holy moly

TOUGH first day of school kiddos.  Commute was Dis-gusting.  The walk to my subway was a nice mix of skating rink and slushie.  Bronx-flavored slushie.  Almost died falling like six times, finally made it into the station as the train left.  okay no biggie.  sat down to wait, and wait, and wait and wait and wait and get up and look at the train which is one stop away i can see it but why isn't it coming and wait and wait and wait and then it finally came and SURPRISE! it's a local because it is too icy to go express.  of course when it gets to manhattan it's underground so it can go express but then i need the local to get to 68th street and the local train takes FOREVER.

So I went to my 9:40 am class closer to 10:20.  dang.  The teacher was incredibly chill though and I had fun in the class and the reading looks interesting.

The books for school are TOO expensive!! I haven't bought proper textbooks in years... but they were very expensive, even more than when I was an undergrad and those were expensive.  now they are like $120 dollars!! I mean c'mon!  So I bought one as an e-book and i'll try that and see if I can read/study from it but I think I can for that class because it isn't that hard.  The rest of the books I am renting.  Renting books!! sheesh.

um what else... i was super hungry at school because i was there for ten hours and all i had packed was a mini p.b.and j.  brian and i are going to get school supplies and foods tomorrow before I go gym/writing group/night school.  

I am so tired.  I never wake up early.  I'm changing Wednesday to Challenge Day in my calendars because this is a very hard day!!

oh i want to write more but I am too tired.

I have to take linguistics and it is impossibly hard because i had no training in grammar.  I know grammar intuitively but not formally and have no basic understanding of it to build off of.  This is very unfortunate because it seems somehow that my classmates were instructed on this stuff at some point and I was not.  maybe it was sixth grade?  I missed most of sixth grade because my appendix ruptured.  linguistics is hard like math.

my fridge died today

long live my fridge.  well when i go get one in the morning.  i filled the mostly-dead fridge with ice to save my foods.  maybe it will work.  who knows?

today my little charges started school.  kindergarten for the 5 y.o. and third grade for the 8 y.o.  they did alright.  chloe likes her teacher and has a friend in her class.  soph's nervous about geometry, even though she has nothing to worry about.  she knows about rhombuses and nonagons and such.  glad we watched out TMBG Here Comes the Science videos this summer :)


i'm a really, really good nanny.  last night i watched a new charge named carmella.  she's two and pretty awesome.  she is pretty decent at using the potty which impressed me, and knows her shapes fairly well.  gonna have to do more work with colors because she guesses everything is lellow or pink.  i like lellow.  her mom was very impressed with how i integrate learning activities into fun and active play, which made me happy.  of course i learned this over time.  it is boring to just play with kids, it is better to play with them and teach them stuff.  and if you just teach them stuff they get bored and frustrated, so it is much better to mix it up into a game, and to break those games up with physical activities.

um what else.  i'm getting a new kid.  her name's ava and she lives in the same building with sophie and chloe and she goes to the same school.  three days a week i'm picking her up and hanging out.  bonus for me on the financial side and also in the job-not-being-boring department.

today i saw my friend andrushka and his mom at the library.  he is pretty cool.  he's in first grade now and he likes rockets and space and stuff and he is trilingual which is just amazing and i'm wishing i was even bilingual!  he speaks English and Georgian and Russian.  he also had bright red hair which i like because it reminds me of my niece Annika who is like the light of my life.

henry came to visit me lots this week because he was home from iraq to go to a wedding.  i like him lots.  he is coming back for a long while in about a month so we shall see what's what.

i decided what i am going to school for, specifically. i want to do a master's of science in early childhood education but that job market is the pits right now.   and i am so tired of being desperately poor.  so instead i am going to do a master's in TESOL.
probably at CUNY hunter.

ok time to go to sleep i have to get up early to go to the used appliance store.  and i have to have my wits about me because they don't speak English over there just Spanglish and i don't want to get anything mixed up, especially not features or prices.  i should probably ask the guy to write stuff down in spanish, that's what i did last time and it worked because translating writing is much easier for me than fast speech.

in closing i want to wish everyone a happy rosh hashanah!