Grown Up Life

T and I are slowly starting the adjustment towards grown up life. He's taking it better than I am, but he's had a few years of experience on me. :) I graduate this coming Saturday (the 18th), and it's a bit overwhelming for me. I break out randomly and cry for little to no reason, and sometimes with good reason. Regardless, we're going to make this transition!

I've slowly started packing up my stuff to move out. And by slowly I mean I've managed to almost empty my entire bookshelf into boxes in the last... three days. But hey, I have until the end of June and I'm getting an early start! As usual, I have a

most ...helpful little helper. Pretty much as soon as I empty any form of small, enclosed space, Yoshi has to come and sleep in it. I should really look into building her a cat fortress.

T got his job moved up to the metro, so he's been commuting the past few days (days? it feels like weeks!). The first few days were really rough for him and I felt really bad (I mean, it wasn't my fault but I don't like him being miserable at work!). Luckily he made a request that I was able to follow through with. He requested that I make something that he could keep in his pocket at work that he can pull out or just hold onto that will remind him of me. Good thing I'm crafty as all get out, right?

Also lucky for him (and me), the Mad Crafter just recently made an awesome blog post about making charms with polymer clay, saving me the trouble of almost trying my hand at salt dough. I don't actually own salt, and it was a lot less painful to buy clay than a bucket of salt.

I made two, because the first was a test run to make sure the settings on everything worked correctly. I found that the temp and time were a little off for my oven (realistically, my oven is horrible), so the top actually got a little burnt coloring to it. :( Regardless, I strung it up and made a second one at a lower temp and shorter time.

 

And because I'm German I had to include "Ich liebe dich" (I love you) on the back of the second one. :)

Alright, so... student teaching is over and I'm wrapping up a few loose ends for classes so I can graduate for real. I mean... really. Yeah, yeah, I'm nervous...

Ahhhh, grown up life!

Thanksgiving, Christmas, and everything else.

It's been a while, hasn't it? I'm pretty terrible at updating blogs, not going to lie. Just prod me with a fork periodically and I'll pretend to know what's going on. I got to spend a portion of Thanksgiving break at home with my family, which was a lot of fun. It meant seeing my niece and nephews that I normally don't get to see, which is always great. It also meant playing scrabble with my mom, which is one of those things that my mom and I always do when I come home because my dad is a little challenged in the spelling field. He could eventually play something, but only after asking us how to spell enough words that we knew the words on his tile bench. :)

Christmas was exceptionally grand this year for me. I had a lot of different Christmas' this year, which is something new for me. The weekend before Christmas I got to hang out with Thomas and his family, and then Christmas Eve was dinner with Dan and Bri (brother and sister in law). Christmas day I spent with my parents lounging around the house, and that evening we went to Bri's parents' new house to check it out and have some dessert. Speaking of Christmas, since I'm perpetually poor, I made all of my gifts this year. My mom, Bri, and Thomas' mom all got the same present (which I should seriously make for myself one of these days), which was a foot rice warmer. (The tutorial can be seen here on Jenna's blog, I didn't design it, she did.)

They came out really well, and minus the slight smell of rice, they work really well. My mom likes to carry hers around on her hands, so I should probably look into making one that's smaller for her pockets or something.

Thomas' present was delayed, mostly because I couldn't think of what to make him up until two weeks before Christmas, at which time I was heading home to spend time with my family. I gave him a choice between a pillow or a blanket (I've made him a House Stark sigil set previously, but I wanted to go another route this time), and he picked a blanket. He mentioned something about someone hogging the House Stark sigil blanket when they visit, but I'm not sure what he's talking about. ;D I decided to go the Star Wars route and made the Rebel symbol (which was a lot harder to cut out than it looks). Also, I actually sewed it on with the machine, which was a major accomplishment for me. Yoshi, however, is not easily amused by the rebel forces!

Student teaching started! I got to take over my first class today, which was exciting. They're very quiet and hard to get motivated, but I have no doubt that we'll make this semester work. Oh, and on a last note, Thomas and I made sushi last night (it's with imitation crab, don't judge, I'm allergic to fish) and it was absolutely awesome. So now I will leave you with a picture of awesome sushi and a super cute (and sleepy) dog, Luke (he's Thomas').

Delusions aside, let's talk.

When I created this blog I thought to myself, "Awesome, a place where I can talk about my student teaching every day... and if not every day then every other day!" Well, soon "every other day" turned into "once a week" which turned into "oh yeah, I have a blog... what about again?"

See also: it's midterms and I haven't posted but maybe twice. Which means you're about to get a wall of text typed out in the twenty minutes before Thomas and I leave to crash his parents' plans for the night. I'm kidding; it's his birthday. Speaking of birthdays, I'd like to make an announcement: the amount I'm willing to hand-stitch for you is reflective of how much I like you. I'm only half kidding, really, and it should be noted that I've hand-stitched almost all of my gifts to Thomas thus far. (Hey, it has to say something, yes?) I don't know how many of my friends are into Game of Thrones (Hodor.), but it's an awesome series and one that Thomas got me into. I originally made him a direwolf/House Stark sigil pillow, featured on a post over on my G+ account that I'll link to at another time. To go with it, I made him this awesome fleece blanket for his birthday. By the way, the house Stark motto is "Winter is Coming," which I had originally planned to embroider on the blanket but unfortunately ran out of time. Maybe next time.

 This is the finished project. It's a rather large blanket (I think it's 1.65 yards or so, roughly 1.5 yards all tied up), but it's amazingly soft and warm. Yes, I'm using it right now while waiting on him.

 A close up on the ties. Originally I was going to knot them, but then I saw an awesome little tutorial online about how you can make these awesome ties and just had to do it. It took probably three times as long, but once I got into a groove it wasn't bad at all. I also have pictures that show how to do it in case anyone is curious.

Of course, Yoshi had to "help" me as well. Her favorite way of helping was the "I'm not paying you any attention while I put cat fur on this while sitting in your way" method. Very helpful, I assure you.

I don't know why, but Blogger just moved all of my pictures around. To each their own, I suppose. I also included a picture of my amazing (but totally not) hand-stitching. Don't mind those crooked direwolf fangs, darlings! I hand sketched the sigil, so don't hate.

Anyway, when I get some time I'll make an actual school related post, but for now I'll have to leave you with crafty goodness. Also, I need to find my shoes, which I'm sure is going to be easier said than done.

Not nearly that painful!

So today was my first day in the school and all went pretty well. One kid greeted me with, "Are you the poor soul that wants to teach kids?" while another was super stoked because she wants to be a teacher, too.

The kids did a lot of really great activities today. Each day when they come in their teacher (Strecker) will have them all stand up. Then each student volunteers a sentence that includes at least one of the vocabulary words in the previous unit or their current unit (posted on the whiteboard). After successfully completing their sentence, they get to sit down. They go until everyone has contributed. Strecker told me today that it's not always vocabulary, but sometimes it's about lunch or something pertaining to the unit. Anything to make sure that they're using the language in a self-forming sort of way.

The second activity required the students to ask each other questions using verbs that use the preposition "an." Afterwards, they repeated the stand up/give sentence/sit down process, using sentences they'd gotten from each other. Periodically he would ask additional information, ie. "Jill is working on her English homework this weekend." "Oh, for a book? Jill, what for?" "For To Kill a Mockingbird." "Did you actually read it? Or sparknotes?" It was all light hearted and the kids really seemed to enjoy it.

What was also cool was that the kids have those cheap plastic faux-wood desks, right? Well, for one of their games they got to actually write on the desks with dry erase markers (because it comes right off)! They wrote sentences and left a blank for their vocabulary word, and then the other groups had to guess what word filled in the blank. It was really cool.

All in all, it was a great first day, and the language isn't nearly as high as I expected it to be. (It's been so long, there's a really big difference between college and high school German!)

Morgen beginnt mein Schulpraktikum!

In case you aren't familiar with the German language (and let's be honest, who really is?), tomorrow begins my student teaching. I'm going to be with a German 4 classroom, which is quite a bit intimidating. Personally, I never made it to German 4 in high school - the program was cut after we finished German 3. Our classes were always large and hectic because they were combined classes (German 1 and 3 at the same time, German 2 and 4 at the same time, etc.). The teacher did as good a job working with everyone as she could, but it was still a rough time.

So tomorrow I'll be over at the high school from 12:35 until 2pm, followed by class from 4:30 until 7pm. I'm definitely looking forward to it, but the idea of having to speak correct German for these students is absolutely terrifying. Maybe I can sit in the corner and hope for the best? Just teasing.

Craft wise I have done almost nothing lately (sad face), mostly due to lack of time. I do have at least one secret project that I need to work on before October gets here, but otherwise it's been relatively quiet around here. Yoshi's been clingy and kind of needy; I think my change of schedule and not being around as much is making her kind of miss me. Luckily I'll be backing off a bit with the hours at work, so she'll get to see me quite a bit more in the mornings (fewer 4am wake up calls are good for almost everyone, yes?).

Ah, so nervous...