Catching up on a Sunday

The school year is winding down, but pace at work is enough to keep this guy out of the blog-o-sphere during the week.

I usually receive a gift or two at the end of each school year, a small fraction of what an elementary teacher would collect.  On Thursday I was given a gift from one of my students, a quote book of funny sayings recorded throughout the school year in my class.  Quality, pure quality.  Quantity never stood a chance. 
Easily the best gift I've received during my eight year tenure at my present school.  Thank you.


Saturday was a lost day due to my responsibilities as an announcer for all home varsity baseball games.  Quite a sweet gig if I do say so myself.  I get paid to talk to the coaches before the game, announce who is hitting, play music between innings, eat sunflower seeds, and watch baseball.
That evening I went to prom with Laura.  Yep, you read that right.  This was my tenth prom, the last eight as a chaperone.  Again, not a bad deal, although I feel older and older every time I volunteer to give up my Saturday night.  You see, I continue to age, but for some reason the juniors and seniors always seem to be 17 and 18 years old.  Oh well.

This morning I woke up to find that my blog was featured on another blog, Juuust a bit outside, as JABO's baseball card blog of the week.  I spend a fair amount of time reading baseball card blogs and flipping through eBay pages of cards in my free time.  I've only posted a hand full of entries that were focused solely on baseball cards and I was a bit shocked to receive such an honor from another blog.  More posts featuring cards are coming in the future, especially once summer hits.  I'm still working on my 1978 Topps set, I'm currently in the process of organizing my collection and working on finishing a couple of other sets from when I first started collecting.  Plus, Topps Archives is hitting the streets on the last day of school and I'm ready to roll into my local card shop and buy a box or two.

Today I helped Laura with the back corner of the property.  She's envisioning a complete make over of what used to be nothing more than lawn and an electrical box.  The beginnings of a compost pile reside behind the four arbor vitae we planted today.  In front of the arbor vitae we'll transplant some hosta and plant some gourds.  I think it'll look nice AND it's less for me to mow!   The electrical box is already hidden from sight and neither of us have hit a power line with a shovel yet.  Shocking!  (Pun intended.)

I had to bake some cookies today.  I only bake one kind: Monster Cookies.  I use them as rewards during the basketball season and as motivation for my students in class.  The seniors' last day of school is this Tuesday and it's my way of saying "thank you" for a good/fun year of learning. For the record, my version of monster cookies are not good for you; extremely chocked full of chocolate and peanut butter.  I found a recipe on allrecipes.com which was only supposed to make 6 to 7 dozen cookies.  Um, yeah.  Well, I've doubled, in some cases maybe tripled, some of the ingredients.  My batch yields about 10.5 dozen.  Laura's my official taste tester, but she hasn't really reported back on how this batch turned out.  She's already had three though and she keeps eying the cookie container, so I guess they'll do.  Cookies, anyone? 

While I was baking Laura was refinishing the bookcase her grandmother passed on to her.  Here's a picture of the book case after it's first coat.   She started last weekend and might be finished before next.  It looks really nice, probably even better than what it would have looked like if I would have epoxied baseball cards to it. 

Gus?  Well, I'm glad you asked.  He was so busy trying to escape to the wondrous outside all morning that he was just simply too tired to even smile for this photo this afternoon.  Isn't it just perfect how our custom made ottoman fits him as though it was his own personal king-sized mattress?