Come On Over

Today while walking through the park I saw two boys playing monkey in the middle, but instead of a child or a friend as the "monkey in the middle" there was this huge german shepherd. I laughed out loud while walking alone. German Shepherd in the middle? maybe the worst idea ever. I only stuck around long enough to watch the dog attack one guy's leg and I decided I had had enough.

On another note, I spent the past 730 days scouring craigslist for a white sectional couch with skinny legs, and low and behold two pot-smoking, mid-twenties oaklandites had one in their apartment and on Saturday they sold it to us, two non pot-smoking mid-twenty alamedians. It's 7ft x 8ft of pure joy. You, your mom and sister and german shepherd could all fit on it. Laying down.
please disregard the wall heater

If I act a fool on the bus, I can't go on no field trip

Every time I announce something in class that my students don't like or say no to something there is always one student, Kaliyah, who says "Ahhh dat's jus coolld". One Monday morning she came bouncing in SO proud of herself and presented me with a drawing she had been doing all weekend...

Richie Rich

A few weeks ago at school one of my students said, "Ms. Baker when I first saw you today I thought you were a man". Note to self- don't wear baggy shirts to work. When I looked in the mirror later in the day I realized I did kind of look like a man, but not just any man, I looked just like my dad. The main difference was I was wearing stretch pants with my baggy collared shirt, and my dad usually wears jeans pulled up to his belly button.

Happy Birthday Dad, I'm glad I inherited some of my looks from you and also the tendency to move my mouth when I'm thinking.

Buckle Your Seatbelts

As I have said before, I make a lot of bold statements like, "Bret, I wouldn't eat at Applebees if that is where they held your funeral". Most of these are obviously false, but when I made the statement that we would make a theme to every year of our marriage, and this is year of the learner, I was serious. So I will now give a nine month progress report of how our learning is coming along. I will being doing this in bullet point fashion as I have been told many-a-time that people read bullet points much more often than paragraphs, so for your reading ease:

-I've learned a lot about the urban education system and in three weeks I will have a California Teaching Credential and 1/3 of my masters (I didn't know until two weeks ago this thing was a partial masters program, and it suddenly made sense because it has been insanely time consuming)

-Bret has learned a little about design and in a couple of weeks will be a certificated graphic designer and will be moonlighting with some graphic design projects

-We decided to learn about all of the regional and state park systems within three hours of us so if you are interested in going to Briones Regional Park, Las Trampas Regional Park, Pt. Reyes National Seashore, Muir Woods, Redwood Regional Park, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Sibley Volcanic Reserve, The Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, Sunol Regional Wilderness, and any other state/regional park you can find on google maps, we may have some tips as we have spent some serious time at each of them.

-We learned that the bacon sandwiches we eat at least twice a week contain 900 calories, then we laughed and continued eating them. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, but in this case, i have full fat content knowledge and those sandwiches are still pure bliss.

-We learned that you can go caming in Hawaii in a VW camper van parked in the middle of nowhere and not be killed... see the following picture: