You might not believe me, but though I almost never update, I still check lj occasionally to check in on my friends' lives. ^^   I don't do much here-- work every day, which goes between being ok and stressful, worry about the future, go hiking, and now play some video games. I think I'm going to try to start updating lj a little more often again, but we'll see! Missed everyone though.

I have been having "one of those weeks." Actually, I seem to be having a lot of those kinds of weeks, but this one hit me extra hard. Not only was I missing my one coworker who is still on maternity leave, but my OTHER coworker was on vacation all week, leaving me in my room alone as the only main teacher working with whomever the bosses could send in to help me. It was stressful. Not to mention I was house-sitting all the way out in Kirkwood, so I was having to get up hours earlier than normal to walk the dog and get to work on time. I was coming in early, staying late, and getting lots of overtime I didn't want (though extra money is nice, my mental health doesn't seem worth it). I was crabby as hell, my coworkers in the room connected to mine probably were getting tired of me getting stressed out and crabby and complaining. I don't like the kind of teacher I become when I get stressed out. Why get upset with a one year-old? Whatever they're doing to piss me off is natural, and it's ME who needs the attitude adjustment, not them. But I get stressed and the whole day goes downhill and the kids are all screaming at once (trust me, if you've ever heard nine kids crying at once, it's enough to actually make you go mad), and it was just turning into the week from hell.

So what do my coworkers do? I come to work Friday and they've bought me flowers, made a card saying how wonderful I am and how appreciated I am for all that I've been doing at work under hard circumstances, got me a balloon, and bought me pizza for lunch. They told me they had seen how hard I was trying to keep the room together by myself and how hard I was working with all my hours, and that they thought I deserved something to show for it. It was so unexpected, so surprising that I had no idea what to do! It is possibly the sweetest thing anyone has done for me in a long, long time. Even though Friday was just as stressful as the rest of the days this week, that made it all worth it. Sometimes whatever misgivings I have about my job, whether I stay there or not, my coworkers made it wonderful.

Got a busy weekend coming up, so no hiking, which I'm a little sad about, but it's a bit cool today and tomorrow it will be raining again, so hopefully I'll be able to do some hiking next weekend. It has been raining a LOT, but I suppose with spring here I can't expect much different. I'm so GLAD it is here too. A tiny bit of green has started appearing here and there, some daffodils have been popping up, the yellow flowering bushes have started to bud along with the dogwood trees (which I'm allergic too, but it's worth it for spring). I think I felt this winter more than others, and it really affected me in a bad way. I don't know if it was because I finally started to get out and hike a lot starting last year and not being able to go out and do it was really hard, or for some other reason, but all I can say is I'm really, really looking forward to spring and warmer weather.

Hung out with John, Jenny, Allison, and Emily last night and finished playing Heavy Rain. How AWESOME is that game, for real? Afterwards, John and Jenny showed us how the game could have ended differently had things gone differently in our game, which was cool since there are like tons of outcomes and minute differences that can happen in the game based on your decisions and who you can keep alive. I wish I could play the game again and again, but it is a PS3 game, and I'm thinking I can probably only spare the money to buy an old PS2. Another day! 

Tomorrow is winery to celebrate my cousins birthday, which should be really nice, even if it is rainy. Still trying to think of something fun to do for my own birthday which is now coming up in about two weeks, but probably will just pick a bar gathering spot and hang there. My sister wants to take me to the tea room for an afternoon tea and then across the street to play at the City Museum, which I think sounds fun!

Last night went over to John & Jenny's, where they let Allison and I play probably 2 1/2 -3 hours of a video game called Heavy Rain. Allison and I shared the controller, passing it back and forth and switching out characters so that we could both get a feel of the game and have fun making decisions in the game that changed the storyline. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm pretty video game stupid-- I never grew up with video games, so I don't really know my way around controllers. I had gameboys as a child, but for the most part I was only allowed to play them on vacations and really long car rides. A my cousins' house in Chicago I got to play Ninento (super old school), and sometimes Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega, but these were few and far between.

Luckily in college friends like Josh and Keith were kind enough to let me play occassionally with them, where I got to try out games like Super Smash Brothers and Naruto fighting games. Not knowing how to use controllers well kind of helped me in the long run, because my "strategy" was just pressing buttons at random and hoping that it did something, though I'm sure that was annoying!

At John and Jenny's I have had a chance to play a little of Prince of Persia, Indigo Prophecy, and Silent Hill, which were really fun (but hard for me), among some other games, but Heavy Rain is the first one we've actually saved the game to continue playing later. I can do the controls for the most part, but the faster action-based times during game are much harder for me (I think I've either killed or nearly killed one of the characters already, I hope he's okay!). Either way, I'm having fun playing it.

I still want to buy a game system for myself, but financial difficulties have left me wondering if I should be spending that kind of money on a form of entertainment, even just $100 on a used game console. But we'll see.

Realize I don't post much here lately, but just checking in. Loved having a thee day weekend, especially since Monday was almost 50 degrees and the sun did make an appearance. I went hiking, made a post about it at pocketranger.blogspot.com/  with some pictures, all of the pictures from the hike are up on facebook though at www.facebook.com/album.php

Life is pretty slow, but steady. Work has ups and downs, and is fairly frustrating a lot of the time, but after 2 1/2 years I've really hit a point where I feel like I really know what I'm doing and talking about when it comes to taking care of these children and their development. I'm still exploring what I want to do long term, if I want to go back to school for early childhood education (or early childhood with a specialty like speech or something), or if I will burn out in another couple years and should be looking into something else entirely, but that's a whole lot of stress I don't want to deal with quite yet.

Recently started watching Chuck, which I'm loving, as well as delving into the 3rd season of Dexter and the 1st season on Arrested Development (with Battlestar Galactica waiting in the wings to be started) . Yep, ,still watching too much tv online.

Hope the Flist is alive, kicking, and doing well.

I may or may not have a tea problem. I expect an intervention and a trip to rehab any day now...

( Pictures of the collection beneath the cut )

( Just ramblings, no spoilers )

So no spoilers! Just felt I should get some sentiments out before I embark on the emotional process of watching part two of End of Time.

Haven't been updating here much, but thought I'd at least get a happy new year out there to all my friends page! Had a good time out tonight with Ashley and some friends-- went to the Royale for dinner, a coffee shop for a break, and then to Schlafly Bottleworks for midnight madness where a guy played Beatles songs and then we promptly went home after the countdown. Hope everyone had a great night and a great year ahead of them.

Finished up this week of work finally. It was a little stressful, but I can rest easy knowing that it is OVER and that I have all of this coming week off for some mental time off! Apparently I had too many hours of vacation time to roll over into the new year, so I'm taking Mon/Tues/Wed off next week (since I'd be off Thurs/Fri anyway for Thanksgiving) and a week in December. Thank goodness! I've been awfully stressed out at work, especially with people being off and conferences and all that, so I am really looking forward to this.

Took a hike today out at Valley View Glades, made a post about it here: http://pocketranger.blogspot.com/

Memory is kind of a funny thing. They tell you that a lot, and it seems to be true. You know how if you have a bad experience with a food, the smell of that food will remind you of that bad experience for a long, long time afterward? Well, the same thing is true for me with classical music.

I have always blamed the film Fantasia for being my introduction to classical music. It has always been a long-time favorite of mine, though I rarely watch it (the only copy we've ever owned I left at my parent's house). But something about the combination of music and art really struck a chord with me. Every time I hear Night on Bald Mountain, how can I not immediately picture little dancing fire demons falling into hellish flames as a big giant gargoyle looks over, ghost skeletons riding ghost horses over a village towards the mountain? Even though now I can appreciate the music a little more for it's beauty, I still get creepy shivers of discomfort and fear from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, because the Genesis segment of Fantasia absolutely terrified me when I was a child to the point that I wouldn't watch it all the way through. Others were afraid of Night on Bald Mountain, but not me. Ghosts, darkness, demons-- those didn't bother me in the least. Earthquakes, volcanoes, lava, destruction... those were the things I had nightmares about. I still have trouble listening to it. I would say that Dance of the Hours reminds me of dancing hippos, but to tell you the truth it is actually harder to get that song away from my childhood love of the song "hello muddah, hello faddah." And obviously, how can I not think of Mickey Mouse when I hear The Sorcerer's Apprentice?

But Fantasia is the reason that I fell in love with Beethoven's 6th Symphony, Pastorale-- this still probably one of my absolute, ultimate favorites. Though Ihaven't seen the movie in years, to this day with each movement I can picture the entire sequence of events as if they were happening on the screen. I know when the pegasus babies go down the rainbow, when Bacchus has his wine party, when the centaurs hook up with their ladies. Weird... it sounds so much more on crack when you actually write it out like that. The point being that more than almost anything on Fantasia, the imagery for this piece has stuck with me the clearest, and quite possibly can never be wiped out. For the most part, Fantasia was my very first introduction to these pieces, probably to most classical music completely, and it is possible that fro the rest of my life, I will bring up these images when I hear these specific pieces even if I have come to really appreciate them in new ways.

But not all my memory is connected to something as... lofty as Fantasia. No, Looney Tunes had to get in there and make it EMBARASSING. How is it fair that when I hear Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, I have to imagine ACME anvils falling from the sky trying to crush the coyote? Or when I hear Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, do I REALLY need to imagine Bugs Bunny dressed up in drag trying to woo Elmer Fudd and then running for his life as shenanigans take place (though girls doing the can-can is a quick second in imagery there, for obvious reasons). Or Edvard Grieg Peer Gynt's HAll of the Mountain King, Daffy Duck dressed in robber clothes with a sack of stolen money from a bank? Ok, granted that that song is also used in that context a lot-- sneaking. Or Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2, which also brings to the mind unbidden images of crazy shenanigans (yes, there are a lot of those in Looney Tunes, aren't there?) happening as daffy and bugs and others run around, or Tom and Jerry? I can't help it! I'm sure that cartoons are the first place I probably heard Edvard Grieg's "Morning", though the imagery there is kind of obvious and universal... so I don't know if that counts. On a stranger note, even Bugs Bunny did a version of the Barber of Seville.

This could be a call to comment on how media affects our childhood, but why would I want to go that route? If it hadn't been for some of these things, I may never have been exposed to some of these pieces in the first place, and so a little crazy imagery is worth it. Even if it is cartoon bunnies dressed as cancan girls. Going back as an adult and listening to the pieces again, the full pieces because of course Looney Tunes would only play you the familiar part, I can get a new understanding and love for the songs all over again. I just happen to have funny imagery in my head. I'm willing to bet of us do.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWGQaczNL5I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvXEElJFR6g

Pretty laid back weekend. Spent Friday night with my mom since my dad and sister were out of town, and babysat on Saturday night. Babysitting job was easy as the kid was already asleep when I got there, so mostly I talked on the phone, watched tv, drank diet coke, and checked on the baby-- just like high-school jobs! Made some nice (MUCH NEEDED) extra cash in the process, so it wasn't a loss either. This Sunday went on a hike with Allison (Ashley and Tanya both had to pull out at the last moment, not feeling too well), but the four of us met at the tea room afterwards for tea and lunch, which was really lovely. Not really looking forward to another week at work, which is just getting kind of frustrating and stressful.

Hike blog updated from today here --> pocketranger.blogspot.com/
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