DPP 28: No Lake Like Home

We arrived home late yesterday evening, with a car full of gifts and games, wrapping paper and gift bags, treasures and trinkets, and candy and cheese (oh, so much lovely cheese!). We also ended up with eight pounds of blackberries, courtesy of a sale we stumbled across in Meijer that was too good to pass up, and a wide variety of odd objects discovered at various flea markets on our meandering journey home. We spent two days driving home, setting a leisurely pace that allowed for the acquisition of various odds and ends and a few pauses for milkshakes and sightseeing.

This was one of our last stops, past the Tennessee border, near a town called Bean Station:

We are home again, and the clock is ticking before the spring semester begins. I will shortly find myself buried in grading and parental queries and disciplinary issues and other delights of secondary education. I am not exactly looking forward to this, but at least we have a home, and we are together, and there are pretty things to look at if we drive away from our home for an hour or two.

[Belated] DPP 23 & 24: Silent Lights

I. and I spent not quite a week with his family up North, enjoying time with both close family members and some cousins and aunts and uncles. We helped decorate his mother's house for Christmas, attended two beautiful Christmas Eve services, and ate a lot of food.

On Christmas Eve, between our two services, we took some time to walk around the neighbourhood and look at the pretty lights (accompanied by one of his lovely cousins). Some people go to such great effort! Above is one of the yards I liked the best, in part because it is mostly white (I have a particular fondness for white lights).

DPP 22: Star of Light

Tree-trimming this afternoon with my husband and mother-in-law. They have a lot of ornaments--but they are all very lovely. This was one of my favourites.

[Belated] DPP 21: The Shiniest Gifts of All

About a week before Christmas, my ninth-graders asked me what I wanted for Christmas.

"I'd like you all to turn in all your work, on time, completed to the best of your abilities, every day for a week," replied I.

"That seems like a lot to ask," said one young lady, and the room filled with giggles and murmurs of assent.

"What about your birthday?" asked another?

"Two weeks!" I suggested, and they laughed. I received many gilt packages this week (and they are beautiful!). I expect this means that they will not be attempting the Great Homework Gift. Alas!

[Belated] DPP 20: No Place Like a Bookstore

To celebrate the end of the semester, we spent Friday evening in Knoxville at a wonderful used book store. My previous trip there took place on a rainy evening, so I missed the "Free Books" bin that the store keeps out front; into this space people will deposit unwanted books that the store will not accept. I retrieved a great selection from the bin on this trip, and we finished the last of our Christams shopping as well. The people silhouetted in the bottom right are all enjoying the "Free Books" bin, which has a very rapid turnover rate.

DPP 19: Let's eat Cake; let's eat cake; let's eat cake.

Today one of the mothers of one of my wonderful eleventh-graders baked cakes (two of them) and suggested that I take the remnants home (on account of a looming anniversary of my own nativity). She made it with all the things I like best (strawberries, mint, whipped cream, and angel food cake). It was delicious.

Last exam tomorrow!

DPP 18: Red Sky at Night

The sky was beautiful tonight as we headed home.

In other news, I've now given three quarters of my midterm exams. The end is in sight!

DPP 17: Moon over Shadowed Hillsides

Yesterday's work day ended with the moonrise; today's began just as that same moon was setting (behind the hill in our backyard).

DPP 16: Hello, Moon!

Today as we drove the last mile towards our home, we watched the moon rise through striations of clouds and fog above nearby houses. It was beautiful.

DPP 15: Careers Play

This month, my husband and I have been trying to spend some time together that doesn't involve screens. Instead, we've resorted to the old-fashioned version of quality time: board games. In particular, I. has shown a fondness for Careers, which I've loved since childhood. Players establish goals (like priorities) in three areas: money, fame, and happiness, and then move around the board (and in and out of various careers) collecting money (straightfoward), fame (stars), and happiness (hearts). The goal of the game is to meet one's initial goal in all three categories, but we also have a lot of fun reading out the descriptions on each square.

 

Yesterday, my short jaunt in the Hollywood corner was my downfall: the square in focus in this photograph (just to the left of the "H") reads "Scandal . . . score 10 [fame points], but lose ALL your Happiness." We thought it was rather apt. 

DPP 14: Blue Christmas Tree

This weekend we attended a Living Christmas Tree programme presented by one of out local Baptist churches. I. and I have both enjoyed participating in a Singing Christmas Tree in our high school and college years (respectively), but this was the first one we've ever seen indoors. It stretched almost to the very top of the sanctuary and was filled with several dozen singers. (My photo does not do it justice).

Here's part of the tree during the overture/light show.

DPP Day 13: I See a Blue Christmas (Stage) Without You

Tonight my school held their annual Christmas concert. The whole lower school was involved, as well as six of my upper-school students, and two of my colleagues performed a very well-done skit. This shot was taken during the prelude, as we waited for the first choir to come onstage.

[Belated] DPP Day 12: Timeless Classics

My eleventh grade has been reading several nineteenth-century classics this term, including Jane Eyre and Walden. I was slightly surprised earlier this semester when I learned they couldn't name a single historical event from the Victorian Era (or its American equivalent), so we spent two days creating a giant colourful timeline for our classroom wall. 

I have no idea what I did yesterday, but I am fairly sure it involved going to school and going home late in a state of exhaustion. Apologies for the missed post.

DPP Day 11: Sky at Night, Clouds at Night

Today, in a special turn of events, we managed to leave school before the sun had finished setting. We enjoyed seeing some amazing clouds in the parking lot at school, watched the mountains turn purple in the distance (beneath those same clouds) as we finished the commute, and were rewarded with a brilliant cluster of pink over a distant hill just as we parked in the driveway.

DPP Day 10: Too Cool to Skip School

Though I paused for a few meals today, I've essentially been grading essays and quizzes; designing tests, projects, and learning objectives; and teaching classes or attending meetings for sixteen hours. I started at 4.00 this morning and left school (after a meeting with the Board) at 20.00. This is unusually late for my current school, though I've endured much worse at my other schools.

All that to say that I've not had time for artistic insights, and today's photos reflect not clever images or beautiful scenery, but two of the most essential research tools in my classroom: my decades-old encyclopedias (the first encyclopedias some of my students have ever held in their hands) and my secondhand dictionaries (used almost every day, though the print is atrocious).

Aesthetically insignificant, but essential to my daily sanity, these are.

DPP Day 9: (Half) Night In

Tonight my spouse and I finally settled down to watch a film we've both been wanting to see for a good long time. It was cozy and the film was lovely . . . and then I became excessively weary and we decided the adventures of Spock and co. might be best spread over two nights, to facilitate attentiveness at work tomorrow.

The nights of movie marathons that begin at midnight are over. In retrospect, and considering my comfortable mattress, I'm not sure I mind quite as much as I'm supposed to mind.

DPP Day 8: Egg Noggin

My husband has many gifts, among which are several impressive culinary skills. Tonight he treated me to two glasses of delicious, homemade eggnog.

I am spoiled and delighted.

DPP Day 7: O! (or Yo!) Tree

Today my most excellent spouse, as a treat, bought me American cookies, and I enjoyed them.

I also stacked them on the piano to take a photograph, which is not exactly my usual response to cookies. However, they were delicious. Mint oreo cookies may actually be a fair trade for dark chocolate digestive biscuits.

[Belated] DPP Day 6: Q are you?

I wasn't going to post for yesterday, because although I took a lot of photographs, they all had small children in them, and I don't like to post photographs of other people's children on the internet.

Looking over my photographs, however, I found a crop that would preserve privacy while still allowing my blog viewers to enjoy the a fragment of the charm.

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the annual Wedding of Q and U. It is one of the major events on our school's calendar in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and featured a small kindergartner in the tiniest tuxedo ever seen playing Q opposite a beautiful small kindergartner playing U. U was walked down the entire hallway of the school by her father, the other kindergartners served as attendants, and the letters were joined under a flowered archway.

Here's Q's black tie and boutonniere:

Our headmaster read the vows, which included, of course, a quirky collection of relevant vocabulary words. No one from Qatar was invited.

DPP Day 5: Light Path to Laughter

I was so weary last night. We arrived home at 5 p.m. and I sat and waited for my evening event, which was a Womens' Fellowship dinner at church. I very seriously considered skipping the fellowship in favour of going to bed early, but I went.

The path to the Fellowship Hall was lined with candles in large jars (not quite luminaria, but they looked the same from a distance). At first I thought the tealights were taped to the tops of the jars, but they actually just put a single taper candle into each jar and let them burn down over the course of the evening.

In all our travels, I. and I. have been particularly blessed by God's providence in giving us numerous and wonderful church homes, and our current church is no exception. A night of laughter and prayer was exactly what I needed last night.

God is good. (Also, Lutherans do White Elephant exchanges like none I have ever before seen. Fascinating).

DPP Day 4: Reading and Weeding

Our school library is pretty small, and currently filled more with donations from well-meaning parents than classics that children could read. Lately I've been making small ripples that might have long-term benefits, such as convincing the librarians that we don't actually need to keep books on being a good Christian wife in the Young Adults section.

This week, in anticipation of soome new acquisitions, I took photographs of our current stock. There's nothing especially signficant about this pile, except that it looked pretty (and colourful!) and I am actually very pleased that, of all the editions of The Hobbit available, we have The Annotated Hobbit in our school library.

DPP Day 3: Two Pretty Things

For all the other ways in which I am sometimes frustrated by life here, we have been very fortunate to have a place to live--both broadly and specifically--that is very pretty, especially at sunset.

Here's a small fraction of tonight's sunset:

Recently I've been discovering tricks of Spotify, which I thought had an absurdly low number of foreign-language songs until I discovered how to search for them.

Zbigniew Preisner has long been one of my favourite musicians (I deeply love his Requiem for my Friend album), but I've just found his Christmas album Moje Koledy, and his version of the "Koleda dla Piotr" ("Carol for Peter") is breathtaking. (Also, foreign-melody Christmas music feels so much less trite than the American tunes that have been blaring in stores since All Saints' Day).

DPP Day 2: Shifting into the Season

A long-awaited treat from Britain arrived today in the mail:

Though I very much enjoyed Wool, the first [five] book[s] in the series [collected into one volume], I am reminded by my excellent spouse that there is abundant profanity in the collection, and there are two scenes of adult nature.

DPP Day 1: Not Much to Show

Though Tennessee does have some very lovely outdoor features, today I was stuck indoors with the last of my Thanksgiving cold. I rested a great deal and graded a little, but I had energy for almost nothing that required effort or creativity, hence I present this rather helf-hearted attempt at a first photo:

I'm now off to sleep off the last of my sniffles.