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NYG: Update 1

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Remember when I mentioned my New Year Goals (NYG) a few days ago? Well, the week is nearly up and I need to report how I've done. Going forward, these may or may not be a separate post, but for now, here you go:

This week, I have MADE banana bread and pineapple delight. The pineapple delight was a totally new recipe. The banana bread recipe was modified to add more bananas. The recipe I typically use only calls for 2 very ripe bananas. I used 6. While it was ever so much more moist, it was almost like eating a banana! I also made a mess in the kitchen. LOL

As far as eating healthier, aside from the desserts that I have made, we have incorporated family dinner as part of our routine. Thus far, we've made rosemary grapefruit halibut with Gigi's recipe for wedged sweet potatoes, and steamed rice. Halibut was NOT on sale, so this meal cost us roughly $15 total.
Next was chicken, broccoli, and rice in the cast iron skillet. Don impressed me with his skills on this one. The chicken was juicy and flavorful and the whole thing was more savory than I originally thought it would be. I do believe he is now a better cook than I am. I'm going to have to up my game. We bought the chicken on sale and Don found a great deal on the broccoli crowns. We also had some chicken stock we needed to use up, but soon, hopefully, we will be making our own stock. This meal cost us about $7 total.
The first dinner had two full servings of fruits & veggies, not to mention the halibut (since we steamed it) was low fat! The chicken and rice dish was made with fresh broccoli, not frozen. We have an abundance of white rice that we need to use up, otherwise, this meal would have been made with brown rice.

The new thing I'm trying this month is swimming. Yeah, I've been swimming since I was 3 or 4, but I was never good at lap swimming. This month, I'm going to actually try lap swimming, like totally putting my face in the water and everything. This weekend I'm going to buy some goggles too! Whoa, watch out! I tried to do a down and back without stopping, and doing my best to keep as much of my face wet (quite a feat!). I made it in a less than impressive 1:30. Later, I ran 10 laps in the pool and my running average speed is 1:00 a lap. LOL! I say I have some serious stamina and speed issues to develop. Since I'm doing a sprint triathlon in September, I need to be able to do a 300 meter swim. That's 6 continuous laps in the pool. That seems like a marathon to me, but you have to start somewhere, right?

With that swim workout and my warm-up walk, I have burned 275 calories this week. I still have another swimming workout remaining and we are eyeballing a 5K for Saturday morning. Obviously I would mostly walk and Don would run.

Oh and the laundry...blech...still haven't done my 1 load. Maybe I'll do it tonight. Ok, ok, I WILL do it tonight!

In other news, Mari is almost back to her routine. Hooray! But she has still picked up that nasty temper tantrum habit of flailing about. We're gonna have to nip that one in the bud. I'm trying to be as patient as I can with her and get her to calm down and use her words. Just asking her to breathe has worked in the past, but she's been doing this growling thing while staring at me from the top of her eyes saying, "I don't want to take a deep breaaaath!!" Seriously, this kid is primed and ready to be the lead singer for an 80s metal band.

Also, for those of you with kids in school, another AMAZING gift to give a teacher (lock this away in the back of your memory of nifty tips) is a jump drive. This week, a certain special teacher's computer completely crashed. The IT person's solution was to reimage the machine without any attempt at restoring the data. This, of course, infuriated me because I know there was probably a way to retrieve nearly 4 years of data that would be lost. Before any objection could be made, the machine had been reimaged and a booming, yet silent expletive could be heard from miles away. The solution from the tech person was that backups should be made regularly on the 250 MB space provided by the district. There is no reason you should ever need more than that amount, right? ha ha ha...so funny! When inquired about what to do if you need more space, the solution was simple: jump drive, but the district won't provide one for you. You need to provide it for yourself. Am I the only person who seems to think this isn't necessarily the best plan? Hmmm...anyway, I'm in search to buy some jump drives that can easily backup whatever the educator (and maybe even the team they are on) will need with ample space, fortified with security, and a lanyard or clip so the drive isn't easily lost. I'm done ranting, but seriously, this irked me. How can we expect our teachers to do their job if they are ill equipped, especially with a tiny piece of technology that doesn't really cost a lot of money? Then again, maybe that is their reasoning, since it doesn't cost much money, what is the big deal if they have to buy their own? What are your thoughts?

1 comment:

Jacki said...

wtg, on your meals! They sound delicious! And, your swimming! I don't swim well, either. I can swim well enough to save myself, but that's all I've got. What great exercise for you tho!

I'm not sure what the solution is for teachers. A better solution would be for the district to provide online storage for data, rather than just something on their servers. Why aren't the teachers files automatically backed up every night on the main server in the first place? That's just stupid. My computer totally crashed and had to be set back a couple of days (before I had entered the grades for the semester of course, for 150 students) and I was able to restore all of that MYSELF from the district's server. Something tells me their district's IT dept is not up to par. Teacher's get a $250-ish deduction on their taxes for "supplies" they have to buy themselves, but I agree that it would be able to keep quality teachers in their jobs if they provided a modern environment and adequate equipment. As the art teacher, my classroom was always one of the last ones to get the new equipment, but I was the "on campus tech emergency" person, because I was one of the few teachers who know how to use my computer and printer :giggle . I think my school had a spectacularly large proportion of teachers who were computer illiterate!! and it wasn't that they were old, either! Who knows what the solution is! But, I did once buy a lot of jump drives for my AP students from eBay b/c the students' accounts had little storage space.

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