Thankful Thursday #30

Hello, blog friends.  It's good to be back with you.  I've been away because my family arrived for a reunion.  There were about 35 of us and I'm afraid Redding will never be the same!

This week I'm thankful for...

• hot showers.  I've caught a bit of a summer cold and nothing feels better than a hot shower in the morning.


• my big, crazy family


• my mom, for gathering my big, crazy family together in one place


• kayaking with my eleven year old nephew, Ryan.  We saw bald eagle in a nest and he couldn't stop saying "This is awesome!".  I love him for that.

• my little brother, Pete,  who drove 11 hours to make it to our family reunion.  We rode up to Shasta Dam Sunday morning and it was beautiful.

• Terry for bringing my roses on my birthday and for not complaining that I wanted to go to a local greasy spoon and have brinner for my birthday meal.


• my friend, Abby, for making me this awesome birthday cake.  Yes, she made the bicycle, too.  And it was Funfetti cake.  Best birthday cake ever.

• my second cousin, Jack, who sang the cutest version of Happy Birthday to me about ten times yesterday.  He also gave me lots of birthday kisses, including one on the armpit.  Did I mention he's two?


• all my friends and family who donated to LiveStrong on my behalf.  I'm $90 from my fundraising goal.  Fingers crossed that I reach it by Saturday.  Fingers and toes crossed that I make it across the finish line Sunday!

Cycling in June

261.732 Miles June was a great month and I squeezed in as much cycling as possible in between traveling and the rain that just kept on coming!

100 Miles of Nowhere: On the first Thursday of summer vacation, I joined Team Fatty in the 100 Miles of Nowhere.  The idea of the 100 Miles of Nowhere is this: ride 100 miles on the shortest course you can come up with.  The registration fee went to LiveStrong, so it was an obvious yes for me.  Besides last year I took first place in the "32 Year Old Teacher/Writer Cycling In My Living Room In Redding" category last year.  How could I not come back for a second year?
I chose a relatively flat three-mile section of the river trail and I rode it out and back 17 times.  It was as much of an exercise in mental fortitude as it was in physical strength.  But that's kind of the point because when I think of my loved ones who have battled cancer, without exception they have all had mental strength in quantities I can only dream of.

So early that morning I set out in the good company of That Laura and our friend Mike.  I'm a pretty lucky girl to have friends who will do these crazy things with me.  The first few laps were boring, so boring that I wondered if I was going to make it.  Then I popped in a book I'd downloaded and I'm telling you, I think that's the secret of riding long distances.  The miles flew by and I was happy as a clam.

Until I crashed.  Wait, can you call it a crash if you just sort of fell over?  Probably not.  Anyway, I was having a great time until I fell over.  About 65 miles in, I was making the turn around on the out and back and turned too tightly and didn't clip out of my pedals in time.  I turtled myself and was relieved to see that nobody was around to see my graceful move.  I hopped back up with a bruised tush and a slightly more bruised ego and finished up the ride.  And wouldn't you know it, I took center podium in the "33 Year Old Teacher Who Only Fell Over Once" category.

20 Donors With a month left until my big ride, I'd like to say thanks to Adam & Suzy C., Anita J., Betty C., Chris F., Christine W., Heather F., Janice L., John P., Joy G., Kathy V., Katie L., Kelly B., Krystle J., Laura G., Lynn J., Marie P., Nick W., Sue H., and Tracy H. for donating to the LiveStrong Foundation on my behalf.  You've donated $660 on my behalf and I'm touched by your generosity.  Take this message that was painted on the River Trail to heart because you've done a beautiful thing this year by donating to LiveStrong.

$340 to Reach My Goal  If you'd like to make a donation on my behalf to help fund cancer research and treatment, please click here.  There are only 8 more days until my big ride in Davis, so if you've been waiting to donate, now's the time.  It's my honor to ride in support of and in memory of your loved ones.

I look forward to telling you all about my big ride later this month!

Fondly,

Alicia

30 Days of Celebration: Day 14, Giggling with Gramma

It's 4:19am and the house is quiet.  The TV is off.  No music plays on my iPod.  Although I've got the house to myself, I've been up all night with a serious case of the giggles.

My family reunion is hours away and I've been squirreling away my free minutes and using them to turn the recently found footage of my grandmother into a movie.  My hope is to make a copy for everyone in my family.

[caption id="attachment_4342" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Can you say 'dinner out'?"][/caption]

As I sifted through the footage, cut it apart and put it back together again, I found myself laughing right along with Gramma Betty as she recounted the story of buying her own engagement ring.  I was snorting out loud as she told the hilarious tale of how she and my grandfather got engaged.  Not to mention the story of how she convinced him to take her out to dinner by cooking chili night after night until he simply couldn't stand one more bite of it!

My grandmother was one smart cookie.  Hang on a sec, let me just make a note of that.  Chili for the next month.  Oh who am I kidding, Terry would fall over dead if I ever cooked anything for dinner.

So today I'm celebrating staying up late and giggling with my grandmother, delighting in the ease of her smile and the twinkle in her eyes.  I thought her laugh and her particular expressions were relegated to my faded memories.  She always joked that her sense of direction was far superior to mine and it's proving to be true because long after leaving this earth, my grandmother has found her way back to me.

30 Days of Celebration: Day 13, Tech Week

Last week I co-directed a Technology and Writing Institute for a school district a few hours away.  Those of you who know me in real life are already laughing because I am anything but techie.  In fact when the NCWP director asked if I would be one of the three co-directors my response was something like "Uh, that sounds great, except for the technology part."  He assured me I'd be fine.  It was quite nice of him to lie to me like that.

I agreed, knowing full well I'd be the weakest leg of the tripod.  The other two directors are adept at weaving technology into curriculum, and more importantly, using technology to add meaning to the curriculum.  On a good day I can turn on my Interwrite board and make it talk to my computer.

But I said yes.  It wasn't easy because I knew full well that I wasn't nearly on par with my two co-directors.  This is the thing though, I believe that the best way to get better at something, at anything really, is to surround myself with people who are better at that thing than I am.  It's the reason I ride with people who are faster than I am.  It's the reason I prefer to work with teachers who are more experienced than I am.  It's the reason I said yes to helping with the technology training.  I knew I'd learn way more than I'd teach and it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

Sure enough, I spent the week learning how to use Word and PowerPoint together.  I learned how to use Little Bird Tales and Glogster.  And when I wasn't learning, I showed how I use Animoto in my classroom and I helped a teacher set up a class blog.  I worked hard, harder than I can remember working in a long time because each day after the inservice, I'd go back to my room and teach myself more about the things the other co-directors were sharing.

It was empowering to help others see new ways to use technology to bring subject matter to life.  It was empowering to be one of those teachers.  It was immensely rewarding to do something so far outside of my comfort zone.  I learned countless new things and spent a week with some wonderfully dedicated teachers.  And in my book that's something worth celebrating.

30 Days of Celebration: Day 12, San Francisco with Gramma

Yesterday I finished up the Technology & Writing Institute and flew to San Francisco where I would take a connecting flight to Seattle.  When I landed in the S.F., I grabbed some dinner and wandered to my gate only to discover that my flight had been delayed an hour.  An hour isn't much, so I plopped down on the floor by an outlet, eager to use this time to edit some of the footage of my grandmother.

I hit play and her voice streamed through my headphones, as if we were sitting in her living room chatting just like old times.  I flicked through the footage to the place where I'd last left off and was elated to find that my grandma's next story was about her move from Texas to San Francisco when she was a young woman.  She talked all about her first job and how much she loved the city, the very city I found myself in at that very moment.  As I sat listening to her stories, I couldn't help but feel she was there with me.

Every now and then I'd peek up at the people around me, families laying down and sleeping, weary from a day marred with delays.  I remembered the time Gramma and I were delayed in LAX.  The airline gave us food vouchers.  Reasonable people spent their vouchers on dinner, but we spent our vouchers on snacks for the plane and, of course, ice cream cones.  What can I say-we were both dessert before dinner kinds of people.  Life is short, so terribly short.

So today I'm celebrating divine moments when God uses His tender hand to orchestrate things so that I, a lonely traveler, could spend an hour in San Francisco with my grandmother as my guide.

Out of the Office

This week I'm co-directing a writing and technology institute.  So, my writing brain is tasked with other things right now, but I'll be back next week.  I'm having a blast working with other teachers who are excited about teaching writing and using technology to facilitate meaningful writing experiences for their students.  Enjoy your week and I'll be back soon!

30 Days of Celebration: Day 11, My Grandmother's Voice

In the wee hours of Friday morning I found myself ransacking the house like a mad woman.  I was throwing open closet doors, heaving out boxes of stuff, rifling through filing cabinets in search of the only thing that might have a chance at saving my dying hard drive: the OS disk.

I was frantic.  My laptop sat there looking forlorn, a gray screen with a flickering question mark on a lonely file folder.

Each blink of the question mark fired a new worry into my head.  Why didn't I make a recent back up?  Would I find the disk in time to save my hard drive?  If I found the disk would it even work?  Where could that disk be???  Aha!  There it was next to my video camera at the bottom of a box of miscellaneous computer stuff on the floor of the office closet.  I'd been looking for that video camera for years, but I didn't have time for it now.  I grabbed the video camera and the disk and shoved the disk into my sick MacBook.  I followed the steps I'd watched so carefully in a YouTube video made by some angel of a man who somehow knew I'd find myself in a rescue mission at 1am.

Sadly, no matter how many times I tried, and believe me I tried scads of times, my hard drive was too sick to even respond to the disk.  My fingers flew through Google looking for another answer.

Aha!  Take the hard drive out and let it cool off.  Hmmm, now if I only knew where the hard drive was... A quick trip over to YouTube had some other angelic man showing me how to remove my hard drive.

I hurried out to the garage to get the teensy tiny screwdriver set my husband keeps in his car.  Where was it?  I felt the tears coming in a big lump bobbing in my throat.  By this time my rescue attempt had gone on for hours and I was losing hope.  Where was that darn screwdriver set?  I searched the car top to bottom.  Nothing.  I could just picture my all my saved photos and documents bursting into flames.  I'm pretty sure they don't really do that, but at 1:30 am, things start to get a little uncivilized in my brain.

I called Terry, who was working out of town, and between tears I explained my situation and that I needed that little screwdriver immediately or the world was going to implode!  Calmly, he directed me to the screwdriver set located in a drawer in the workbench in our garage.  Silly man, putting tools away where they actually belong.

Screwdriver in hand, I removed my hard drive to let it cool overnight.  I posted a desperate message on FaceBook looking for any last-ditch genius solutions or any suggestions of places to take my hard drive for an autopsy.  Then I staggered into bed where I dreamed that all the people in my photos on my computer were dismantling the novel I'd written one word at a time, carry off the words until all the people and all 50,000 odd words were gone and the only thing left was a giant question mark folder.

The next morning I put the hard drive back in only to have that question mark folder stare back at me.  My FaceBook friends had come through with the names of 2 computer places known for resurrecting hard drives from the dead.  I took my sad computer to both places and I only cried a little bit when they couldn't revive it long enough to retrieve anything.  I cried a little more as I explained to them that I'd only backed up some of the photos from my trip with my grandmother and that those were what I wanted most.  And it would also be nice to get back the novel I'd foolishly not backed up.  Both computer places were so kind to me, not even charging me labor for the hours they spent trying with no success to recover my things.  I left the second place with a new hard drive humming away in my MacBook.

Back at home I started the tedious process of reinstalling software.  This involved hitting the enter key lots of times and then waiting and then waiting some more.  While I waited for this new hard drive to make magic happen inside of my old computer, I picked up the video camera I'd stumbled across while ransacking my house earlier that morning.  I plugged the camera into the wall setting it on the carpet near the outlet.  I crossed my fingers that the camera somehow still had the footage I'd recorded a couple of years ago.

I pushed play and the living room filled up with my Grandmother's voice as she recounted stories of her life.  I laid down on the carpet my face inches from her face on the tiny screen and I cried.  It was so good to hear her voice, to hear her laugh again, to see her when she was healthy.  I watched every second of the footage, even the bloopers I promised her I'd edit out later.  Suddenly losing some photos of our trip didn't seem so bad now.

My computer started to make happy beeping noises as it came to life again.  I jumped online to check my email and then remembered that last November when I was frantically hammering out my novel, I'd emailed myself a copy just in case.  In a couple of clicks I was staring at it in all it's horrible rough draft splendor.  I let out a little yelp of glee!

So yesterday and today I'm celebrating that sometimes, not always but sometimes, what is lost can be found again.  And sometimes in looking for what it lost, something even greater is discovered.

Thankful Thursday #29

This week I'm thankful for...

• white peaches so juicy that I have to eat them over the sink


• time alone in my classroom to get organized


• opportunities to put on my big girl pants and read something I've written.  Out loud.  To other people.  Gulp.


• running into former students around town


• leftovers


• reading and writing in my favorite Chico coffee shop


• carpooling with friends


• my workout buddy


• a fresh haircut


• the hot tub after a long day of travel

30 Days of Celebration: Day 10, Lesson Learned

Today I'm celebrating being taught a lesson.

I'm no photographer, a fact that is really obvious.  So I use images I find on the web, always making sure to ask permission, give credit if desired and link to the photo if the photographer so wishes.  So you can imagine my horror when I found out one of the images I'd used (with permission) was not in fact owned by the person who gave me permission to use it.  The true photographer kindly left me a message letting me know as much.  I removed the image and apologized as soon as I realized my mistake.  The photographer was very gracious about the whole thing.

It's a weird thing to say I'm celebrating a mistake, but I'm also celebrating the opportunity to make things right.  In the future I'll do a much more thorough job investigating ownership.

It's a lesson I'm glad to have learned.

30 Days of Celebration: Day 9, Bike Commuting

Today I'm celebrating the opportunity to commute by bicycle.  I live close to my school, so close in fact that I often walk to work.  In the time it would take me to pump up my bike tires, strap on my helmet, and get my bike gear on, I could probably be almost to the door of my classroom.  Then there's the whole issue of bringing a change of clothes, and shoes, and not to mention dealing with helmet hair.  Too much effort for what would equate to just over a mile.  Round trip.

But today I had a meeting downtown right off the river trail.  So I slipped into my bike gear, strapped on my helmet and pedaled out.  It was an easy ride from my house, just over 4 miles in the warm morning.  I rode along the river, thinking about the meeting at hand.

After the meeting, I pedaled home, mashing my pedals uphill in the summer heat.  Sweat trickled down my brow.  I didn't care.  It's summer and today I'm a bike commuter.