Frankenstorm is coming!

So if you are anywhere near theeast coast at all you know it's all about getting ready for Hurricane Sandy right now.  Isaac already has school cancelled for Monday and Tuesday (as usual, my school district is still in session, despite the govenor declaring PA to be in a state of emergency). 

I learned a new fact about Ryan: he is obsessed with being prepared for extreme weather conditions.  He was concerned that I have no flashlights in my house.  Then I remembered that my mom had made me and Isaac 72 hour kits as a Christmas present about 5 years ago and I had only a vague notion of where I had store them and no idea what was in them.  So we drug them upstairs and went through them.

These are what they look like:

I believe most of these things were ordered from a website called The Ready Store.  Like I said, they were a gift from my mom, so I am not too sure about pricing or anything like that. 

 I will show you what we discovered in the kits. 

Panchos, hand warmers, candy (I am assuming to keep your blood sugar up, but the candy in my kit was all melted), little flash light, matches, emergency blanket,  a card with survival tips. There was also water purifiying tablets, but I don't see them in this picture. Then  the top the photo are pouches of drinking water and, this gross block of lard or something that you can break pieces off and eat every few hours. 

SO GROSS.  I would have to be in some serious dire straights to eat that. 

The only thing in the front pocket of the backpack was this whistle.

The other backpack was FILLED with all kinds of supplies.  There was this little tent.  Who knows how to set it up, but I guess if we really needed shelter this could do in a pinch...

There was this candle that burns for 100 hours-- could be pretty handy to have this week as I am sure we will lose power at some point.

This backpack was filled with food...

More candy... tons of MRE in those brown boxes and lots of random little foil packets of foods.  The one pictures above is "fortified snack bread"... whatever the heck that is.  I am sure if I am hungry enough, I would eat it.

Most of this looked totally disgusting... but I was kind of excited about those little squarish packets on the top right.  They are COOKIES.  Does my mom know me or what?  There were also lots of these little kits baggies with napkins and plastic silverware.

 More first aid supplies...

More handwarmers...

And finally, the ever important roll of TP. 

I was feeling rather prepared when Ryan discovered another rolling suitcase in my garage that turned out to be a part of the kit too.  BONUS.

The outside pocket had another roll of toilet paper.  And this is what we saw when we opened it up:



It looked like food we might actually WANT to eat!!!

Unfortuneatly, pretty much all of the food was expired.  This is the pile of stuff we had to throw out: apple sauce, Chef Boyardee, granola bars, juice boxes, cereal, canned tuna and chicken salad. The next picture shows the stuff we were able to save:

Pretty self explanatory except for the little bottle. 

So I definitely need to replace the food that actually looks APPETIZING that expired.  Ryan and I also discussed adding a heavy duty flashlight, a change of clothes for each family member, possibly some cash in case ATMS are down, and some additional batteries.

What do you do to be prepared in extreme weather?



one

I picked up this book from Target. I'm looking forward to starting it. I haven't read a book in a while, and now that it is chilly curling up in bed with a good book sounds so lovely. Plus, I'm a sucker for self help books.

two

I've picked up this little palette at Ulta a few months ago and I have been using it for my makeup everyday. The colors are nuetral and pretty and have great payoff. I'm such a creature of habit, I'm sure it will be quite some time before use other make-up again.

three

While I'm on the topic of beauty products, I think it's safe to report that I am OBSESSED with these lip balms. I picked up the melon one at Ulta but I got the strawberry one at Target, right in the checkout line. Try them! They are adorable and soooooooooo YUMMY.

four

I need this mug. Have a great day!!!

So I really wanted to check out Occupy Philly and I finally got a chance to today (google it if you don't know about it, or it's predecessor Occupy Wall Street). My friend Becca was up for checking it out and we managed to make it down in time for their big march across town to the Liberty Bell. I was surprised by the crowd. Yes, there were dirty hippies. But there were also a ton of families marching with their kids. There were white people and black people and middle aged people and young people and really old people. It was a fun way to spend the afternoon.

Me and my marching buddy Becca. They had a big sign making area so we decided to make signs.

(yes, I'm wearing my teachers union shirt)

Bonus points if you recognize the movie Becca's sign is quoting. I recognized it right away, but only a few people on the march seemed to get it, including a random bicycle cop. As we were leaving the march at the end of the day and heading towards the subway, one of those open top tour buses passed us. The tour guide read Becca's sign to the group in a confused voice and we ended up having a ton of tourists peering down at us, gawking.

Lots of different causes were represented:

We marched across town to the Liberty Bell, where they had a brief rally and then we marched back.

I loved these two little toddlers waving their fists in the air, so I had to snap a picture.

This sign says "You know things are bad when toddlers start marching".

Snapshot of some of the march.

I liked this one. It was above a big pile of snacks. I don't know how clearly you can read the writing, but it informs you that snacks are a human right.

This sign was one of my favorites, and we didn't even see it at the protest. It was on a wall directly across the street from a Bank of America in Fishtown. How angry do you have to be to do this? (I don't know how clear it is, but the yellow sign says "I hate Bank of America".)

There was tons of press there. I got approached by one reporter, who wanted to talk to me about student debt. He wouldn't talk to him, but he said something to the effect of "I'm sure many of these protesters here are recent college graduates like yourself." I was flattered, but I had to assure him that I can no longer really be considered a recent college graduate. Here is a video from the local news:

Occupy Philly Marches To Liberty Bell: MyFoxPHILLY.com

And one of my friends posted this on Facebook, so I had to share.

September is here!

It's been a while! First of all, this happened: My baby is in first grade!! It's been back to school in every sense around here. Isaac is attending first grade, I am teaching an incredibly lively bunch of all new first graders, and I am also taking a grad class as well. It was a bit of a shock to the system to go from the dog days of summer, to the insanity that is September, but we're rolling with it and doing well I think. I actually enjoy the busyness of the school year, but it takes me a bit to settle into it and get into a routine. By Thursday night I felt like I had been run over by a Mack truck, so I was grateful to have Friday off. So on our day off we were about to head out to Leola to see my mom when we discovered this:

(the flat tire, not the dent. That was always there)

There was a huge chunk of metal sticking out of it. My rear tires are almost bald, so I figured better that it happened on my day off from school when I had time to deal with it. We managed to get Firestone to squeeze us in and we got some new tires. I'm learning to live with the driver window never going down, so hopefully this will be our last car expense for a while *knocks on wood*.

Anyways, while we were waiting for the AAA guy to come and change my tire for me (yeah, super lame, I know. I get the steps in the process of changing a tire, but this is what my 40 bucks a year goes towards. I don't have to get down the ground a try to change lug nuts and whatnot.) I decided to clean out my trunk. My trunk has pretty much been a disaster for several years. Just to give you an idea of how long it has been since I cleaned it out thoroughly, I unearthed this:

back there, along with a receiving blanket. Anyways, all of the junk is gone and so are all of the Christmas tree needles and beach sand. It was a productive 45 minutes until the guy showed up.

Anyways, that was only a minor setback and we made it to Leola without any trouble. We slept over and then woke up early to go to Blue Ball Days which sounds gross but it's actually when the whole town of blue ball has a big yard sale! I scored some great deals. Brand new soccer cleat for Isaac for only .50, two Ramona books (I'm always on the lookout for those and Junie B Jones) but the jackpot was the lady who was dumping all of her Stampin Up stuff. A whole table full of stamps. I had to restrain myself. I got an Easter set, two Christmas sets and a invitation stamp. So that was exciting.

So what else? Oh! I won a blog giveaway! I enter them all of the time and I have *never* won. And this is such a cool prize too. Teaching in Pink is sending me this book. After only four days with this new group of firsties, I am open to any and all ideas on classroom management. So I'm pretty pumped for that.

Isaac and I watched a neat documentary series on Netflix streaming called "Circus". I guess it aired on PBS originally. It made both of us long to run away and live life under the big top.

One last thing, I was so excited to see these out on the shelves:

LOVE THEM!!! I'm was excited when we were driving home to see an Amish stand with gourds in it. I'm excited to decorate the house for fall and HALLOWEEN. When is it okay to start putting Halloween decorations up? Thoughts? Well, have a great week.

we hate the Lakers... bottom line

E-mail to my friend:

Tonight he declared his favorite basketball player to be Kobe Bryant. I don't know where I went wrong as a parent.....

Friend's response:

I wouldn't worry about it - he's young. However, if he's still a Bryant fan by the time he reaches the age of reason - consider your parenting a complete failure.

don't wanna go to sleep

First of all, I keep seeing "joy school" mentioned on LDS mom-type blogs. I think I must really be turning into a cynical wench in my old age, because I can't think of anything less joy inducing than having a bunch of three year olds over to my house and playing pre-K teacher. It actually kind of makes me want to gag. And why can't it just be called playgroup? Is that not "joyous" enough? Although, looking back on it, I'm pretty sure my mom did a short joy-school type of playgroup with me when I was a young child living in Utah and I guess I turned out all right. (Yes, little known fact, I'm actually from Utah originally). Whew, now that that's off my chest...

Today I took a personal day to be the mystery reader at Isaac's school. It was so fun to surprise him and help out a little in his class. Apparently no other parents have been mystery readers, so that was fun to actually put a check in the "things mom can still do even though I work full time" column, since the "things I have to say no to cause I work full time column" is filled with entries.

I also wanted to take some time for spring cleaning today. I'm pretty impressed with myself.

I:

• Did six loads of laundry including both of our sheets, comforters, duvet covers, dust ruffles, etc. etc. AND they are folded and put away.
• I vacuumed and flipped our mattresses.
• I moved my bed and night stands and vacuumed the carpet and dusted the baseboards. I haven't done that since I moved in and it was absolutely disgusting how much dust, etc. was back there. Also cleaned all the junk out from underneath my bed and found approximately 87 pens.
• Organized my jewelry, shoes and closet in general.
• Cleaned out my purse. I'm no longer hauling around 5 pounds worth of old receipts.
• Updated Google calendar with all of my events for the coming months.
• Found a whole bunch of cool online resources to use in my classroom.
• Went to the gym and ran two miles.
• Got some great books for my classroom at the used book store for supercheap.
• Cleaned out both cat boxes.
• Made cream cheese cookies.
• Called my sister (and nearly gagged the whole time. She and I have very opposite views on things like breastfeeding, vaginal deliveries and whether or not placentas are interesting organs [she is a labor and delivery nurse]).
• Finally called the builder about my leaky roof (Hello! My house is barely two years old! Why is the roof leaking?!) and completed some paperwork for the HOA to officially report my neighbors for letting their dog crap all over the place. They should be getting a fine in the mail shortly. Yeah, I'm that neighbor. And I don't like your freakin' dog.

I didn't get to most of what's on my list but I feel like spring cleaning is in full swing. Isaac's room is next. I will carry on Saturday hopefully after our first soccer game. Not sure what's going on for the weekend yet. I'm up for something low-key which conference weekend usually is. Have a fab Friday!

What I Love lately...

This necklace from Lia Sophia. My friend is having a party next week and I was browsing around on their sight to see if there was anything I could afford that appealed to me. This one is so darling.

Celestial Seasonings in Lemon Zinger. I have been starting off my mornings at work with this and also sipping on it in the evenings. So yummy... Ulta Eyeshadow in Peacock. My friend's sister works for Ulta and she tossed me a ton of full sized eye shadows. I ignored this one for a while because I felt like it was too wacky but it's actually very pretty. I wore it Friday night to my friend's birthday party and today for church. It's highly pigmented but it blends nicely. This song by Tiny Vipers. (Disclaimer - I am known to like really depressing music). My friend dragged me along to see her at Burlap and Bean last weekend. Honestly, she is a little on the awkward side live but I've been obsessed with this song ever since. I think it's so pretty especially 3:14 on.