Welcome to December!

Life has been absurdly busy. I just finished my first term report cards. This meant a lot of extra work for me. I've marked a lot and spent a truckload of time at work lately. This has been fine and expected except then I got sick. I've had a cold for eight days now. This is annoying as it is the third cold I have had since August. It seems every time I get stressed or really tired, I get walloped with a cold. Right now my voice is just shot. Anyway, I finished report cards at 10:30 last night and tonight I get to proof read them. Although it is nice to have the report cards finished, I feel like school should be done now. At my last school we had to finish report cards just before Christmas break. Once report cards were done, we were off for vacation. It sucks that I still have three weeks to teach before I finally get a break. I am still relatively happy with how this year is going but it has seemed like an exceptionally long time between September and now and three weeks until Christmas still seems a really long time to go.

This weekend I went to an Advent Retreat at Gull Lake Camp. It was really nice to get away for a weekend- even on a report card weekend. We had a lot of free time in which I read. So happy. So long since I got to read and the weekend before my church had a booksale and I bought 23 books for two bucks a piece. They had been screaming to me for a whole week but I couldn't answer their call as I had those dang report cards to get done. The retreat was nice as there wasn't a lot of people there and most of the folks there were from my church so it was very comfortable. I went in stressed, tired and sick. I walked out relaxed, calm and sick. Stupid cold. I think I'll go back again next year. It was a really great way to kick off the Christmas season.

On Thursday we are going to a party that is all about putting together meals. You pre-order your meals off a menu and then the company does all the prep work. We go, put all the preportioned food together into freezer packs and take them home to pull out when we need them. It is a bit expensive but the variety will be great and knowing we don't need to plan a meal will be good too. We may eat out less if we know we have good food at home.

It is ridiculously cold here. -28 with windchill tonight(-18 F) and lots and lots of snow. Winter took its time arriving but when it showed up it came with a vengence. We are all just trying to stay warm here.