Managing work and play…

I’m about three weeks in to my offical work year now.  Its a bit of a rude awaking from what I have been doing for the last year.  I got pretty used to having days around the house when I was in Minnesota, and crazy jam packed working for three week stints in Alaska.  Now I am back to the old Monday through Friday work week.  I usually leave the house at 6:30 AM to make the 40 mile drive to work.  If I’m lucky I’ll get home around 5, but there are plenty of days that I don’t seem to make it home until 6:30 or 7:00 PM.  That doesn’t leave much time to hang out with Erin before I need to get the sack and catch some z’s to do it all again the next day.

Friday night Erin, April, Jesse, Jim, and myself went to the Cook vs. Tower high school football game to watch their cousin Jordan play.  There were some fancy storm clouds overhead.  I really like the big billowing clouds that build up over the midwest.  Tower ended up beating Cook pretty easily, and it was a fun evening under the lights.

This weekend a couple of friends from work Tony (Art teacher) and Kate (English teacher) joined me on a BWCACAST trip.  I got up at 6:00 AM and met them at the Y-Store at 7:15.  We headed to the end of the Fernburg Trail (by car) and paddled through Lakes 1, 2, 3, and went to the edge of Lake 4.  It was a gorgeous day, and I of course didn’t bring sun screen and burnt my face.  I was hoping to get some video of the leaves changing, but it appears I went a week or two early.  I’ll have to think about going in again in the near future to get the fall colors caught on tape.

My grandparents drove up from Alden to Duluth to attend a hawk sighting deal in Duluth.  They called us up and let us know they were in the area.  We were lucky enough to have them stop by today.  We went out for a pontoon ride, and had them over for some venison pot roast for dinner.  It was nice to catch up with them.

Labor Day Weekend

This was our last real weekend of freedom before heading back to school with kids.  I have been working for the last three weeks trying to rebuild all of the district websites… Its quite a task.   The list runs something like this…

• District Website
• High School
• Roosevelt Elementary
• Parkview Elementary
• Nurses Website
• Each staff member has a site. (roughly 250)
• All the sports (basketball, track, football, tennis, etc.)
• All the student activites (chior, band, orchestra, etc.)
• Community Ed

Im sure there are more that I am either not thinking about, or haven’t even been made aware of.  So that has kept me pretty busy.

Aside from that I’ve been helping Rudy (the network admin for the district) set up polyvision boards, install projectors, set up airports, which doesn’t really fall under my job description, but its a lot of work for one guy.  I have also been helping teachers get their classroom websites up and running, and working with a few of them on how they can start to implement some technology into their classroom.

Needless to say, I’m wicked behind and have decided I’ll work as hard as I can, but at the moment I have more tasks then can be completed before school starts.

So back to school starting tomorrow morning.  Amidts all that I haven’t really had time to plan for the two classes I’ll be teaching.  One being web design and the other broadcasting.  I’ve worked of the last couple of days hammering out a syllabus for each class, and lesson plans for the first week.  Those are finally under my belt, which feels good.  We’ll see how those plans play out in the classroom this week.

So to take a little break from the actual computer we headed out on Donny’s new pontoon boat yesterday with April, Trisha, Tonya, Cindy, Erin, myself, and of course Donny.  It was a great day to be out on the lake.  Very very warm, and just enough of a breeze to keep us somewhat cool, and throw the occasional wave up over the bow splashing everyone from the front of the boat to the stern.

I was reading up on CSS (cascading style sheets) while we were out and about.  I haven’t had time to do any reading lately, so it was a perfect time to relax on the boat and listen to everyone chit chat and catch up on all that fun xhtml/CSS goodness.

Although summer feels like it has come to an end, the days are still warm, and the lake is still swimable.  We went out a couple times today.  Its nolonger like bath water, but it sure helps cool you off from the hot sun.