Last night, I had to give a speech at the city commissioner meeting here. Man, remind me not to try to run for public office. When I was a teenager I went to Girls' State, which is where you go and act out the process of running for offices in government. I ran for mayor, but did not get it. I ran for Secretary of State and also didn't get that (I am still bitter about that one because I still think it ended up being a popularity vote and not a vote on the issues...). I always have kind of thought that maybe I would be good at something in a public office, but I am totally over that after last night. What a mess! I waited for about 2 hours while the commissioners argued about an area of land that is on a lake. Then, I gave the speech (yikes!).

When I got to school today, a little girl asked me if I was on TV. I thought she was talking about when I first started teaching and I was on videos that went to other schools. But she said, "No, it was last night and you said you were from (the school where I teach)." Oh! Yes, City commissioner meetings also get televised. I kind of wondered about that last night because there have been times when I have been flipping through channels and have passed city meetings, but I didn't know that it was city commisioner per se. Indeed. Not only did I give a speech to the city commissioners, I was on TV all across town, too. To be honest, I wasn't too worried about that, cause that channel is so boring, but apparently SOME people watch it!

As another random point, I got hit in the head with a medicine ball today. Being a PE teacher continues to get awesomer and awesomer (as you can see, my English is improving, as well!

Well, this weekend has ben very, very full. I haven't been home hardly at all. Just a little bit today (just enough time to enjoy House of Worship on the radio), and today I haven't gotten much done cause my mind is racing from all that has happened. Some of it was very scary and a shock to my system. But in the midst of it, there were some funny moments. And I am nothing, if not optimistic--always looking to the full glass when faced with scary things and a currently, difficult life.

Yesterday, I went to a conference for ESL teachers. Even though, I am not an ESL teacher, yet, it is my aspiration, so I went to the conference hoping to make connections and learn about the profession. I like to go to practical sessions when I attend conferences. Most of the fun ideas that I use in the Spanish classroom have come from these conferences (I just use the same activities, but with Spanish instead of English).

There was a neat session that I went to yesterday where the man showed how to use dice with letters on them for different activities in the language classroom. He would demonstrate the drill and then we worked in groups to play the games. None of the people in my group had ever met each other, but we got along great and had a lot of fun. I was always the first one to start each of the drills, and in this one drill we had two alphabet spinners. We were to use the spinners to determine what noun and verb we would use in the phrase--"I like to (verb) (noun)." I had one where I liked to "flip umbrellas." One man in my group laughed that it was like "Flip My House," but with umbrellas. On my second turn, I got K and U. I could think of the verb Kill for the K, but not anything that I could kill with a "U." This other lady came up with unicorns. From then on, my group was making fun of me for liking to "kill unicorns."

Then, in another session we played Catchphrase to talk about circumlocution, which is when someone who is learning a foreign language will talk around the word that he or she doesn't know, but is still able to get across the point that he or she is making. When it got to me, the Catchphrase deal was on Exxon Valdez. I have no idea what that is, but I thought maybe it had to do with the Exxon gasoline so that's what I said. I ended up losing, because the gadget stopped beeping on my turn. I still don't know what Exxon Valdez was (was I right?), but it made for a funny game.

Now back to the originally scheduled week. Only 9 more days to a holiday! No I do NOT have a count-down going...just until Christmas! haha.