Smells Like Thanksgiving

Hello all! I'm writing from Oklahoma, which is pretty exciting. It is not exciting that it's 30 degrees here. I miss my 80-degree flip flop weather! However, I'm very happy to be home with my family for a few days, and on this delightful Thanksgiving holiday to just have the opportunity to relax with people who are important to me.

We aren't actually having Thanksgiving until tomorrow with my mom's side of the family, so today has been a pretty low-key day. We ate chicken and mac and cheese for lunch, and we're about to eat a Mexican casserole for dinner. Just like what the pilgrims ate! I'm super pumped for tomorrow, with lots of turkey, mashed potatoes, deviled (devilled?) eggs, chicken and noodles, hot rolls, green bean casserole, and pies. Quite a bit of family is coming over to my house, and to make stuff even more exciting, a good chunk of my cousins are pregnant this year! There will be lots of babies to play with by this time next year.

The cooking has just begun at my house, and it's slowly starting to smell like pumpkin pie up in here. My favorite part of Thanksgiving cooking, making the deviled/devilled eggs, will be a little later tonight. If I could only eat one food for the rest of my life, I'm pretty sure it would be those eggs. Well, maybe mixed in with some chicken and noodles.

I'll keep this short so I can go hang out with people, as Stephanie and Phillip (my sister and brother-in-law), Adam (brother), Sara (his girlfriend), Brendon (his freshman roommate), and my parents are all around. Brian (other brother) is still in Arizona, but he gets to take leave in December for Christmas. Hope everyone is enjoying their Thanksgiving! Eat some extra food for me today, and cheer for the Sooners on Saturday!

Life is Gooood

If you've been keeping up with my countdowns, I'm sure you can guess that I'm in a pretty awesome mood as of right now. My little Daytona Beach getaway is TOMORROW!!! We leave after school and head to the beeeeeeeach. Please forgive the excessive use of capital letters, exclamation marks, and draaaaawn out words in this post, as I've had a lot of unnecessary sugar today and was already a little hyper before that. Anyway, Tracy is currently at his very last night shift for his transplant surgery month, I got all packed this evening, and all that's standing in my way is 7 measly hours of school tomorrow.

A somewhat unexpected development this week is that I was hired by Sylvan Learning yesterday! This marks my first job ever that requires a college degree. I'm such a grown-up *sniff*. My position even sounds all official and such-- Certified Reading and Math Teacher. BAM! It's like a real job and everything, plus something I can continue while doing grad school. And they're so eager to start training that I'll be getting a paycheck or two before Christmas. I don't remember if I posted about this before (so I'm sure you don't either), but I emailed them way back in June, and they actually contacted me about the position last week. I usually get really nervous at interviews, but because of the circumstances, I kind of felt like they were seeking me out rather than me desperately needing the job (which was the actual case), so I ended up having a great interview. I'm pretty happy with what I see so far, and I'm really looking forward to starting with students.

Just some random little life updates for all my Oklahoma friend-people (and Kelly!) Please enjoy the pretty-colored trees and cool weather right now, as I'm lacking in both of those things and am especially missing the leaves. Be home in less than a week!

Living Weekend to Weekend

As this weekend winds down, I get eager for the next week to hurry up so I can get to another weekend. Does anyone else feel like they're living from weekend to weekend?

This weekend has been uneventful, but great. Tracy had to work, but since there were so few patients, he's been able to just bring his pager home during the day, so it's almost like a day off. Last night I went with him to turn his pager back in, and then we went to the fishy store (we're about to start up a salt water reef tank) and out to dinner at BJs. It was a nice date night to ourselves, which we haven't really gotten to have for awhile. Hopefully he'll get a little time off today too, because today is his 24-hour shift, and I'm sure he'd rather relax a bit before he has to stay there all night.

The big fat reason I'm so ready for NEXT weekend is that it's finally going to be Daytona Beach weekend!!! We got the hotel on the beach reserved and have absolutely no official plans except to eat dinner Saturday night at some sort of oceanside restaurant. If anyone has ever been to Daytona, feel free to give suggestions on what we should do.

Two days after I get back from our Daytona adventure, I get to fly home for Thanksgiving! I'm getting really excited about this, especially since I don't have to take any tests or anything while I'm home this time. When I come back from this trip, I'll have a mere 5 days of my internship left.

So what will I do after my internship is done, you ask? Well, coincidentally, I got an email this week. I applied with Sylvan Learning here way back in June, and they chose this week to finally email me and tell me they have a part-time position open for a certified teacher for reading and a little math. I have an interview with them this week. Still not sure I want to do anything resembling teaching, but if I were to teach at all, this would be more up my alley, with just a few kids at a time and not the full responsibilities of a classroom teacher and such. Whether I take this job or not, I plan to work somewhere else as well in order to save up as much money as possible before graduate school. I probably won't start anything full-time until January though, as I still have to study and take my GRE, and I want time to go home for Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, I may get to go to Wyoming for a few days and visit Tracy's family! Yay high five do a little dance :)

In other news, this week I'm going to a supper club meeting with the Junior Medical Guild, which is basically just going out to dinner somewhere new in Gainesville with a group of girls. They're going to the Flying Biscuit Cafe, which is a breakfast place. I don't know anyone yet, so cross your fingers that they're nice!

Cooking update: This week I cooked the aromatic and ever-popular Chicken Tortilla Soup, as well as Penne a la Betsy, a Pioneer Woman special. Both were a hit with the gentlemen I'm currently entertaining (that's Jonathan and Tracy for all you forgetful people), and it's really funny to me right now to see the leftovers get eaten before I can get to them, and to be asked "Hey... uh... is there any more of that soup stuff?" It's not that I was a crappy cook before, but I'm finally getting a few really decent recipes. I like that when Tracy takes the first bite of that pasta recipe, he immediately says "Wow, this is really good!" and actually seems like he means it. I mean, the kid tends to not get excited about food (ANY food) the way I do, and he sure never ate leftovers before this. Now I come home and the first thing out of his mouth is, "I ate a big bowl of the soup while you were gone." Maybe it's just the girly domestic side of me, but I really enjoy cooking things that people look forward to and request. Next week, I won't be cooking too much since we're leaving early Friday for the beach, but I do plan to cook another batch of the Chicken Tortilla Soup (per request of the boyssss), and I'm going to try out a very simple Pioneer Woman recipe for Sesame Noodles.

I realize my blog posts are pretty much always some sort of countdown/to-do list/here's-what-I'm-excited-about rambling rather than my thoughts on important subjects or focusing on one particular topic, and I apologize for that. I just rarely have a particular topic I've been contemplating that gives me enough motivation to write about it. Instead, my head contains a mash-up of school, cooking, Tracy, friends, my family, Oklahoma, the beach, and downtime. Perhaps if you have a subject you're just dying to hear my opinions on (ha), you could comment and tell me what you'd like to hear. Ok the end.

Muh-muh-muh-Monday

I was feeling a little ooky today (yes, ooky... you don't know the word?), so I ended up coming home from school a little early. After a nap, I feel quite a bit better, so I've been studying for my GRE for a good part of the day. However, it's time for a break, so I thought I'd get in a short entry. You know, break the trend of only posting on Friday after a long week. I'm a rebel like that.

This weekend was pretty good in terms of restfulness. Saturday I cleaned and spent a little time with Tracy in the evening, and then Sunday I hung out with Jonathan (the friend who's visiting Gainesville on his rotation) while Tracy rocked a 24-hour shift. We had a lovely time, cruising up to the hospital to hang out with Tracy for part of the day when he wasn't busy. It still makes me giggle a little bit every time Tracy gets paged and picks up the phone, dials some number, and says, "This is Dr. Sisk and I was paged." Hehehe... You're not a doctor, you're Tracy! Silly. Anyway, Jonathan and I also browsed around Target and Barnes & Noble, as well as one of my favorite places in the world, Publix. Aaaaand finally, I worked on some lesson plans and a behavior management plan, which were thrilling, let me tell ya.

As my GRE looms ever closer (As in, it's in about a month! Eeeeek), I've definitely started a mini panic party and decided to really buckle down and study so that I don't have to cry on the evening of December 10th as I realize I have to take the stupid thing AGAIN. I'm currently studying some antonyms. Seems easy enough, right? Especially for someone who loves English and grammar... No. No. NO. Sadly, no. It's really quite difficult and makes me freak out even more, as I realize my seemingly decent vocabulary is actually rather teensy when it comes to big fat standardized tests. All that being said, I think with a few more weeks of studying (since that's all I have), I'll be in a place in my knowledge that I can at least get the average score to be admitted to the speech pathology graduate program. Cross your fingers, make a wish on a star, etc.

To wrap this baby up, let's go through a little list of countdowns, about which I'm very excited. If you know me, you know I love my countdowns and lists...

15 school days left of student teaching

15 days till Oklahoma for Thanksgiving

11 days till Daytona Beach with Tracy

3 days left of school this week

17 days till Thanksgiving

1 month and 2 days till the GRE

See? Wasn't that fun? Okay fine, I'm done now. Have a great week and try to stay well!

Yeah, I don't know. Just read it.

The bad news: Tracy and I didn't go to Daytona Beach this past weekend.

The good news: We've made plans to go in a couple weeks and spend the night! Much better. Tracy has a 3-day weekend (how? I don't know) coming up, so we're going to leave that Friday after I get off work, drive down, stay in a (hopefully) oceanfront hotel, and then spend the whole day Saturday exploring and shopping and having ourselves a wonderful and relaxing mini-vacation.

Another exciting development is that Tracy's college friend Jonathan is coming to Florida for the month! I'm looking forward to meeting him and getting to know him better, and I'm happy he gets to come check out Florida's residency program.

Only a few more weeks of student teaching left! I love a good chunk of the kids there, but it is truly exhausting. Buuuuut... I'm down to 4 days next week, 5 days the week after that, 2 days the week after that, and then one more week of 5 days. Not too bad! I got to spend time observing the speech pathologist the other day, and I loved it. Definitely quite the motivator to study even harder for the GRE so I can get into the graduate program at UF.

Also exciting in my life: I booked my trip home to Oklahoma for Thanksgiving!!! I'll be leaving Tuesday after school and getting back Sunday afternoon. I'm very much looking forward to relaxation, home, my kitties, and of course FOOOOOOOOD... Can't wait to just smell the yummy smells that come from Thanksgiving cooking. Hopefully I'll get to help put up the Christmas tree while I'm home too.

Cooking updates, since that's what I'm into right now (you can leave if you don't like it... ha!): I'm going to the grocery store tomorrow, and besides buying assorted random crapola, I'm buying the ingredients to make Pioneer Woman's white chili, which is basically white beans instead of red beans, chicken instead of beef, and some delicious spicy spices, as well as Monterey Jack cheese on top. It's cool and rainy here, so that kind of food just sounds good. Also on the menu for the coming week is Pioneer Woman's Penne a la Betsy, a tasty-looking dish with shrimp, penne pasta, fresh herbs, and a tomato-cream-delicious sauce. Aaaaand finally, I'm buying the stuff to make very yummy slow-cooker Chicken Tortilla Soup, which is amazing and surprisingly not Pioneer Woman. Yet another week of wonderful smells coming from my kitchen; this means another week of jealousy for you. Sorry. That's just how I roll these days.

PS- I decided to make random things bold in this entry. My technological prowess is astounding even to me sometimes.