I have an interview !!!!!!!!!!!!

And just like that summer is gone. Work has been CRAZY busy and I’m just now settling back into somewhat of a routine. Hence the update. Not much has changed in the Radz household…work is work….Evan is growing (and pulling up on things…yikes)…the house is still falling apart. Same old, same old. What is new is my job situation. Mainly that tomorrow at 12 noon, I have an interview to get back in the classroom! I have been wanting to get back in the classroom for some time now and finally have a few promising leads. Those who know me, know that I was meant to be a teacher. For those of you who don’t know me, here are a few of the reasons that I MUST get back in front of the kiddos.

 

1. I like hearing myself talk which means that I’ve started talking to myself….not good.
2. I looooooove the kids. There is nothing like the relationships that you build when you see the same kids every day for a whole school year. It’s amazing to watch their successes and their failures and every once in a while you get that kid that comes along that makes you say, “Now THAT is why I’m a teacher.” 
3. I love buying school supplies….and without being a teacher I really have no reason to buy them and instead I look like the sad old lady at the office supply store buying colored pencils and fun paper clips.
4. I am just not meant to sit at a desk. Sitting in front of a computer leads me to do troubling things like…well….talking to myself, giggling at absolutely nothing, yelling out random obscenities, stealing things from other’s desks for ransom, and other equally psychotic things.
5. I want my summers back…and vacations….and 3 day weekends….and snow days  I realize that sounds selfish, but really it’s all about more time with my little man.
6. I need to have my own classroom that I can just close the door to from time to time. I realize that I will still be accountable for my work, but there’s nothing like being able to just do your own thing and run with it.
7.  I’m hilarious. No really….I am. Okay, so maybe day to day I’m not too funny, but something about being in front of 30 teenagers brings out the inner comedian in me. They even laugh with me sometimes! (Alright, maybe it’s at me….but it’s still laughing.)
8. Where the heck else am I going to my funny stories from? Like the time the kid saw me at the movies and asked why I wasn’t at school….on a Friday night. Or the brilliant student who asked me if she dyed her hair if her unborn baby’s hair color would change. Or the ….well, you get the idea.

And most importantly….

 

Teaching is truly my passion. I find nothing more rewarding than getting kids to realize that they are amazing individuals and that even if (gasp) science is not their thing, they all have strengths. I love watching the “trouble” kids come alive with a little bit of support. I love the kids that come back after they’ve graduated to share their success stories. I love knowing that maybe, just maybe, I am the topic of conversation around the dinner table because a child learned something so fun that they just had to share it with their parents.

 

Anyways, fingers crossed that this interview goes well. Ah hell….cross your toes, arms, legs….whatever you can manage for me 

 

My amazing burglary skills...

I figured it was Friday and a good day to post and even though I missed the  MamaKat posting day I went to her for a prompt and came across this gem.  Couldn't have been more perfect.  Enjoy.

1.) Write about a time you had to crawl through a window.

It was a beautiful summer day...a bit on the hot side, but bright and sunny....perfect for getting a little tan on my glowing white skin.  At the time, I lived in the third floor apartment and we had the cutest little deck off the back of the house that rested right on the peek of the roof from the floor below (picture this...its important later).  I don my tiniest of bathing suits to avoid tan lines knowing that no one can see me on the back deck and grab my iPod, a towel, and a bottle of water and walk out, closing the one door back into the house behind me.

Fast forward about an hour later....I am sufficiently fried, my water is gone, and I'm starting to get a little woozy so I figure its time to head out of the sun and cool off.  I gather everything up and go to open the door....and the knob doesn't turn.  I try it again, thinking maybe the sun has gotten to me.  Nope.  Nothing.  I have locked myself onto my little 6'x6' deck 3 stories up in 90+degree heat.  Lovely.  Panic sets in when I realize that I will be home alone for at least the next 5 hours!  I could be dead by that point!  So I take action.

If you read this normally, you know that I'm a fairly athletic person (klutzy yes, but somewhat coordinated when I need to be), so I haul bikini-clad self over the railing of the deck and lower myself onto the STEEP pitch of the roof below...and realize the black roof is burning hot!  I try desperatly to scramble back up onto the deck, but can't quite get the leverage I need while alternating which foot I'm standing on. Realizing this will never work, I turn around and crab walk (not sure why that seemed intelligent) down the roof to the much flatter roof of the second story.  Once there I find a little bit of shade and sit down to contemplate my next move.  I look around to see if there's anyone I can call to....there isn't.  Which is good because that also means that no one has seem the woman in the bikini just scale her roof, but bad because I'm still stuck two stories up.  I look over the edge of the roof and try to calculate how far the drop would be if i hung all 5'3" of me from the gutter and figure that its prob still a good 20 feet....not doing that.  Soooo I lay on my back on the roof of the second story and figure I'll wait for my lovely husband to come home and rescue me....and then I notice that I'm staring at the window of the 2nd floor apt.  Wooh!  I knock on the two windows that I can see and call to whoever may be inside...and no one answers.  At this point, I'm desperate....hot, sweaty, practically naked, and a bit light headed....so I try to open the window...locked.  To this day I'm still not sure how I actually got the window open, but I think I had one of those superhuman strength moments...and before I knew it I was in the apartment.  I quietly closed the window and tiptoed through their apartment (not sure why I tiptoed...no one was home), out their front door, and back up the stairs to my apartment where I put some aloe on my burned to shit feet and took a well deserved nap.

How about you?  Ever broken into anywhere?

Another day....another pound?!?

At the beginning of last week I started a diet.  This would be unremarkable for most people, except that I typically don't believe in dieting.  I'm known to tell anyone who says they are on a diet to "just eat in moderation...you'll be fine!".  That was before....when I was already skinny.  Easy to say then.  Fast forward to today....and my post baby body is still not quite back to normal...and I have a stubborn ten pounds that just don't want to budge (really, I could probably stand to lose 20 lbs, but I'll settle for the 10).

The diet that I started is called the slow carb diet and basically involved me eating lots of protein and veggies and very little carbs.  I should really only eat carbs when I'm working out, which I'm not doing, so I really eat practically nothing.  The cool thing is that I'm allowed a cheat day once a week where I can eat ANYTHING that I want to (yummo!).  So I started this last week and I've already managed to lose 5 lbs!  I'm sure that that'll come back a bit, but I also know that for me once I lose weight I'm pretty good at keeping it off....so bring on the crazy diet!  Wooh!  Wish me luck :)

Inherited Traits...kinda...

I was feeding Evan last night and noticing that he had quite the stubborn streak already and I got to wondering….exactly how much of our personality traits are inherited and how many are just because we are raised by our parents and end up taking on traits they have. I kind of thing that a lot of it is genetic predispositions to certain personality traits, but I won’t bore you with that. Instead, I got to thinking about what I may have “inherited” from my parents. Look wise, we know that I look NOTHING like most of family. The running joke is that I was switched at birth. Despite that I have inherited some pretty strong personality traits from my folks…for better or worse.

• Like Evan, my stubborn side. When I dig my heels in, look out. And I didn’t stand a chance because I get this from both of my parents.
• My ability to guilt trip. This totally comes from my mother. The woman had the ability to make you feel absolutely horrid about the most trivial of things. I can’t count the number of times where she didn’t even have to raise her voice (though she usually did) to have me in tears and wrought with guilt. I have used this trait to my advantage in my teaching career and I must say I’m pretty darn good at it (and clearly super modest too). If you’ve ever been on the other end of one of my guilt trips, I’m sorry. If you haven’t considering yourself lucky.
• •My work ethic. My dad is not college educated and yet has managed to work himself up from an entry level position in a local manufacturing facility to a small business owner. And all because he works his butt off. I know that I can certainly be lazy from time to time, but when push comes to shove I’m a pretty darn hard worker too.
• My singing voice….totally from my mom…it sucks. My sister got the good voice from my dad (who has the uncanny ability to sing any pop song and make it sound Frank Sinatra-esque).

What “traits” have you gotten from your parents?

 

He hates me....

I figure I’ll make it a two post day considering that its Friday and I’m done with work in 30 minutes and because I need to vent.

I have neglected posting about work on here….not because it hasn’t been active, but because I’ve been venting through email with my co-workers instead (and the thought occurred to me that those could be hilarious to read also…too bad I delete them all…). I have come to the conclusion that my boss hates me. And its not just me. Ask anyone I work with and they’ll tell you the same thing….I get treated much more harshly than anyone else. Case in point…

1. He has made comment to other co-workers that I would like to be an intern. Mostly this is because I like things neat and organized…both things which he is not. So if things get messy I clean up after him….so I want to be an intern. 
2. I am his personal secretary and he enjoys that way too much. Because my master’s degree in curriculum development means that I should mail out your letters and order food for your workshops. Thanks.
3. He will make comment to everyone else about how my work sucks….even after I’ve done exactly what he’s asking and have the emails to prove it.
4. The other day I approached to ask a very simple yes or no question….I very politely and somewhat quietly said, “Hey, N***?....” to which he responded all flustered and snippy…”wait, your third on my list”….There was only one other person anywhere near him. Jerk. You could have just said one minute.
5. He constantly tries to catch me doing things I’m not supposed to be doing. He is known to burst into a room where I have gone to work and then act disappointed when he finds that I am, in fact, engaged in productive activities. He has even taken to showing up to the office on his days off….I swear with the purpose of catching me doing something I’m not supposed to. This has led me to set my desktop image as a screenshot of my desktop when I was being productive….just in case

Luckily, his general snippiness is lessened by the fact that he is the most anal retentive person I have ever met and I find this hilarious. He makes sure that….

1. He doesn’t come into contact with anything BPA related….including receipt paper (really?!?) 
2. He thinks that everything causes cancer.
3. He bakes things with all kinds of low fat substitutes….just wrong.
4. He thinks caffeine is the devil and will get all red in the face when discussing how we will not give it to children.

I know there’s more, but its Friday and I’m stuck for idea. That and I’m sure there are only two people reading this right now that find this even remotely entertaining. If you made it this far….congratulations….now go have a drink.

Rules Schmools.....

Rules are made to be broken right? Especially fashion rules…


I have never claimed to be fashion forward…or even very fashion conscious. As long as my clothes cover up my bits and don’t make me look like hippo I don’t worry about too much else, much to my mother’s dismay.

My mom is very fashion forward. She is 50 and her wardrobe makes mine look like the old lady’s. We’ve gotten to a point now where we laugh at my numerous fashion faux pas, but it was a pretty big source of strife growing up. At least now we can laugh about it. Case in point…

I showed up to her house a few weeks back with Evan in tow. She scooped him up and once she had smothered him with kisses began to examine his outfit…which is when she noticed the socks. I couldn’t find two matching socks so he had on one white dress sock and one white baby tube sock. At which she busted out laughing and proceeded to tell me that as a child I used to think it was acceptable to wear two different socks as long as they were the same color….and apparently I’m passing that along to Evan.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I still wear different socks on a regular basis. In all honesty, no one notices if I have on two black dress socks but one of them has an every so subtle pinstripe to it and the other doesn’t. Or maybe they do and they don’t tell me. And who cares what kind of socks I have on if no one can see them? If I’m wearing long pants and boots…I may even wear two colored socks completely! And I’ll sit at my desk smugly all day knowing that I am totally being a rule breaker 

Barefoot and hormonal....

Ah pregnancy.  Let me preface this by saying that if you take away my irrational penchant for pancakes and bacon (both food that I despise normally) and my insistance on doing handstands through my pregnancy so I could see my center of balance changing (as a side note...nine month pregnant handstands just don't work no matter what you try)...I was a very sane pregnant lady.  I def didn't glow and all that jazz, but I wasn't that crazy prego lady.  And I can say that because my husband doesn't read this and he's possibly the only person who would disagree with that statement.  I did, however, have a few irrational pregnancy stories that looking back on make me giggle.

For starters, I was a MASSIVE pregnant lady.  My 5'2" short torso-ed frame had nowhere for poor little man to go but out.  As evidence, here's my halloween pictures...keep in mind that this is me at the seven month mark....I still had two months to go and already that's some belly.

That's a freaking belly.  Moral of the story....I was clearly pregnant.  I was in my last few weeks and hubby and I decided to go out to dinner.  By this point I was used to people asking about the baby and how I was feeling, etc.  For some reason, that night we made it through the entire outing without one person commenting.  We settled into the car to head home when a shocking thought hit my mind and the tears started to flow.  Poor hubby, having no idea what the problem was, attempted to weed it out of me in between sobs. I choked out, "No one said anything about the baby....they must all think I'm just fat!" He sat back in his seat, gave me the side eye, put the car in gear and just drove off.  Hmm....

The only other crazy prego thing I did was fight to stay in work (really!).  The docs had wanted me out about a month before little man was born because of my blood pressure and for some odd reason I insisted that I HAD to work.  Hell...if you told me today that I could stay home on my fat butt, watch re-runs of Teen Mom, and have an excuse to do nothing and still get paid I would be running out the door...

What about you?  Any good prego stories?