Thirty minutes

Today is all-day professional development for us, but my group finished much earlier than expected so now I'm all ready for class on Monday morning, all planned for all of my classes for all of next week and I still have half an hour until our final share-out meeting. So, here I am.

Has anyone else had a crazy week? Brian and I had a pretty relaxed start to February - we didn't go out and do a whole lot for the first two weeks, but then this week was out of control. Tuesday night we went to a basketball game (and watched the Wizards win, which was new and exciting), Wednesday night we heard Thomas Friedman speak, tonight we have dinner reservations at Founding Farmers (looks so delicious), and tomorrow night we have another basketball game (where, I suspect, we will see the Wizards lose to the Spurs). Plus, last night I had first semester parent conferences. And Monday we're going out after work to celebrate our second (!) anniversary. No wonder I'm exhausted (well, that and I'm not sleeping well because we both got sick this week).

Grad school is going well. I'm less than two weeks away from being finished with my third (of ten) classes. So far, I have a 100% in the class. I am excited and proud of this fact, but I am also incredibly stressed about breaking my streak now, so close to the end. Still, I think it might happen with the last assignment, which is a reflective essay. I seem to have a pretty hard time with those. Probably because they require you to be a much more touchy-feely writer than I am comfortable with. Still, it's been a pretty great run. And the course, on content-area reading strategies, has been incredibly useful.

Work is dragging on at a fairly good clip. I'm a little burned out, which is normal for this time of year. I think that once things warm up and the sun is shining on a consistent basis, I will start to feel better about my job. Such is the cycle of teaching, I think. I just need spring break to get here (end of March, for those of you playing along at home) and then it's a pretty easy ride to the end. Not to say that I will coast, just that, for whatever reason, the work doesn't seem as painful when the end is in sight and the weather is nice.

Wedding planning is sort of at a standstill. Pushing the wedding back to the summer of 2010 gives us a lot of breathing room, but now it's just about 18 months away and I want us to have some things finalized soon. We're having a tough time budgeting because neither of us really know what is reasonable and if we set a budget using the money we currently have saved, well, we'd be serving snacks to our relatives and sending photo links to everyone else. In the end, I suspect we'll plan a great event for all of the people who mean the most to us and the money issue will work itself out eventually. Still, as all of you know, it is a stressful process and I'll be glad when we have something in writing somewhere. Plus, I want the big stuff taken care of so we can focus on the smaller, more fun details. Because I'm a girl and that's how it goes.

I think this is a pretty disjointed post (and I feel like I used way more adverbs than necessary), but it was a nice way to pass some time. One of these days I'll get the pictures on my camera downloaded (nothing major, just lots of little things) and share some of those with you as well (I'm always envious of my friends' blogs that feature lots of photos - they are so much more interesting to look at than mine). Happy weekend!