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| it really stinks because i was actually feeling kinda productive tonight (i'm awake at 3 am) and i was going to grade all of my papers, but the version of the gradebook program that the district offers online is not up to date with the version that is on our computers at school and so i can't get into my gradebook and so i just really lost all motivation to grade papers if i can't record the grades. last year i would have graded them anyways and then entered them later, but in the beginning of this year at our inservices they were kinda giving us some evidence about how comments only on papers can increase student learning more than if grades are given at all. so i'm trying it. and gosh it takes sooooo much more time cause you actually need to look at things and consider useful comments that could possible result in some improvement. writing 1-2 sentences per paper actually takes quite a bit more time. i was actually impressed, though, because i had one student that actually asked about what he was doing wrong on one of his worksheets (1 out of 100). so we'll see how that goes. and the students are already complaining about the style of teaching. they really dislike the discovery learning because they can't stand not having solid answers immediately. i had a student today that had a ruler in her hand and got soooo frustrated because she was asked to determine the length of a segment and i didn't tell them exactly how to do it. the problem wasn't that she didn't know how to use a ruler, but there's some kind of block that just because i didn't tell them exactly how to find the distance between the points (we were really looking for indirect methods - counting spaces on a graph or subtracting the numbers - but i would initially accept any entry into the problem) she just couldn't even consider a way to do it. i understand the benefits of this style of teaching. actually developing the skills for students to be able to enter into a problem and trying to work through it and being able to evaluate how accurate their answers are independently is important. and traditional teaching doesn't necessarily build these problem solver skills. however, i can definitely see why teachers are against it. as a teacher you feel like you get so much more done when your kids are successfully completing problem and problem following whatever procedure or formula is appropriate, instead of working on convincing students that there's value in understanding how to work out a problem on their own. so this is the second night this week that i've been up at this time before school. i actually started the week off like this, which is terrible. i always seem exhausted the entire week if i don't get enough sleep on a monday. chris' wedding was on sunday and tom was the best man. friday night tom happened to go out with a guy from work, so i stayed late at the school cause i was a bit behind grading papers and wanted to make some phone calls. i didn't get home until 7ish and then i cleaned up the kitchen and was only eating some dinner when tom got home. i think i went to bed early cause i was tired from the week. then saturday was the usual up early for garage sales. then tom needed to get a haircut and pick up his tux and i was hoping that i could put on my wedding dress and try to get a picture of tom and i cause i've always been disappointed with the wedding photos i have of the two of us. i have a lot of awesome wedding photos, but the ones of just the two of us that people would seem to want the most aren't so nice (most of them tom just has the worst awkward smile or the lighting is bad or something). well, we ended up running out of time cause we had to be at the rehearsal. we called ahead for the rehearsal to ask about the dress and were told nicer than normal. so i dressed up (black dress pants with a nice top). i was the dressiest there and tom was probably second. chris had on khakis with cargo pockets and tennis shoes and so did one of the other groomsmen. and the other groomsman had on ripped jeans. the bride had on a jean skirt. i felt better dressed than the bride and it was just awkward especially cause i was the only person there that wasn't part of the bridal party. this is why we called ahead to check on the dress. after the rehearsal and lunch/dinner the guys and the girls did things. i went home and cleaned some and then went to my parents to work on the gifts. we had got them a clock and i was trying to make the picture that we got in their invitation look acceptable. i spent soooooo much time on it cause the edges didn't fit right and i was trying to figure out an oval border that would look nice. my dad came up with a real quick and easy solution after i spent like an hour and half playing with other ideas. i thought it turned out pretty well. and inside the clock with the mess of paper and tape and such to hold everything together i left a couple of notes like "kimtom rocks hard". just so they remember that. i hope they keep them there. um, so then tom got home around 11:30 and i was like ya know you don't have anything to say for your speech tomorrow and it's not something that you can just mumble your way through and hope people don't care. he's never done any real public speaking and i had the hardest time trying to convince him that it's something that he should care about. i think i finally got through to him when i was like "ya know how when you get an answering machine and you try to leave a message and sometimes it kinda comes out jumbled together cause you weren't expecting it and you're really having a conversation with yourself? that's what's going to happen if you don't have anything prepared for your speech and you'll have a microphone and it'd just be terrible to mumble into a microphone." since the beginning of the summer i've been reminding him of the speech and all he ever did for it was make up terrible jokes (like things about dogs and beastiality and children, ya know normal terrible things). i probably wrote him close to five different versions of speeches and he was always like eh, it's not really me. and he was like you should stop worrying about it because i don't really care. so i said fine, do it yourself and left him alone. when we got up the next morning he basically had nothing. he had general ideas like say something about this or that but nothing at all that could be put together as a speech. i am such a good wife because even after he was such a jerk to me about the speech i still helped him through it. it was weird how he was completely unable to put his thoughts together that they'd flow. i wouldn't necessarily say that i am great at writing speeches or anything because i actually don't think i'm a very interesting writer, but i'm not sure what his speech would have been like without me. he just didn't seem to have the ability to make it flow well somehow. and when one of my sisters was writing her salutatorian speech, my mom was like can you help her out? i think i only made a few minor changes to the intro and it completely changed the feeling of her speech. of course, the first line of my graduation speech is the most memorable "to infinity and beyond". anyways, back to the weekend. after quickly finishing up his speech we got ready and went to my parents to take some of the wedding dress photos since we didn't get to the day before. it was difficult to get good lighting and it was weird being outside dressed like that. we didn't actually get the pictures off the camera so i'm not quite sure how they turned out yet. of course i hope they're decent. so then i dropped tom off at the wedding since he needed to be there early and then went home to get myself ready. while i was in the shower panders got in it also. he's never actually gotten into the tub completely when the shower was on before. i thought it was so weird cause he doesn't really like water, but he's curious about the shower for some reason. so i just made it to the church when the wedding should start, but it started late so i was completely fine with time. after the wedding i waited around with tom while they ushered people out for the receiving line and then had to hang around for pictures. tom was still nervous about his speech so instead of going to the cookie reception i stayed in the church with him and wrote out notecards for him that would help him through his speech while he practiced it. then at the reception i was seated with dave that i went to high school with and i sat down while he was talking to their pastor and he kinda looked over to me and then just turned back around. i kinda waved hello. the pastor waved back, though. so i sat there, since dave seemed so cold i decided to get up and find someone else to talk to and ran into chris' mom. so she just started talking to me about whatever. random. it was strange cause everyone that you talked to in chris' family that you had never met before in your life knew you and something about you. like sometimes in a conversation you just kinda look at the person like wow i can't believe you know that. then when they were going to announce the bridal party we all had to take our seats. so i'm just sitting by myself on at the end of our table cause i didn't know how many others were at the table and i didn't want to be in the way of other couples, ya know. no one else was at the table. well, dave finally turns when he's looking at the head table and he looks at me for a minute and finally he asks if i'm kim and he's like i completely didn't recognize you. so he wasn't actually being cold before, phew. so dinner wasn't too bad cause we just sat and chatted and caught up a little on each other's lives. so tom's speech wasn't bad. he gave it much better than i anticipated. people laughed. it's hard for me to judge i think because it's tom and i helped write it so i knew it all. but the two pictures that i saw of tom giving the speech on facebook posted by others had positive captions. i'm thinking that if these people don't actually know tom and they have positive captions when they could really not have anything at all then it must of been a decent speech. i'm not positive, though. you can never tell if people are just being nice. so after that tom and i just sat around and talked and waited until people were ready to leave. chris and sarah wanted some nighttime pictures at various locations so tom had to go with the bridal party to wherever and so i just went home and got ready for school and went to bed. i woke up at 3 am and tom wasn't there (he had to go to work the next morning). i was curious about him and wasn't sure if he had keys to get in, so i called him and he asked me to unlock the door and he said he'd be in a little he was talking with justin outside. he doesn't come in for fifteen minutes so i put on a sweatshirt and i go outside cause i wanted to know what they were doing cause i thought that was weird and let them know that they could come outside. apparently they were just outside talking for like 2-3 hours and we ended up standing there for another hour all three of us chatting. eventually i was like i have to get up in an hour for work and said we could get dinner or something or sometime and talk then. i ended up not being able to fall asleep right away. i was really cold and couldn't seem to warm up and it was keeping me from falling asleep, so i ended up only getting like 20 more minutes of sleep before going to work. lame. so that's why i was up early on monday morning. and what's terrible is tom left justin a voicemail about getting together, but he never called us back. so he kept us up late talking when we had to go to work, but he's not willing to go out with us later? kinda upsets me that i gave up so much sleep to stand outside in the cold then. i thought he was a better guy than that. oh well. one random piece of information that needs to be recorded. i am now the cheerleading coach. ridiculous. i know nothing about cheerleading. i need to hurry to bed so i can get like 30 more minutes of sleep  ... | | |
| ok, one more entry for things i want to remember from this summer. we got another kitten. his name is panders. the name was between panders and mugen. he looks like he is black and dipped in white paint. like he's mostly black on top and mostly white on the bottom but there's some parts that have splashed with the other color and such. he's such a little cutie.
well, we were on vacation and so we didn't see cinders for over a week. and then when we got back i started my cmu classes and so it seemed like we rarely saw him. and then it was basically as soon as those classes ended that we got the new guy. we really wanted to get cinders a friend cause we felt bad like he was home all of the time by himself and we thought he'd like someone to play with. well, the whole introduction didn't go quite as well as we thought.
we had been looking at the cats at petsmart. and we'd visit with different ones and we were trying to find one that was not a hider, that would love us, and had a lot of energy to play around with cinders cause we thought he was kinda crazy. we actually picked one out, but we weren't approved for adoption because we would probably end up getting him declawed. and then there were some that were sooooo sweet, but they just didn't seem like one that cinders would really want to play with. so we liked panders whose name was orginally polo, but he had a brother whose name was marco. they were so cute together, but tom really didn't want to have three cats. and we felt bad splitting the two up. so we debated getting the cats for a couple of days. so we eventually decided we go check and see if they're there and were pretty sure we'd get polo, but we'd think about marco. well, while we were playing with them in the room marco was afraid of us. even when we had just him he wanted to hide or play at a distance. and we just really didn't want a hider cat. we like the ones that come to the door when they hear someone come to investigate what is going on.
so we bring the new guy home and we let cinders see him while each of us is holding one of them and cinders hisses. this surprised us because he seems like such a friendly cat. and he actually saw a stray outside of our house once and he seemed really interested and that was when we really started thinking it would be ok to get him a friend. so we gave up on that introduction, and we felt really bad so one of us would stay in the room with panders for awhile and we debated on one of us sleeping in there with him, but figured he should be fine on his own.
the door to panders' bedroom is 1.5 - 2 inches off the ground ( i think there used to be carpeting there, but now it's hardwood). anyways, so cinders spent the night outside the door and the two of them would stick their paws under the door. the little guy could almost get his head under. this happens to be one of cinders favorite things. he always used to sit outside the bathroom and try to get us to play with him through the crack in the door. so i think the little guy playing with him helped.
so then the next day tom and i were rather nervous about the two together. but we got our carrier and we put the little guy in it and brought him out to see cinders. they kinda just sniffed at each other through the bars but there wasn't really any hissing. so then we put the little guy back in his room and tried it again and after that went alright we tried letting them see each other outside of the cage and things seemed to be ok.
so i basically spent the next week at home watching them constantly. it felt pretty much like i was babysitting. cinders weighs probably a little over 10 pounds and panders was only 2.5. so we had this long thing of paper that happened to be in a box in our wii room, which i put out on the floor and they seemed to really like hiding behind it and pouncing out at each other. panders was so cute cause he would do the cutest butt wiggle before he'd go running towards cinders. and cinders actually ended up being really good. anytime that we thought they were getting to rough and we'd say hey, they'd just break apart. but when they weren't playing together cinders seemed kind of distant. he was never a lap cat, but he would meow at us and follow us around to different rooms. sometimes he'd lean our arms or something if we were on a computer.
so we weren't really sure that we could keep the new guy and it was hard to actually like him when cinders seemed so upset about it. but cinders seemed to be coming around. he definitely is talking to us again and he purrs when we pet him and he seems more willing to let us pick him up again. so he's mostly back to normal. he's still our favorite, though.
and we actually rarely call cinders cinders. we usually call him cutie/little bear or little man. so when we got panders the only thing we could think of that would also fit is little guy. but tom later came up with tiny dancer. our cats are totally not going to know their names.
we also started recording when they play fight sometimes. we call them boyfights. and one time they were playing king of the mountain on one of our chairs. so cute.
yeah, i know i completely sound like a crazy cat lady now. yuck. good thing we didn't end up with three of them. i was kinda ok with having three cats if the two smaller ones would make cinders the leader and they all walked around together as a cat gang. three cats are ok if they form a cat gang. the vision in my mind's eye is just so fantastic...
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| in the beginning of july i took two "classes" at cmu. it was for 8 days straight (including weekends) from 8:30 - 5:30. breakfast started at 8 and dinner started at 5, but i really didn't need to sit around and eat for an hour, but i could if i wanted to. the first session was about computational thinking. the presenters were all very good. basically everything that they talked to be about was a conglomeration of my college classes. the point of the class was really to help teachers encourage their students to use computational thinking. to help teachers present students with computational ideas so that the students will be more likely to include computer science in their education. supposedly there isn't enough college graduates to satisfy future computer needs. i guess they really wanted to also broaden our idea about what computer science is. that it's much more than sitting at a program and looking at a screen of pieces of things that just make no sense. and i pretty much already knew this. there were definitely some interesting ideas on how to teach some basic computer concepts. the problem is actually working them into a very rigorous geometry curriculum. any "free" time that i have with my students is best spent reviewing some concept because they don't remember it or didn't have enough time for it to settle with them. so i actually highly recommend this course to other teachers. i enjoyed it a lot.
the second session was an intro to java. i had an intro to java class in college, so i was able to mostly follow along. a lot of the other teachers were just blown away by the pace. they were trying to provide us with the skills that we could take an already written program and adjust it or work with it to allow us to do something that we would need. or perhaps teach our students to do the same. this class seemed much less useful to me. i've never had a strong interest in programming and i would say almost any program that i would need for some reason i have tom. i guess the best part of the class was that it showed us different uses for computers. such that you can check numbers to see if they're prime or something like that. unfortunately, it seems like you can go online and google whatever you'd like and it's ever so much easier than trying to figure out how to rearrange a java program. you can even google java programs and find a program for what you wanted to do in the first place. so this session was much less applicable to my teaching i think, but it was still a decent attempt.
one of the presenters, i actually had a class with at pitt. and i didn't realize it at first. like when he first started talking i was like wow he sounds so familiar, but i was like how in the world would i know this guy and was just like all computer people must sound like this or something and figured i couldn't know him. then during one of the breaks he was talking to mr. boyer and i and we said that we were both from oliver. and he was like oh do you know tim? and i was like do you mean todd smith, because i knew that he had interned there the year before me. and he was like yeah, that's who i meant, i thought that he was working there. and that's when i realized that we had had a class together. see i took the intro to math ed course as a junior because for some reason i just thought i should get it out of the way. when really most people take it as a senior. so i had the class with all of the mat students the year before me and that's how i knew that todd interned at oliver. and this guy was also in that class, and he was the guy that would go off on different subjects and whenever he would say something others in the class would groan because he would just go on and on and want to argue different points. he didn't seem to recognize me at all, though. perhaps because i had cut my hair since then and i never talked in that class.
anyways, for both sessions i get a $400 stipend plus transportation expenses. and they would put you up in their dorms if you lived further away. i thought 10 miles wasn't far enough to stay in the dorm. they also fed us breakfast, lunch, and dinner plus two snackes and all of the drinks that we could want. and at the end of each session they had raffle prizes. you could win a netbook, a kindle, a gps, or an ipod. i didn't win anything. i was so disappointed. i really wanted the netbook. oh, and i get act 48 credit for the classes. it's really quite a good deal if you have the free time during the summer. some of the others in the classes said it was kinda like a vacation or their kids were coming to visit to look around the city and stuff.
i also got a cmu shirt so i can pretend that i am smart enough to go there. i liked taking a shoulder bag and walking around with it during breaks trying to blend in with the other students on campus. oh, there were also some cmu students that helped during lab sessions. i actually talked to the kid in the first session. he was a math major going into his senior year. he was good looking. what is weird, though, is that he's the age that he could have been in one of my classes when i was interning. so i just think that's weird to find anyone attractive at that age. i decided that he is the best looking math major that i've ever seen. and i was attracted by his looks i was only slightly attracted when he said that he was a math major. my perspective of him changed completely. i think i just really miss that higher level of thinking.
i've been feeling very unsmart. first most people don't think much of teachers. like oh you're a teacher, that's so unimpressive. and second i only know high school math. i can't even say that i know high school math really because students are getting much more advanced and i'm not quite sure i remember much of anything from calc 2 or 3. even calc 1 i think i could definitely do with some review.
i don't have anymore thoughts on this subject so i'm done.
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| i was thinking i should try to write entries a little more often, and obviously that has been going extremely well. so rewinding a few months.
the school year ended. i don't remember anything particularly interesting happening at the close of the school year. i hardly remember anything about my old students.
so tom and i went on an alaskan cruise with the k-baughs. we flew to seattle and i don't think there was really anything interesting about the flight out. i don't even remember any interesting people that we talked about or anything. we didn't find out michael jackson died until my aunt and uncle picked us up at the airport. such random news to hear. the cruise didn't start until the next day so we shared their hotel room. the pull out couch bed was the worst ever. i'm not really a picky sleeper, but that was the most lumpy matress ever. i don't know how you could even offer that as a bed.
it seemed like we got there a day too late because they had lots of good stories about my uncle buying a wallet that had some card in it with a guy's name on it and a story about druggies and a prostitute outside their windows. they did point the bushes out to us. and disabled childred stealing food out of their mouth. we only walked the city for an hour the next morning and nothing very eventful happened at all. we were going to ride up the space needle, but couldn't believe it was $16 per person. we had a perfectly good time taking a picture of the building from the ground. and if we would have gone in we probably wouldn't have been stopped by a radio lady interviewing people about michael jackson's death. i told her i didn't have any comment, but when she asked tom how he thought he would be remembered he said molestation. and she was like not his music? and so he was like "well, molestation first. music second." he's so terrible. but if you actually think about it, it kinda makes sense. michael jackson was famous for his music before tom was even born.
moving on. we also walked through the olympic art park on our way back to the hotel and it was kinda disappointing. it was small. and i wanted it to be a park of like bush sculptures or something, but there were just random pieces of art around. i was hoping it would be a nice park to walk around, but it wasn't really set up like that at all. it was like a single pathway.
anyways, after we got back we went to board the ship. i feel like there should be a story here, but i can't think of any. i remember laughing with the kid checking us in about diarrhea. tom, kk, and i decided to board the ship first, while the others waited for peeps returning the car. we were supposed to go in and eat, but for some reason no one could decide what to do and it was really annoying me. like we walked around a little to look at the ship and then it seemed like all there was to do was get something and eat. and i kept suggesting it, but someone else would be like well let's go over here and we'd walk that way and do nothing then say let's go here and walk there and do nothing. so eventually tom got some food and we sat at a random table, but i was just too pissed off by then to want to eat anything. so kk went to find her family and tom and i just sat there. so we talk our way through it and during the conversation tom turns around and points at this old lady and laughs loudly. he's such a terrible person. really, who does that?
so after eating we went and found our room and it wasn't too bad. definitely kinda small, but we moved the bed up against the wall and the night stands beside each other so we could have space to put our suitcases. our stewards kept asking us about it and saying that they wouldn't be able to make up our beds with it against the wall and we were like it's fine we don't care.
so we sat in the room and watched the information on the tv for half an hour and then it was time for the emergency drill. so we put on our lifejackets. after the drill was the sailoff. so tom and i dropped off our jackets in the room and then ran up the steps so we could get a decent spot to see whatever there was to see. we were able to walk around the entire top deck before anyone else showed up. we're just that fast. it was really pointless anyways, though, because there wasn't really anything particularly worthwhile to see. i think we just wandered around and took some pictures and then checked out some of the things around the ship. then maybe we went back to the room and took a nap before dinner. dinner was decent. tom had so many fistfuls of meat. i had baked alaska for desert because it was dusted with gold.
anyways, so the next day of the cruise i made tom get up early so we could go work out. i called my cousins to wake them up to see if they wanted to go as well and they said they'd meet us there. well, we get up to the gym and tom is like i can't do anything, i don't feel well, i need to get back to the room. so i go back down with him and he just lays down cause he feels terrible. so i call leanne and tell her that we're not going and she says that she feels terrible and isn't going either now. so we lay around and watch some poker tournament on tv. and we call between rooms to see how everyone is doing. tom and i are wearing our seabands and we go to the medical center and get some motion sickness pills. tom and some of my cousins threw up. tom and i order room service and basically just laid around all day. i kinda just slept as much as i could so i could avoid feeling ill. it was a pretty crazy day. while we were laying on the bed it felt like we were riding the pirate ship constantly. just up and down and up and down. tom ventured up to the buffet to get us some drinks and cookies and maybe some other snacks and while he was up there he said that it was so rocky that plates were tumbling out of cabinets and it was just craziness. after talking to others later we found out that it's usually not that bad at sea. there just happened to be 20-30 foot waves and a lot of people that usually don't get sea sick were. it seemed to us that like half the ship just stayed in their rooms the whole day also. and room service was really behind. unfortunately that was supposed to be the first formal dinner, but we were able to order the food as room service so it was ok. i still got my crab legs.
so it was wonderful to wake up the next morning and feel like normal. we also docked at juneau and so we were going to be on land as well. we actually ended up getting to juneau an hour or so later than was expected. my aunt and uncle rented a van while we were there. it was a pretty creepy van. we drove to this shrine because the guy at the car place told us it was a good place to see whales, but we didn't see any. we just walked around there and took a lot of pictures. so then we went to see a glacier. it was too far away to actually get to the glacier to walk on it so we just had to take pictures from far away. so that was kinda disappointing. there was a ranger lady with some chunks of glacier ice for people to touch. so we all decided to put our foot on it so we could say that we stepped on a glacier. it wasn't as exciting as this little boy that went and got his own piece of ice out of the water with a stick. i was so jealous. there was also this man with the most amazing mustache that tom and andrew definitely needed a picture of. my aunt wanted to tour the brewery, but since it late sunday it wasn't open. so we stopped at fred mayer to get some things. tom and i got come drink pouches because they were on sale and we were too cheap to pay $2 for a can of pop on the cruise. so we spent the rest of our time wandering around the shops. donna and i were excited to collect all of the free things that we could. we got some earrings and a bracelet and a set of coasters. so after we got back on the ship we had to rush to get ready for dinner. i don't really remember anything else that happened.
i think the next day we stayed on the ship and went to see another glacier. i think we played some ring toss game and lost completely. we got two dam dollars, though. we may have also played bingo this day. we didn't win anything.
the next day we arrived in sitka. it was kinda rainy and took awhile to get off the boat because they had to tender us. tom and i just wandered around on our own and made up our own tour. we went to a small aquarium type place and we got to touch various sea creatures. tom was a pussy and didn't really want to touch many of them. my favorite were these little white things with poofs on top and when you touched them they sucked it all in. then it started to rain so we ran across the street to some museum. it was only one small room of stuff, but since we paid to get in we had to walk around and look at everything. then after that we went for a walk to some eagle place. we walked through some forest hoping we could maybe see a bear but we didn't. so then we went back to the russian bishop's house. tom actually wanted to see this because he had read about it in a couple of things. so we went on that tour. it was alright. just another old house (i've been on a few of these types of tours). and then we walked around at a couple of the shops but everything i was interested in buying was ridiculously expensive. so many things were like $10,000. and they'd just these random things that you wouldn't think would be that much and you wonder if people actually sell these things.
the next day we went to ketchikan and tom and i signed up for ziplining. so that took up most of our time there. we were actually really excited about doing this, but it ended up not being so exciting. the guides were nice and they would pick on you if you were scared at all and they'd give you random pieces of information and they'd try to pump you up and ask if you were nervous or anything. but you're hooked onto a line at all times and the most nervous part is feeling like you're going to mess up braking because they make a really big deal about it. like you need to make sure you have enough speed and you need to be paying attention so you brake at the right time and blah blah blah, but really you just curl yourself up and then go across. it's fun, but i didn't feel like it was fun enough for the price. i probably would have regretted not doing it, though, because i was really excited about it cause i heard that it was awesome. then we had to wait around in their gift shop for like an hour for our bus to come and pick us up. so we didn't have much time to go around the city and so we just hurried and got the free ornaments and necklaces that we could. tom was really stressed about getting back to the ship on time so he kept rushing me and wouldn't let me look at anything. when he finally realized that he was being a jerk he let me look at some jewelery and was willing to buy me a gemstone ring and the guy even offered us a deal on it, but i just didn't like it on me. i liked the ring, but when i put it on it just didn't look as nice on me. so disappointing. i really want a diamond bracelet anyways.
so other things we did on the ship. we did some put put challenge and got a dam dollar for that. tom and i convinced andrew to join us to do a scavenger hunt with us. only one other team showed up for it. so we had 25 minutes to rummage through our rooms to get various things. we got the steward to help us by giving us a pair of rubber gloves. we couldn't get his friend to lend us his blue jacket he was wearing and they didn't have any boots. so we ended up finding everything except for boots but i found a picture in a book and ripped out the picture of the boots. so we go back and the old ladies actually beat us back. they had everything except for one thing, i don't remember what it was. so we go through our stuff and he accepts the picture of the boots as boots, but we somehow left the binocs in my cousins' room when we were stealing their things. it was so upsetting. we had everything, and our downfall was the binocs. seriously, immediately when we scanned through the list we all yelled binocs because we were so excited that they were on the list and we knew exactly where to get them, but then we showed up without them. so disappointing. we ended up getting three dam dollars each anyways, though, since only two teams showed up. and tom and andrew made me put everything on because that was one of the rules and baruch said that we were supposed to catwalk , but i totally couldn't do it. i just kinda of laughed and walked normally. i was sweating like crazy cause i had a sweater, a coat, a robe, a scarf, a hat plus all of my normal clothes on.
tom and i also did this around the world challenge and everyone got a dam dollar for participating, except me. i had to be like baruch, i didn't get a dam dollar. when he was giving us the dam dollar tom might have said something about him being racist and i was like no there was another asian there he's sexist (cause i was the only girl). he gave us the most shocked look and we both just walked away. hmm, then we also played some word game with my aunt and uncle, donna, and leanne. you had to figure out what the different phrases were and we totally won this one. we're just amazing. so we all got three dam dollars. that was exciting. so we were able to cash in our dam dollars to get a t-shirt and a sweatshirt.
my cousins really liked their server widi. i didn't particularly notice anything great about him, but they were always cheering him. tom and i discovered a really cute server our last day there, pande. he was my favorite. he just seemed so adorable. oh and the chef's dinner was probably one of my favorite things. they have the performers sing and dance for you at various times during the dinner. i thought it was really funny at first cause i didn't realize it was the performers and first and i was like wow, that chef is a little silly. there was this one guy by us that was just halarious. everything about the way he moved made us laugh. and then the servers also danced a little and they were really cute.
we also stopped at victoria. we got there at like 7 so there wasn't really much that we could do. so we just walked around and made up our own tour. the tour wasn't as good cause tom didn't bring the camera so we couldn't take pictures of everything in the tour to remember the goodness. we went back to the ship early to finish packing. tom had lost his wedding band during the middle of the trip. and so we spent some more time looking for it. we were pretty convinced it had fallen in the sheets and then the sheets had been changed. i was surprised that i didn't flip out on him about it. we were both kind of down about it, but it didn't really ruin everything. now i know that i can lose mine and he can't be mad at me.
anyways, when we got back to seattle it took forever for my uncle to pick up the car. and then we all couldn't fit in it with the luggage so he dropped tom and i and donna and leanne off at pike's market so we could wander around a bit while the other went to the hotel. it wasn't that exciting. we didn't take a lot of time to look at the various shops and such and we weren't exactly hungry. so then we wandered over to chinatown and were rather disappointed. we did find a shop to get some bubble tea, but other than that it didn't seem like there was anything else besides chinese buffets. i'm not sure if we were on the wrong streets or what. from what we saw it was a very disappointing chinatown. so we got picked up to go back to the hotel and we just went swimming. we tried swimming like polar bears and it is extremely tiring. i could barely make it across the pool once. my aunt and uncle went and got us some dinner and then my cousins and aunt napped before they left for the airport for their flight home. tom and i pretty much just went to bed after they left because we had to be ready to leave at 4 am for our shuttle to the airport.
again, can't remember anything happening on the flights home. they were all on time, maybe slightly early. when we got home our cutie bear was still there so i guess chris did an alright job taking care of him. he seemed kinda fatter, though.
so the next day after we got back i did some laundry to wash all of our dirty clothes from the trip. while was pulling some clothes out of the washer out fell tom's wedding band. hurray! no idea how that happened because he assured me he thoroughly checked his pants while we were on the cruise and he gave me dirty looks when i quickly started feeling some of his pants pockets. i actually prayed that somehow his ring would mysteriously show up in the wash.
so that was our trip to alaska. perhaps i'll finish up writing about my summer later.
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| almost summer 
only four more days of getting up at 5 am.
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