Posts tagged santa monica
All the Updates That Are Fit to Print…
Oct 7th
…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!
Garlic Girls
Jul 27th
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.
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