…and some that aren’t, really.

WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO: Ernie Halter. Someone posted about him on a message board I go to, and I checked out his website. He is soooo cool! I downloaded some of his stuff, and I just can’t stop listening. The CD I burned from the mp3′s on his site is what is currently keeping me pumped up during my workouts. http://www.erniehalter.com Check him out, why don’t ya?

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING: Manner of Death by Stephen White

COOL MOVIE I’VE SEEN LATELY: The Fighting Temptations. The gospel music in the movie was not quite as authentic as I’d hoped….or maybe I should say, it wasn’t the style I enjoy most. I like “choir” kinda gospel music, which I thought this would be. John P. Kee. Kirk Franklin. Fred Hammond. West Angeles COGIC. Basically any choir with the word “Mass” in it. You know what I’m talking about. This was more like hip hop, R&B-style gospel. For the young people. LOL. But still very cool…a sweet story. I liked the movie overall.

COOL WEBSITE I’VE RECENTLY DISCOVERED: www.mystupidmouth.com – John Mayer message board. It’s fun. It’s a good way to get rid of some of that pesky disposable time we all hate so much. Of course, if you’re not a Mayer fan, it probably would not appeal to you as much.

RANDOM RANT: Die, John Wells!!!!! Die, bastard!!!! You are not fit to derelict Aaron Sorkin’s balls. DDDIIIIIEEEE!!!! (for more info on the reasons why I feel this way, expressed in a way that is much more clever than I have the time to come up with, see: http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/story.cgi?show=4&story=5480&limit=&sort= )

WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON: Well, the big news is that I got a new car…finally!!! YES!!! It’s a 2003 Nissan Sentra, silver. Love it! Spending six weeks with no car was no fun. I spent an ungodly amount of time posting on various message boards and abandoning any pretense of leading a real, non-internet life.

I have rekindled my interest in exercising, however, and have been doing my Power 90 tapes and going to the gym very regularly. YAY…..endorphines! WooHoo!

Five O’Clock Shadow is breaking up!!! NNNOOOOO!!!!!!! Evie is friendly with one of the guys from the group and he told her. I don’t think it’s a secret, though, because someone alluded to it in their guestbook. I emailed them to ask if it’s true…just in case for some odd reason Oren was messing with Evie’s head or Evie was messing with mine. But I think both of those possibilities are slim like shady. I think they are history.

David Ryan Harris is playing this Saturday night in Santa Monica…WWWWWAAAAA!!!! Dang it, every damn thing goes down in LA. I always get excited when I see concert announcements for California…but is it ever up here??? NNNOOOO!!!! This would be one major reason why I am getting my ass back to SoCal as soon as humanly possible.

I went out and voted in California’s own little Saturday Night Live skit….er….um….I mean….Recall Election. Not telling you how I voted. The point is that I *did* vote.

I replaced Eddie, who was broken. Those in the know, know. Those that don’t, don’t.

My website broke 3000 unique visitors this week! YAY!!!!!

I am currently subjecting my 2nd Graders to the non-abridged double CD version of The Phantom of the Opera while they do their seatwork under the pretense that it is appropriately creepy for the season…but really because I just want to listen to it. They are BEGGING me to bring Chuck Mangione back. Heeheehee! They love Joe Satriani, but it gets them too riled up. I can only put it on at the end of the day when I’m about to send them out the door anyway. LOL

I’m currently reading “In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson” aloud to them. I forgot how awesome that book is! LOVE it! Makes me cry, makes me laugh…makes the kids do those things, too, which is important. They are having a little trouble getting used to the Realistic Fiction genre after I’ve just finished spoiling them with “The Hoboken Chicken Emergency,” “Fat Men from Space,” and “Jennifer Murdley’s Toad.” Heh. But they’ll live. The only thing I regret about teaching second is that they are too young for me to share my favorite children’s lit book, “A Wrinkle in Time,” with. AWWW!

**Note – If any spies from my school are reading this, I only read novels aloud to them for ten minutes a day and I DON’T count it as part of my sacred Houghton Mifflin minutes! God forbid I take precious time away from curriculum adoption workbook pages to share some actual literature…wouldn’t dream of it, baby!

Have I mentioned on here how much I really hate the state of the educational system today????? Nothing personal against my particular school…it’s the same all over.

I’m just gonna go ahead and end on that downer note. I can’t think of anything else to say!

Stay strong, power people!

Well, OK, I guess the once a week thing did not work out as I hoped….due mainly to circumstances which I will explain fully in the “What’s Going On” section of this entry. So, without further ado, on with the show….

WHAT I’M READING: Or, more accurately, listening to on tape…Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I know it’s been forever since it came out, and I actually bought it the day of release, but I just keep parceling it out to myself in tiny increments as rewards for good behavior…e.g. – working out. It’s a fairly good system if you ignore the concept that I actually have to bribe my inner two-year-old to do things I should, as an adult, just suck it up and DO! But, hey, whatever works.

COOL MOVIE I’VE SEEN LATELY: Swimming Pool. The ending was a bit of a let-down, and I thought that they should have cut the whole “murder mystery” sub-plot and focused on the character development…but all in all, a worthwhile flick. B+.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Jason Mraz. I like him. Don’t get me wrong, he’s no Hottie John Mayer…but I like him .

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING LATELY: OK…first and foremost….I got in a car accident, which sucks IN THE EXTREME! My tire blew out on the freeway, across three lanes of busy traffic. My car hit the center divide, and now it is TOTALED!

OK, that sucks so badly that I am finished talking about it…it’s too depressing.

In other news, I was going to go to the Jack Johnson/Ben Harper concert, but that did not happen due in equal parts to the car situation and a last minute change of venue which put it at 2 hours away from me instead of 1. I heard about the concert from my friend from work, Heather, and she ended up not going as well because she did not feel well. BUT…her husband, Nate, DID go to the concert, and he said it was quite good. I definitely want to catch one or both of them the next time they roll through town!

My book-on-tape project (asking my friends to record picture books on tape for my listening library) is going well! I have gotten some returned, and my friend Janice even ordered books to be sent to me…AWWWW!!!!! She is the best!!!! I haven’t even emailed her to say Thank You, come to think of it, I need to do that tomorrow.

Well…I will write more later….and I actually will, honest! LOL

Welcome to my new resolution of updating my web journal every week!

Yah…we’ll see how the hell that goes.

WHAT I’M READING: I’m re-reading “Good in Bed” by Jennifer Weiner…it’s such a fabulous book! I feel like it explains what it’s like to be me…not an easy task LOL.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Just discovered Lucy Kaplansky…God, this lady is amazing! She has a PhD in psych and left her practice and professorship to tour with her guitar. Neato! Her music is bomb, too. So far, I particularly love “Guinevere” and “Broken Things”…but I’m just getting started. She’s playing at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz this September, so I need to order all her CD’s immediately so I can be fully prepared come Sept. Also, I’ve never been to the KJC, but one of my friends said that it is a REALLY cool venue, so I’m pretty psyched about that, as well.

I think the coolest venue I’ve ever been to was McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, CA. (Shout out to SoCal!) They have this cool room in the back that seats about 40 or 50, and it’s painted all black…guitars are hanging by their necks from the walls…great venue. Saw the Bobs there, and DaVinci’s Notebook made a surprise appearance. Great night, eh Evie!

I’ve also been listening to a lot of Carole King lately, by virtue of the fact that I am teaching my Second Grade class “Alligators All Around”, “Chicken Soup with Rice” and “Beautiful” right now. So those songs are terminally running through my head!

(MELANIE’S CREATIVE TEACHING IDEA NUMBER 67: Singing is an excellent choral reading activity! Repitition of text is what moves words from decodable text to sight words, and singing makes the repitition fun! You can also expose kids to cool music they might not otherwise hear…blues, jazz, etc. I have a cool lesson I like to do where I read them the story “Lookin’ for Bird in the Big City” and then we learn about and listen to Miles Davis and Charlie Parker music…screw Barney and crap! Kids are never too young for quality tunes!

WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON: So, today Cat and I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. IT WAS SO FREAKING HOT!!!!! And I don’t mean in the sense that it was a hip and happenin’ place…it was HOT…as in, heatstroke hot.

We are Food Network freaks, and Cat said that the Garlic Festival is a big deal on the Food Network. Last year, hottie Tyler Florence was there. He’s so cute! Evie has a jones for him, too. I have this fantasy where I pretend I have a Food 911 emergency and once I have hottie Tyler Florence in my kitchen….well, that’s a story for another time.

At any rate, the big culinary deal at the Garlic Festival is Garlic Ice Cream. Sounds disgusting, right? Well…it’s interesting. For some reason which made sense to me at the time, I ordered Garlic-Chocolate ice cream served in a half-cantaloupe. I believe it had something to do with the cantaloupe only costing 50 cents more. And for some other reason which has at this point escaped me, I continued to eat it even after I started feeling nauseous. I think that reason had to do with a “I paid for it, damn it, I’m eating it!” philosophy which has been proved unwise.

So, all in all, we spent about 35 minutes inside the gates of the Garlic Festival (there was 10 bucks well spent!), but the good thing is that now we can say that we have been to the thing…and that we consumed the famous (should be infamous!) Garlic Ice Cream.

STORY FROM THE JOHN MAYER CONCERT I FORGOT TO TELL: So, okay, the one bummer about the John Mayer concert was that I was sitting in the designated fuddie duddie section, apparently. All the people were sitting down, quietly listening…no one was singing along…damn it, I can do that at home! I wanna dance! But I was too self-conscious to stand up (I was in the front row of my section).

So, then, the three girls next to me stand up and start dancing…YIPPEE! Just as I am about to join them, this old guy from about six rows back yells, “Hey, sweetheart, I didn’t pay a hundred and sixty bucks for these seats to look at your ass!” and she turns around and yells at him, “You paid a hundred and sixty? I usually charge twice that to look at my ass, you got off cheap,” and continues to dance her heart out.

In the spirit of sisterhood (and because I had already wanted to anyway , I had to join them. Now there were four of us dancing in the front row of the fuddie duddie section!

Well, I would love to say that this began a wave of concert enthusiasm which spread throughout our section and inspired a lot more standing and boogie-ing like would happen in the movies, but actually, it just remained the four of us dancing throughout the concert and getting popcorn and crap thrown in our hair.

BUT…the moral of the story is this: I had a much better time because I did what I wanted to without worrying about what other people thought, AND I met three really cool chicks. So, shout out to the sassy chicks I met last Saturday, should they by some miracle end up reading this!

Ciao, ragazzi! Ci vediamo.

WHAT I’M READING: Easy Prey by John Sanford, Double Deuce by Robert B. Parker, Motion to Strike by Perri O’Shaughnessy, Say it With Poison by Ann Granger, Q is for Quarry by Sue Grafton and Icehouse by Minnette Walters. You may think it’s not possible that I’m actually reading all these books at once, however, I actually am currently at different points at each of them.

WHAT I’M LISTENING TO: Room for Squares by John Mayer. (Listening to hottie John Mayer both on CD and…last night…LIVE, BABY! See below)

MOVIES I’VE SEEN LATELY: OK…Karin….I’m going to say it…you know what I’m going to say….here I go…FINDING NEMO!!! WooHoo!

COOL TELEVISION SHOW RECENTLY DISCOVERED: That would HAVE to be AMERICAN CHOPPER. This show is so classic! It’s a reality show, which is always a plus , and it is about a father/son team that build motorcycles. If you are thinking, “Eh…motorcycles? Not my thing, babe.” then I can completely relate! This is exactly what I thought before I started watching the thing! It is so great! The dynamic between the father and the son (Paul and Paul Jr. or Paulie) is so powerful and real. They clash almost daily, yet they really love each other, and both aspects of that relationship are explored. When it comes to the motorcycles themselves, Paul Jr. is an amazing talent, and even if you are not into motorcycles, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the pure artistry. Also…one last plus for the show…did I mention Paul Jr. is a major hottie? Because he is. He’s a hottie. Major. Hottie. Check it out!

WHAT’S BEEN GOING ON: My number one big event is the AMAZING concert that I just attended with my cousin Karin and my friend Cathy. John Mayer (did I mention John Mayer is a hottie? LOL Because he also is. Major Hottie) and Counting Crows.

I left right after work on Friday and drove for eight and a half hours to get to Yucca Valley, where my cousin lives. The next day, she and I jumped in my car and drove for three hours to San Diego to meet Cathy and hit the concert. Concert ended at midnight, Karin and I drove back to Yucca, getting back at 4 in the morning. Then today, I made the eight and a half hour trip back home. Tomorrow morning, I return to work.

You might ask…was it worth a hundred-some-odd dollars and almost twenty hours driving crammed into a couple of days just to see John Mayer in concert with Karin and Cathy?

And the answer is a resounding……HELL YES!!!!!!!!!! Every penny and every minute.

More on this and other various and sundry subjects later, thanks to all my faithful readers.