Traci Gardner

11/23 Journal

November 23, 2005

Cleanapalooza is 90% over. The living room is inhabitable again, and there’s enough space in the kitchen to cook.

Spent the afternoon in Salem, with my mom, sister, and niece. Mom had an eye doctor’s appointment, and we went along to give her company. While she was in the doctor’s, we took the car and did a little holiday shopping at a nearby Walmart. Didn’t buy anything overly exciting, but did manage to get some little things out of the way. After Mama’s appointment was finished, we went by the fire station where my brother works. It’s an older building in Roanoke. It was beginning to snow, so we didn’t go inside. Just said howdy, I gave him my leftovers from Sonic, and we were on our way back home. We ordered various pizzas for dinner so that we weren’t distracted from Cleanapalooza.

Filed under Children's/YA Lit, Personal Journal

11/22 Journal

November 22, 2005

Today’s major accomplishment has been grocery shopping. That probably doesn’t sound very exciting, but given that it was time to get all the goodies for the Thanksgiving meal, it was a pretty involved activity. I think that I’ve gotten everything, but we won’t be sure till the cooking is over.

While I was out, I found a couple of cute wreaths for my front door, so they’re in the car and waiting for the return trip to Illinois. Pictures next week.

We still need to do major cleaning on the living room and the kitchen to get the Thanksgiving feast underway. I’ve been calling the event Cleanapalooza. So much cleaning needs done that I’m embarrassed to even share the actual details. Cleanapalooza really gets underway tomorrow. Did some beginning work today. The heavier stuff has to get finished tomorrow though. Since it’s not quite clean enough for the whole family, we went to Longhorn Steakhouse for dinner. I ordered a chicken-fried steak and ended up with enough food to feed 3 people. I’ve never seen such a huge portion. Fortunately, there are dogs at home here.

Filed under Personal Journal

Best Books (Inbox Ideas)

November 22, 2005

The Ideas Section for this week’s Inbox focused on Best Books, pointing to award winners that have been recently announced at NCTE’s Annual Convention and books that have been recently reviewed in NCTE publications.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |

Filed under NCTE Inbox

11/21 Journal

November 21, 2005

This has been interesting so far. I am split between rooms on two different levels of the house because of space constraints. I’m sleeping upstairs in a bedroom/office, and I have all my clothes and whatnot in a bedroom downstairs. I’ve had no end of trouble getting online. There’s something very wrong with the fact that it was easier to send blog posts from the road than it is to post from inside a house with multiple phone lines and a cable modem. Fortunately, I brought my own Airport Express, and I now have it attached to the cable router, but it took most of the day to get that worked out. I ended up doing my conference call on the book cover interactive for ReadWriteThink without an Internet connection. Hopefully, I’ll have an easier time of all this tomorrow.

Filed under Personal Journal