Happy Sunday to all of you who are still out there, willing to read my blog even though it’s been pretty much missing and very little hitting.  It is always difficult finding the right balance of time when my schedule changes; adding in master’s classes into an already jam-packed week is really difficult.  Where oh when will I be able to find the time to just sit on the couch and half listen to Hollywood gossip and glaze over at a combination of inspirational quotes and rooms that will never be recreated in my own house from Pinterest???

Totally.

For the past three weeks this is pretty much what has been my landscape when not at work, on a treadmill, or sleeping:

I spent the great majority of Sunday afternoon reading dozens of articles that may or may not be used in my research project for my current master’s course.  My topic is the efficiency of mainstreaming ELL/ESL (English Language Learners/English as a Second Language) into a traditional classroom setting.  So far the research has been tremendously supportive of…

Sorry.  I dozed off for a second there myself.

Now that I’m back in the swing of my new schedule, I have been able to prioritize the never-ending list of tasks in a way that doesn’t leave me feeling overwhelmed.  Three tips/questions that helped me get to this point:

1.  What needs to be done today?

2.  What can be put off until tomorrow, Scarlet?

3.  Is this something that I can delegate?  If so, let’s get on that!

And now I can breathe!

I did three VIP things today!

1.  I spent a great deal of time tackling the things that I HAD to get done today, hence the photo above.  Here’s a reminder:

2.  Dan and I joined a new gym.

Our friends live across the street from an LA Fitness, and Dan’s been playing a lot of basketball lately as a guest to LA Fitness.  After I heard all of the praise about how large and in charge this gym was, I decided to take a tour of the place, and from the first minutes inside, I knew that we would be members.  As you may remember, Dan and I were great fans of our first Florida gym, Snap Fitness.  If we hadn’t moved so far away from Snap, we’d probably still be members.  While I’ve enjoyed the convenience of stepping into our homemade gym in the mornings, there are far more benefits of joining LA Fitness:

• Wider range of weight and cardio equipment
• Basketball and Racquetball courts
• Lap pool
• Full-function locker rooms
• Group classes – I’m already scheduling myself for my first spin class!

• Our friends are members – WORKOUT BUDDIES
  

3.  I made a trip to the local library to pick up copies of the two novels that my Honors English students are going to be reading this quarter (And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut) and found some titles for myself.

I didn’t realize what a negative theme I had going there what with the additions of My Favorite Fangs by Alan Goldsher and The Grievers by Mark Schuster.

Goodreads.com Summary: Maria von Trapp is sweet, innocent, and can sing like an angel. Oh, and she’s also a bloodthirsty vampire. When Maria is kicked out of the Abbey where she’s been residing for the past thousand or so years, she lands a job caretaking the family von Trapp, a rowdy clan in need of some serious discipline… or vampirification. After Maria turns the von Trapp children into children of the night and marries the von Trapp patriarch, the family seems destined for eternal (really, really eternal) bliss. But Hitler’s Undeath Squads are on the march, intent on ridding Europe of bloodsuckers. And Maria will have to do everything in her power—supernatural or otherwise —to save her vampire brood. In the open vein of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, Alan Goldsher’s My Favorite Fangs is a hilarious horror novel that will have readers screaming, ”Do Re Mi.” Or just plain screaming.

Goodreads.com Summary: When Charley Schwartz learns that an old high school pal has killed himself, he agrees to help his alma matter organize a memorial service to honor his fallen comrade. Soon, however, devastation turns to disgust as Charley discovers that his friend’s passing means less to the school than the bottom line. As the memorial service quickly degenerates into a fundraising fiasco, Charley must also deal with a host of other quandaries including a dead-end job as an anthropomorphic dollar sign, his best friend’s imminent move to Maryland, an intervention with a drug-addled megalomaniac, and his own ongoing crusade to enforce the proper use of apostrophes among the proprietors of local dining establishments. Desperate to set the world right and keep his own life from spiraling out of control, Charley rages through his days and nights, plotting all the while the ultimate eulogy for his deceased friend and a scathing indictment of a world gone wrong