They always get ya!

Friendster Blogging sucks. Anything you want to do always requires $$, which I don't have. So I want to organize my blogs so they are neatly archived and put into links so ppl can easily navigate through them instead of having them all on one really long page but NOOOOOOOOOO, that requires upgrading, which requires actually paying money. That's how they get you folks! That totally sucks ass...... that's why blogger rules!
Anyways, the end of the week went relatively painless. By Friday I was absolutely exhausted after spending a week and half lesson planning for two weeks since I have training all week next week. I have to make substitute plans for the next week and the lesson plans for the week that I come back. That is a lot to do! I not only plan for my reg. class but also ELD (English Lang. Dev.) Kinder, ELD 4th grade, and Power Readers. Crazy, man. For all you ppl out there who think teaching is so easy it is so not. It is very time consuming. Teaching is one of those misunderstood professions. There is curriculum out there to plan out your days and weeks but that doesn't mean that everything is useful. I sit there and go through all the lessons, decide what works, modify what I need to so it actually benefits my kids, and then put that together. Think of it this way, it took me 1 hour to plan 4 lessons for one subject. Can you imagine having to not only plan math, reading, writing, science, and social studies for your regular kinder class and then also plan for your ELD Kinder class, ELD 4th grade, AND Power Readers and all this planning is NOT happening between the hours of 8-3 because you're too busy teaching! Therefore calculate all the hours that is put in, begin all this planning at 3 p.m. and you do the math and realize that we work more hours than we should. If that doesn't make you a believer, consider this, teacher's contract hours end 15 min. after the students go home (for example, mine's ends at 3:15 p.m.). Any work done after that is volunteer work. There is no such thing as overtime in the teaching profession. And let I mentioned earlier, we cannot lesson until after the kids leave so technically we're doing overtime and not getting paid for it. Soooo.......do you really think a teacher's job is easy and they are overpaid????
Anyways, enough about teacher-talk. I've been doing that way too much. Last night Ray and I went to his cousin, Eugene's, 40th bday party. It was nice. Lots of kids running around. Because of all the stress buildup finally ending on Friday I totally crashed. By 10 p.m. I was ready to go but Ray just had to play Halo 2. I was totally falling asleep but not wanting to because this isn't my family so I didn't want to appear rude. By 10:30, which was when he finally finished, I was ready to go but then he jumped at the chance to play AGAIN. It's easy to say that I was pretty irritated by that point and even though part of me wanted to go over there and just straight out tell him that I wanted to go home, the other part (the supportive loving part) didn't say anything because I wanted him to spend time with his family. So I sucked it up and he eventually took the hint and we went home. Thank God!
Today, we mulched. The veggie garden needs mulching so we can have some nice veggies for the summer. Since Ray stayed with me for over a week while he waited for his new room to be avail. he mulched to return the favor. We spent the morning mulching. It wasn't too bad even though I had to avoid some slimy worms. Ewwww! I'm so not a gardening type person but I definitely enjoyed the time spent with him. Afterwards we tried to go watch "Robots" at the Tech IMAX, but no one I knew was working that day so we couldn't get in for free. Ran into Vuong there but couldn't talk since he was with a "school" group. Went to this free convention that had vendors selling wares. Wanted to get a fake Louis V person but Ray guilt-tripped me out of it since I didn't have money and I was asking him to cover for me. With all the recent past month's events I've been put into a few thousand dollar debt so Ray wants me to stop using my credit card as much as possible. He's also willing to pay my bills and have me pay him back which is soooo sweet of him. That's total love, man. He truly makes me happy. So we then hung out at Borders for 3 hours and now we're watching TV.

Tomorrow: brunch with my sister (and hopefully Ray will come), bike ride to Oakland Zoo and dinner in SF. Woo-hoo!