last lesson plan

today is my last day of teaching normal lessons for the semester. tomorrow they are taking a test (Richard Nixon - 2000 Election), then we are spending the next six days compulsively reviewing for the state test. and boy do they need it. two weeks ago, one of them asked me who robert e. lee was, and the other day i realized that one of them thought the president who just died was herbert hoover. and she had been to d.c. at christmas and had seen him lying in state! once again, i spend my days battling apathetic ignorance. (on a side note, what was the deal with the migrating funeral party for gerald ford. the man had five funerals. i didn't think he accomplished enough in his presidency to warrant five funerals. by the time they finally buried him, he'd been dead for over a week. get the guy in the ground already.)

i guess maybe i should talk about what i've been doing for the past weeks or so. christmas was nice. on christmas eve i sang in the cantata at church. it was...special. we went out to eat for lunch at this little bar-b-que joint up the mountain with aunt susan, uncle terry, and ashley. i had a great time. we took the scenic route home, which consisted of terry wandering up and down random little roads and susan fussing because he was going to a) get us lost, and b) get her carsick.

i went to virginia to see my parents and sisters on the 27th. it was really good seeing them, although mary took off for the va tech bowl game the next morning. on the saturday after christmas, i had a temporary loss of sanity and spent the day in three northern virginia malls - tyson's, tyson's II, and pentagon city. bad enough any normal time, but even better on official Exchange Your Unwanted Christmas Presents Day. the original purpose was to exchange the shoes josh got me for christmas for a differerent size. a simple process, right? no. they are from coach, meaning that they don't have a huge backlog of various sizes, so i had to go to three stores to find the right size. it worked out ok, though, cause i ended up meeting rachel at pentagon city. it was great seeing her. i think she may be busier now than she was in college, if you can believe that. i also spent a lot of the day with one of my best friends from high school.

i made two major obserations over the course of the day:
1.) it is tacky that you have to pay to park at pentagon city mall. it's not like i'm not already giving them way too much of my money as it is.
2.) i can see why people are willing to pay the higher prices to shop at the upscale stores in tyson's II, rather than have to deal with the crowds and obnoxious small children in tyson's I.

the highlight of the day, though, was when i slipped in the crosswalk and completely wiped out (as in, basically did the splits) in the middle of the street, in front of a truck which had stopped to let me cross from the parking garage to the mall. not one of my more stellar moments. (up there with earlier that day when i pulled into a street to turn around only to discover that i was in the driveway of some company's corporate headquarters, which had every gate down and absolutely no way to turn around without driving through the flowerbeds, requiring me to call the security guards to be let out.)