery from knee surgery.

The New England Patriots quarterback made an unpublicized appearance Wednesday with his girlfriend, model Gisele Bundchen, at the annual Goodwill Thanksgiving dinner in Boston where they served food.

He told Channel 5 that he's "doing well" more than two months after a season-ending injury to his left knee in the opener. He also said Thanksgiving is his favorite holiday."

Why did the police arrest the turkey?

It was suspected of "fowl" play.

Hahaha. I've got more.

Why can't you take a turkey to church?

Because it uses such fowl language...

I can't help it. I love Thanksgiving, just about as much as Halloween.

Can I do this too?

You may have already seen this, but Kate pointed it out to me and has been quoting lines from it for the past 72 hours so I thought I'd share in case you missed it.

What do you do when you don't want to pay a bill?

Bad Teacher

I changed my mind about what I was going to write about tonight. Last week I got an unusually large number of "You're the best teacher in the world Ms. Gross!!!" cards and signs. I'm not sure why the big increase, since I actually thought I was kind of mean last week, but my only guess is that we had a lot of indoor recess because it was so cold, and the girls got bored and made me pictures. Some of them were good, and flattering (my hair looks awesome in one...) so I thought I'd post a few of my favorites.

But then today happened, and I didn't feel worthy of posting all of the greatest teacher ever pictures.

My class went on a field trip to the science museum with the rest of the 3rd grade. We're only allowed to bring two parent chaperones, which is kind of lousy because I had six parents who wanted to come, and two who took the day off only to find out that I couldn't have them come. It is also kind of lousy because it means that I have to split my class into three groups of 8 kids each, which is a lot to ask a parent to do, especially in a place like the crazy museum. Luckily my kids are pretty well-behaved and I knew I wouldn't have any trying to climb up walls.

Well, shortly before we had to meet for a show with the rest of the 3rd grade, I was waiting for my little group to use the bathroom, when I heard/saw another group from my class screaming and running toward me down the escalator, with no parent in sight. As they got closer I heard, "A. is lost! A. is lost!!" The chaperone finally appeared, and didn't seem at all concerned which made me extremely upset. What made me more angry was that she also had not told any of the museum workers that there was a missing kid, and had no idea where she had actually lost the kid, and couldn't tell me how long ago. She speaks mostly Spanish, so her daughter translated for me when I asked the last place she had seen her, but her daughter told me it was the room with the computers (great, since every exhibit has computers...). It turned into a big hassle where I had 4 museum employees with me talking to the other guys on headphones, and then got her paged. Finally I took my kids to the show, where I found out that another 3rd grade teacher had found her wandering by herself (thank god for my school's uniforms) and took her. It was great that it all worked out, but I was angry for the rest of what had been a nice trip so far, and I was definitely not so nice to my kids for the rest of the time (and counted them every minute for the rest of the day). When I got back to school I had to tell the principal that I lost someone, and then called the student's parents, so it was all not fun since I knew I was the one responsible, but it was a bad chaperone who could have been a little more careful.

Let's see if I get any "Great teacher" posters during tomorrow's rainy indoor recess.

Turns out I'm STILL not 19 anymore

I'm in a fantastic mood. I only have two days of school this week (and Monday is a field trip all day to the Museum of Science), and then it's Thanksgiving, which is my second favorite holiday. Also, this weekend I got a cable box in my bedroom after a year of having 8 channels in my room, so it's amazing (what's even more amazing is that I'm completely inept when it comes to hooking up anything TV, VCR, or DVD related, but somehow I hooked up the cable box at 3AM last night while wasted, and it works). Aaand, we got a DVR in our apartment at the same time. I haven't really fooled around with the DVR aspect of it yet, but that's because we got like 300 (literally) more channels somehow with it. I have a feeling we'll have them for about a week and then Comcast will pull them out from under our feet and Kate will cry for days because she misses her 90210 marathons on Soapnet. Anyway, it's enough little fun things to make a Sunday a lot better than usual.


This little baby equals a whole lot of lazy mornings in bed from now on.


I had a crazy Saturday night yesterday, which was not at all planned to be that way, but always seems to happen when all of us get together with Jeff's friends. After a fancy birthday dinner (where I was the classy one guzzling Bud Light while others enjoyed their wine and margaritas), I joined up with Kate and Caitlin at BHP. We hadn't been there since July!! I ordered the first round of Bud Lights from a new bartender, but not draughts like usual. The old bartender walked over and said, "What prompted the change?" and explained to the horrified new bartender, who thought he had screwed up, that we always order Bud Light draughts. Anyway, Caitlin, Kate, and I enjoyed some girly talk for a little while before joining up with Jeff's crew, where the night turned sloppy due to our regretful decision to play Shoulders and Never Have I Ever. I'm not sure how we ended up playing both, or why we didn't seem to care that we played Never Have I Ever for a solid 2 hours in the bar. It's clear some of us lack social skills.

Anyway, I again realized I'm too old to have nights like that. I slept until 10 today (hours later than I can usually sleep on a weekend), and spent the entire day horizontal on the couch, with a nap for half of the Pats game.

Happy endings, like at Friendlys

Sometimes I find myself believing that as I'm watching a movie, the events in the movie will be different from the last time I saw the movie. The first time I realized that I did this was when I watched Titanic for the second time, and Jack was clinging to the chunk of ice. I had a faint glimmer of hope the ending would be different, and that he was going to get rescued, and then he and Rose would both get on some boat and get back to dry land and marry and have babies. But he froze to death on that ice cube, again.
This weekend I watched The Break Up. I saw the movie a year ago and it made me sad because I thought it would be a fun cheesy romantic comedy and Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston would finally get together in the end. And then the don't. And then they meet up at the VERY end, and they STILL don't get back together. So, when I watched it this weekend, I couldn't help but feel optimistic when they run into each other in the last minute of the movie. I thought, "Hooray! Maybe this time they'd realize they were both right for each other! They'll move back in together! They'll make babies! They'll be happy!" But that didn't happen this time in the movie either.
Am I completely crazy? Does any of this make sense? Is there anything else I can find to do to put off doing all of my work for school any longer?


I have a big crush on Vince Vaughn in this movie.

Bicycles

I'm sort of in love with the Obamas. I kind of want to be in their family. I have a little bit of a crush on Barack, and I haven't felt this way about a president since I was in fourth grade and had a crush on Woodrow Wilson. Yeah, I'm not sure about that one either.

Many of you may already know the website Barack Obama Is My New Bicycle but while I procrastinated writing this week's lesson plans tonight I found a whole bunch of other "bicycle" website that exist.

My favorite is Michelle Obama Is My New Bicycle because she apparently read Good Night Moon and tucked me in, but John McCain Is My New Bicycle and Ron Paul Is My New Bicycle are pretty good too.

The arthritis makes it hard to flip quickly.

This weekend I pretended I was 19. Only it was very apparent that I'm not anymore.

I got signed up to be on a flip cup team and play in a flip cup tournament at a bar. It seemed like a fantastically horrible idea.

The day started early. We had to be at the bar by 2 on Saturday. Getting off the T I knew it would be a bad situation, when we ran into a group of people, who could barely pass for 21, in uniforms. Head to toe fluourescent pink. Black sweatbands. Logos on the front of their shirts. Names on the back. One had was designated the captain with a "C" on his shirt. And then we saw another team, wearing matching t-shirts, and again with sweatbands. Kate and I had been considering wearing t-shirts and sweatshirts, because it seemed like that's what you do when you start drinking at 2 on a Saturday.

We got into the bar and realized that the average age was about 22, which was a solid 8 years younger that the majority of our team. Naturally, there was a team of guys from Union. And naturally, the wore their Springfest t-shirts, and they were loud, and they were good. There were 32 teams in all, and we found our competition listed on the brackets. We had about an hour to wait until our first round game, so we enjoyed a few pitches of PBR to settle our nerves. All we could drink until 6 PM! What a great idea!

We finally got to play our game, and luckily we played against the team that was closest to our age. They all wore fake mustaches for some reason, and matching t-shirts.

We killed them. Each round was best of 7 games, and we won handedly 4-1.

By that time we were feeling a lot better. The beer was kicking in, and we were feeling more confident and a whole lot less nervous. Then I went outside while Kate smoked and realized, it's sunny and 3:30 and I'm drunk.

We played our second game against another team that barely looked 21, and again had matching t-shirts with their names on the back. They killed us, but they weren't good. The girls, Kate and me, held our own. The boys looked like they learned to play flip cup yesterday. We got swept.

But we still had two hours left in the competition, so we enjoyed our "free" pitchers of cheap beer and became just a group of people getting wasted in the middle of the day. We stumbled out of the bar at 6 and found the closest place with nachos.

I passed out shortly after 10 o'clock. I'm definitely not in college anymore.

I'm feeling patriotic today.

What a day. I was excited about the idea of having our first black president, but hadn't quite realized how powerful it would be to see it actually happen. Two years ago, I never thought we would see a black president "this soon." For the first time in awhile (with the exception of every 4th of July when I get a patriotic spike), I felt really good about our country today. It's good to finally elect a president that I voted for.

Yesterday I gave my kids a homework assignment of finding out who is elected president. Before they were even in my room this morning they were yelling out who was chosen (of course, some were too excited about this, and neglected to do their actual spelling homework..). I hadn't talked too much about the election with them because it's not something that's covered in the 3rd grade curriculum and I have zero time to teach anything that's not in the curriculum. Surprisingly though, they knew a lot about it and were really interested. So, I shut my classroom door and deviated from my planned literacy lesson, and we had a great ten minute talk about when Obama will become president, why we have government, vice presidents, why other countries have kings, etc. We talked about why he made history, and why it's important that our country has its first black president. Because I teach in a city with a gigantic Hispanic population, I'm not sure if my class realizes that they're all minorities. But with their knowledge about the election's impact I'm guessing more than a few parents have emphasized their happiness at finally getting a president other than an old white guy.

Oh, and good job to Massachusetts voters for not getting rid of the income tax. I'd like to keep my job next year.